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Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
We are bringing a tech revolution to the NHS to improve patient outcomes and reduce waste. Today I am delighted to announce the selection of the first batch of products under the accelerated access collaborative, as well as funding for tech test beds to ensure that more patients get faster access to the most effective innovations.
Scott Mann
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his answer. Will he expand further on the recent announcement of the wave 2 test beds project and how it could deliver better outcomes for my residents down in Cornwall?
Matt Hancock
The tech test beds programme is about ensuring that we have units around the country that will support local collaborations between the NHS, tech companies and academia to harness new technologies right across the land, including—and no doubt—in Cornwall.
Julian Sturdy
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has so far declined to recommend the new drug Spinraza, despite its ability to transform the lives of patients such as my young constituent Matilda Jamieson, who suffers from type 3 spinal muscular atrophy. As NICE meets today to finalise the guidance, will my right hon. Friend assure me that he will work with the manufacturers, NHS England and NICE to ensure that patients such as Matilda can benefit from that drug?
Matt Hancock
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for making that case so powerfully. We work very closely with NICE, which is rightly the objective decision maker that makes recommendations for Ministers to follow about what drugs should and should not be accessed through the NHS. He makes the case very strongly.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
This question is about innovative technology in the health service. What is the Secretary of State saying today to scientists? For example, 97% of people from the Francis Crick Institute say that our science and our bioscience are in danger because of Brexit. What is he going to do about technology that is suitable for the health service?
Matt Hancock
The scientists, like me, want a Brexit that is based on a good deal for the UK, and that is what we are seeking to deliver. In any case, we have put more money into the science budget than ever before, so no matter what the outcome of the negotiations, there will be more support for science in Britain.
Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)
One of the innovative technologies is the new production and distribution system for flu jabs for the over-65s. Is the Secretary of State aware that this technology is breaking down? In my constituency and elsewhere, there are doctors and pharmacists who simply cannot get hold of stocks, which leads to potential pressures in hospitals. Will the Secretary of State investigate and take action if necessary?
Matt Hancock
Having a flu jab is incredibly important, and I hope that Members on both sides of the House have taken the opportunity to do so, including the right hon. Gentleman, with whom I enjoyed working for many years. We have a phased roll-out of the flu jab, making sure that we get the best flu jab most appropriately to the people who need it most, and of course we keep that under review.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
Digital health tools, including decision-support software, have a great potential to increase the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of care for patients, and nowhere is that more important than in reducing antimicrobial resistance. Will my right hon. Friend respond to the points that we on the Health and Social Care Committee make in our report about the variation in roll-out, which is wholly unacceptable, and what measures will he take to make sure that it is clear where the responsibility for this lies?
Matt Hancock
I pay tribute to the Select Committee for the report on AMR that was published yesterday. Of course, digital tools such as the one that my hon. Friend mentions are important in making sure that we make the best use of antibiotics and counter antimicrobial resistance as much as possible.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)
If we have a “technological revolution”, in the words of the Secretary of State, surely that depends on capital investment, but that has been cut by £1 billion. For example, we have the lowest numbers of CT and MRI scanners on average in the OECD, hospitals are reliant on 1,700 pieces of out-of-date equipment, and the hospital repair bill now stands at £6 billion. If austerity has ended, can he tell us when this maintenance backlog will be cleared?
Matt Hancock
Unlike with the failed national programme for IT, we are delivering modern technology in the national health service. That is underpinned by a record commitment of £20 billion extra for the NHS over the next five years, accompanied by a long-term plan that will show how we will support the NHS and make sure that it is guaranteed to be there for the long term.
Jonathan Ashworth
But I asked the Secretary of State about capital budgets, not revenue budgets.
Innovative technology can play a role in prevention, but so do public health budgets. With health inequalities widening, infant mortality rising in the most deprived parts of the population, rates of smoking in pregnancy remaining higher than the EU average and child obesity levels getting worse, will the Secretary of State commit, alongside an investment in technology, to reversing the £700 million of cuts to public health, or is the reality that his promises on prevention are entirely hollow?
Matt Hancock
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has it slightly muddled up, because technology does involve capital investment, but it also includes revenue investment to ensure that the service element of any technology can continue to be delivered. Maybe he should have another look at how technology is delivered these days. Alongside the capital budget, we have record spending on the NHS to ensure that it is there for the long term. Of course public health is an important element of that, and there has been £16 billion for public health over this spending review period because it really matters.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
This June we published chapter 2 of the childhood obesity plan, which built on the world-leading measures we introduced in 2016 and included bold plans to halve childhood obesity by 2030. Our consultations on banning energy drinks and on calorie labelling are now open. Later this year we will be consulting on promotion and marketing restrictions, including suggestions of a 9 pm watershed.
Peter Aldous
The feedback that I receive locally in Waveney is that childhood obesity needs to be tackled by Government Departments, clinical commissioning groups, medical centres and councils working together, whether in schools or by encouraging breastfeeding and the preparation of weaning foods. Can the Minister confirm that he is pursuing such a multi-agency approach?
Steve Brine
I can, and the plan covers many Departments, which was why I recently announced the trailblazer programme to support innovative local action with local authorities. That has the commitment of key policy teams across many Departments to support participating councils to harness the potential of what they can do and learn from others.
Mary Robinson
One in five children in Greater Manchester are classified as overweight or obese, but Prospect Vale Primary School in Heald Green is just one of the schools in my constituency that are getting on and getting moving through the Daily Mile campaign. Will the Minister join me in welcoming that initiative, which brings daily fun and fitness into schools? As more and more adults use wristbands to help them to get fit, what consideration is being given to the use of technology, such as in the UK Fit Kids programme?
Steve Brine
Like my hon. Friend, I pay tribute to Prospect Vale. I have many similar examples in Winchester. We absolutely recognise the importance of physical activity in tackling obesity, which is why as part of chapter 2 we are promoting a new national ambition for all primary schools in England to adopt an active mile initiative.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
So further to the Minister’s previous answer, why did the Government abolish school sport partnerships?
Steve Brine
This Government are investing heavily in school sports through the school sport premium. For instance, the money raised from the soft drinks industry levy—the sugar tax—is going directly to supporting schools’ investment in sports, for instance through the Daily Mile campaign, which has just been mentioned.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
Scotland’s diet and healthy weight delivery plan contains specific recognition that breastfeeding can be a means of preventing obesity. Will Ministers engage with the all-party group on infant feeding and inequalities to see what more can be done in England through early breastfeeding to prevent children from becoming obese later on in life?
Steve Brine
Yes, and I am a big supporter of breastfeeding—I have supported it a lot in my constituency, and we engage regularly with the sector. I will be interested in any proposals that the hon. Lady has.
Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)
Alan Mak (Havant) (Con)
The Minister for Health (Stephen Barclay)
Having committed an additional £20 billion in real terms, the Government are asking the NHS to deliver a long-term plan that includes continued improvements in productivity and efficiency, and we are reinvesting the savings in improved patient care.
Damien Moore
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his drive to recycle more hospital equipment such as zimmer frames, crutches and wheelchairs, but what steps is his Department taking to encourage more hospitals such as Southport Hospital in my constituency to run recycling programmes to reduce waste in our NHS?
Stephen Barclay
I am keen to work with my hon. Friend to encourage Southport and other trusts to recycle equipment. I know from my family’s experience that it causes significant frustration when people see hospitals not collecting perfectly good medical equipment that could be recycled. I am keen to work with him and with trusts to ensure that we learn from that.
Stephen Barclay
I commend my hon. Friend for his excellent report for the Centre for Policy Studies, which highlights the opportunities provided by technology. I was at a Scan4Safety event last night, looking at how barcodes are being used at six trusts, and at how that could be expanded to deliver 4:1 efficiency savings and improve patient care through the safety it offers.
Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)
Does the Minister believe that the practice of cutting funding to hospitals that miss A&E targets helps to improve the patient experience at those hospitals? Will he agree to meet me to discuss how this issue has affected Leighton hospital, which serves my constituents?
Stephen Barclay
The hon. Lady may have missed our recent announcement of significant additional funding, ahead of winter pressure, to assist hospitals. As the Secretary of State announced, the extra £20.5 billion real-terms increase is part of a wider commitment to support our hospitals.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Jack Adcock’s death was a tragedy, but why did the General Medical Council spend £30,000 on getting Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba struck off, even though she had already faced the consequences of her mistakes in court? Does the Minister think that the GMC needs to sort its act out and that Charlie Massey should resign?
Stephen Barclay
As the right hon. Gentleman will be aware, Professor Norman Williams looked at the circumstances of this case and produced a report on it for the Government. As a part of that, we are looking at a number of factors.
David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)
Is the Minister aware that in terms of value for money and efficiency, the Government of India’s integrated health Ministry has half a million ayurvedic doctors and a quarter of a million homeopathic doctors? At a clinic I visited recently in Karnataka province, four fifths of the patients who would have normally gone to see a western doctor were treated by those local doctors. Will he build links with the Indian Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy?
Stephen Barclay
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the longevity and sincerity of his campaigning on these issues. He draws attention to the wider point of how patients presenting with multiple and complex conditions need to be treated in multiple ways, and what he refers to is a part of that wider discussion.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
NHS England is being ripped off to the tune of £230 million a year as the price of some off-patent drugs and non-standard preparations, or specials, have been hiked up hundreds of times, for example to over £1,000 for a bottle of pain-relieving mouthwash. In Scotland, specials remain in-house to keep the price down, but a year and a half on from the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Act 2017, why have the Government not used its powers to stop this drug racketeering?
Stephen Barclay
The hon. Lady, very astutely and correctly, identifies the issue, which is how we ensure value for money from specials. Indeed, I commend The Times for highlighting a number of these issues. We are looking at this area. As we commit an extra £20 billion in funding to the NHS, our commitment is to ensure that we derive value for money from that investment. That applies to specials, too.
Dr Whitford
The healthcare market in NHS England is estimated to cost £5 billion to £10 billion a year and involves 2.5 million nursing hours a week being wasted on non-clinical paperwork. Does the Minister not recognise that this is the biggest inefficiency? Will he commit to reversing the disastrous marketisation of NHS England?
Stephen Barclay
Again, the hon. Lady draws attention to my work on driving productivity improvements within the system, which looks at a range of efficiencies such as sending texts and emails, dealing with missed appointments and the use of green energy. We can implement a whole range of initiatives as a part of that agenda.
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
As the first port of call for patients with often minor ailments, community pharmacists can really help to improve the efficiency of the NHS by taking pressure off GPs. What plans do the Government have to support and enhance the role of community pharmacists?
Stephen Barclay
My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the valuable role played by pharmacies. This is part of a wider education campaign within the NHS and increased access to clinicians, such as through 111, is another component of that. We want to ensure that rather than people’s first port of call being a GP, they access the NHS and pharmacies at the appropriate time.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
At the end of the last financial year, trusts owed the Department a staggering £11 billion. NHS providers say that this is locking some trusts into
“a vicious circle of inevitable failure”,
and the King’s Fund says that there is no prospect of them ever repaying. Trusts with the biggest debts are forced to pay the highest levels of interest. How can the Minister expect trusts to be efficient when they are paying an interest rate of 6% on debts to his Department?
Stephen Barclay
As it happens, I will be at an event with NHS providers—chief execs—this evening, when I am sure that this will be one of a number of issues that we will discuss. The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the very high private finance initiative costs that many trusts face due to contracts signed under the previous Labour Government. That is a real pressure faced by many trusts.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
This month, we hosted the world’s first ever global ministerial mental health summit. Over 60 countries were represented, and they were united in the ambition to achieve equality for mental and physical health. The legacy of the summit will continue, with the baton now passed to the Netherlands, which has committed to host next year.
Richard Benyon
At the summit, I hope that the Government were applauded for appointing a Minister for suicide prevention. Will my right hon. Friend reflect on the fact that many people contemplating taking their life end up in A&E or in police stations, and will he look at James’ Place in Liverpool? That non-clinical centre catches young men in particular, who are very often the victims of this problem, and deals with their mental health issues.
Matt Hancock
Part of the purpose of having a cross-Government suicide prevention Minister is to bring together all these issues. I pay tribute to the work of James’ Place and its founder, Clare Milford Haven. We are spending £30 million of taxpayers’ money to increase the number of health-based places of safety for people experiencing a crisis, and I look forward to working with my hon. Friend on that.
Mr Speaker
No, the question has been grouped. The moment is now; the chance is here—let us hear from the hon. Gentleman.
Adam Afriyie
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the admonishment, or encouragement—
Adam Afriyie
Thank you very much.
It strikes me that every person in this Chamber, every one of our constituents and every household across the country will have been affected by the issue of suicide, whether among family, friends or colleagues. The causes of suicide are multi-faceted—there are so many, including mental health—so I welcome the new ministerial responsibility. Will my right hon. Friend clarify precisely what the role will entail in government?
Matt Hancock
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The role will be cross-governmental. It will involve working not only across national Government, convening the policies that need to be pulled together from various Departments’ responses to support people in crisis and to reduce suicide, but with local government, which has responsibilities here.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
Suicide prevention plans have to be a key element of any mental health strategy, yet the Government are not monitoring the effectiveness of those plans or ensuring that they are fully funded. Will the Secretary of State commit to ensuring that the plans that are put in place are effective and that local authorities have sufficient funds to implement them properly?
Matt Hancock
The hon. Lady is right to draw attention to the need to ensure that funding for mental health services has parity with that for physical health services. Getting there is the work of a generation. We did not even measure access to mental health services until this Government brought that in, and we are working towards parity.
Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)
The Secretary of State boasted to the global ministerial mental health summit about the Government’s plans to recruit 21,000 more staff to the mental health workforce by 2021, but he did not tell the summit that by the end of May this year, nearly 25,000 mental health staff—one in eight of the workforce—had left the NHS and that fewer than 1,000 extra staff had been recruited by March, equating to just 0.5% of his target. Does he really think that he is in a position to lecture the rest of the world?
Matt Hancock
I welcome the hon. Lady’s commitment to this area. Clearly it is very important to have the workforce in place. As she said, we are making progress, but we still have more to do. As far as the international approach is concerned, the response to the summit was that many countries came together, because collectively we all face the same sorts of challenges. I am in absolutely no doubt that the leadership shown by some countries, including the UK, is warmly welcomed.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
The links between poor mental health, suicide and gambling addiction have been made clear to the Health and Social Care Committee. In that regard, will the Secretary of State make it clear to the Treasury that many across the House want to make sure that action on fixed odds betting terminals is taken forward so that we can have good results in the areas of mental health and suicide prevention?
Matt Hancock
My hon. Friend knows my personal strength of feeling about tackling the scourge of fixed odds betting terminals. The links between gambling addiction and mental health issues—and indeed, directly to suicide—are clear in the evidence, and we must address them.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
My constituent David contacted me after his 18-year-old son became severely mentally unwell and needed emergency treatment. His son spent four days in A&E at the local hospital because no in-patient beds were available. This is not a one-off case: on a daily basis, mentally unwell people are being failed by our health service. When will the Secretary of State take meaningful action to fund mental health services properly and stop this scandal?
Matt Hancock
I am glad that, like me, the hon. Lady cares so much about getting this right. The long-term plan, which we are writing with the NHS, for how we will spend the £20 billion funding increase is where we can get these details right. Access to mental health services was not even measured before. The first step was to put the measurement in place, and now we can act on that measurement with the huge increase in funding coming to the NHS.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
Yes, we are fully committed to ensuring that the most innovative cancer treatments are available to patients on the NHS. Since 2016, the radiotherapy modernisation programme has seen £130 million of new investment to ensure that all new equipment is capable of delivering advanced radiotherapy.
Grahame Morris
I thank the Minister for that reply. May I point out how effective advanced radiotherapy is against many cancers affecting the soft tissue? I must declare an interest as a beneficiary of the treatment myself. The latest NHS research shows that treating prostate cancer with 20 treatments of advanced radiotherapy is far better for patient outcomes and would save the NHS more than £20 million a year, but the current tariffs system disincentives trusts from saving this money, as their income is based on the number of treatments. Will the Minister meet me and representatives of the all-party group on radiotherapy to discuss how we might address this anomaly and improve treatments?
Steve Brine
It is good to see the hon. Gentleman in his place and looking so well—I am glad we looked after him well. He is absolutely right that access to advanced radiotherapy treatments is critical, as is getting them against the key standard. I would be very pleased to meet his all-party group and discuss its manifesto for radiotherapy.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Lady was standing. She has changed her mind. All right, never mind. We can always have another go later.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
The Minister for Health (Stephen Barclay)
The planned temporary overnight closure of the Princess Royal Hospital’s A&E in Telford is necessary to ensure that patients continue to receive safe care. The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is working closely with colleagues in neighbouring provider trusts and the ambulance service to develop plans for key clinical pathways to minimise the impact.
Emma Reynolds
The proposed closure of Telford A&E would pile even more pressure on New Cross Hospital in my constituency. If the Government will not step in to stop the closure, as it sounds is the case from the Minister’s answer, will they give New Cross the resources it needs to recruit upfront the nurses, doctors and other staff they need so that patients do not have to suffer longer delays?
Stephen Barclay
The current modelling suggests that about 11 ambulances will be diverted from the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust between the hours of 10 pm and 8 am during closure. Of the patients who go to Wolverhampton, any admitted as in-patients will return to Shrewsbury and Telford and any who are discharged will be discharged from Wolverhampton.
Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)
The chief executive of Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust says that the closure at Telford is the result of bad planning and could have been prevented. Does the Minister agree it is wholly unacceptable that my constituents’ safety should be put at risk by a preventable closure that is the result of bad planning by management, and will he do all he can to ensure that the hospital management have the help they need to properly run our hospital and properly plan for the needs of our community?
Stephen Barclay
First, may I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who has campaigned assiduously on behalf of her constituents? She has lobbied me and the Secretary of State and made her case very powerfully to NHS leaders. There has been progress: three additional consultants have been hired and attempts made to recruit middle-ranking doctors to the trust, including from neighbouring trusts. We are making a significant capital investment in the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and these changes must be seen in the light of that.
Mr Speaker
No, no; Yorkshire is the most marvellous place, but it is a considerable distance from the narrow ambit of the question, from which the Minister did not stray. The ingenuity of those Members will be served later in our proceedings.
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)
Health and social care hubs are a great example of health and care systems coming together through sustainability and transformation partnerships and integrated care systems to transform services in local areas. The NHS long-term plan will set out how we will enable and encourage better integration.
Luke Pollard
The Minister will know that Plymouth is leading the way in developing health and social care wellbeing hubs. She will also know that we have bid for £15 million of funding to create more hubs across the city, especially in our city centre, to bring together NHS dentistry and dental schools, sexual and mental health support, social care and new forms of general practice. Will she do all that she can to look positively on that bid, so that we can help to improve our health outcomes?
Caroline Dinenage
I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised this issue. Plymouth is indeed leading the way in creating hubs and showing how incredibly valuable they are in bringing together all the relevant services in one place, not only to tackle people’s current healthcare needs but to play a vital role in prevention.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
Health and social care hubs provide a real opportunity to ensure that patients are cared for in the right place, and it is vital for that to be extended to those who need palliative care. Can the Minister confirm that the NHS 10-year plan will adequately address the need for equal and appropriate access to palliative care across the country?
Caroline Dinenage
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to mention this. Palliative care is crucial to the experience not only of patients but of their families and carers. He will be interested to know that we have a new indicator from 2018-19 to measure the proportion of people who have had three or more emergency admissions in their last 90 days of life, which will help us to assess how people can be better supported in the community, and to do that better.
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady is right. We know that the adult social care system is under pressure, which is why we are setting out a more sustainable future in the Green Paper which will be published later this year. It is, however, important to point out that more than 83% of adult social care providers are rated good or outstanding, and that, thanks to a range of Government actions, County Durham has received an additional £37 million for adult social care in 2018-19 and was allocated £2,822,376 in the recent winter funding announcement.
Sir David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
Britain is world leading at treating cancer when it is discovered, but we do not diagnose it early enough, so we will radically overhaul our screening programmes, roll out rapid diagnostic centres for people with early symptoms, and expand mobile lung screening units. Our ambition is to ensure that three quarters of cancers are diagnosed at stage 1 or 2 by 2028, up from half today.
Sir David Evennett
May I first highlight the excellent Guy’s Cancer Centre at Queen Mary’s hospital in Sidcup, a state-of-the-art facility which offers local cancer patients treatment closer to home? Secondly, can my right hon. Friend provide any detail on how the NHS long-term plan will improve cancer services?
Matt Hancock
Yes. Focusing on early diagnosis will help to save lives. Indeed, the cancer survival rates have never been higher than they are now. About 7,000 people who are alive today would not have been had mortality rates stayed the same as they were in 2010. However, we want to use the most cutting-edge technologies in order to save more lives.
Kwasi Kwarteng
In respect of early screening, how does my right hon. Friend expect the measures that he has introduced to move the service forward in the way that we want to see?
Matt Hancock
Absolutely central to this is ensuring that we address cancer at the earliest possible opportunity. The earlier the diagnosis is made, the greater is the likelihood of survival, so we want to see more cancers diagnosed earlier across the board.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
Matt Hancock
The announcement the details of which I have just set out comes with £1.6 billion of the £20 billion uplift we are putting into the NHS written into the long-term plan, so the funding is there to deliver on this policy, too.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
The Secretary of State is right to say that early diagnosis provides more opportunity to cure and treat cancers. Some 60% of those treated for cancer will receive radiotherapy, and nearly every radiotherapy centre in the country has linear accelerators that are enabled to provide the advanced SABR, or stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy, technology, but Government—NHS England—contracts mean that out of the 52 centres in England no more than 20 are contracted to actually use this technology. That means that either patients are not receiving the highest quality life-saving standard of treatment that they could be or that trusts are providing it anyway but are not being paid and valuable data on mistreatment are being completely lost. Will the right hon. Gentleman order NHS England to stop this recklessness, and frankly lethal, nonsense and agree to every—
Mr Speaker
Order. [Interruption.] Order. The thrust of the question is entirely clear. I was going to offer the hon. Gentleman an Adjournment debate on the subject until I realised that he had in fact just conducted it.
Matt Hancock
And also, Mr Speaker, the hon. Gentleman’s all-party group is meeting my Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), on this very matter. Since 2016 we have put £130 million of funding in to try to resolve the issue that the hon. Gentleman talks about: to make sure that all new equipment is capable of delivering advanced radiotherapy. Work on this is ongoing.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
In calling the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) I promise to make no reference to the result of the match last night between Arsenal and Leicester City.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Mr Speaker, you had a broader smile on your face this morning than my friend the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and I. We still support Leicester and hope we will pay you back some day.
An important aspect of diagnosing cancer is to find the drugs that address it. What has been done to ensure the partnerships between universities and the NHS can continue, so that they can find new drugs and therefore address cancers at a very early stage?
Matt Hancock
There are deepening relationships between universities and the NHS right across the country, especially in this field of the combination of diagnosis and early treatment. Some of the most advanced technology and research in the world is happening in universities in the UK in order to save lives, which is such an important issue here.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
We will continue to have access to new medicines through the deal we expect to negotiate with the EU. In the unlikely event of no deal, we will directly recognise batch testing of medicines done in the EU. We are currently consulting on the approach to licensing medicines in a no-deal scenario, but I am clear that patients should not be disadvantaged and should continue to have timely access to new medicines.
Alan Brown
The reality is that Brexit uncertainty about future medicine approvals and unresolved issues with the European Medicines Agency have caused research firm Recardio to suspend UK recruitment to a drug trial, posing a risk to its business and interrupting the research. As the EMA has no associate membership for third countries, how does the Secretary of State plan to avoid the UK being left out of future clinical trials despite his bluster?
Matt Hancock
Not only does the UK bring a huge amount to the table in terms of research, but we fully intend to make sure that we have a robust and seamless system in place. A consultation is out at the moment and we will respond to it very shortly.
Martyn Day
The Government have stated that the new EU clinical trials regulations will not be in place before March, but have committed to aligning with it where possible. What progress has been made regarding data sharing to ensure that clinical trials continue and pharmaceutical and research firms do not leave the UK after Brexit?
Matt Hancock
As part of the EU deal we are negotiating, the relationship with the EMA will be extremely close, so I am sure that that will be a part of our agreement.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Will the Health Secretary confirm that since the referendum the number of EU nationals working in our NHS has actually risen by 4,000, and that regardless of the state of the negotiations their rights will be protected and they will continue to be able to work in the NHS after we leave?
Matt Hancock
Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. In fact, the number of EU nationals working in the NHS has now risen by more than 4,000 since the referendum, and we welcome them all.
Mr Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) (Lab)
The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Nigel Adams)
It was disappointing that in July and August, Vertex, the manufacturer of Orkambi, rejected the final offer made by NHS England, as well as rejecting the opportunity for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence—NICE—to appraise its new medicines, as is required for all companies seeking routine NHS funding for their products. Vertex must re-engage with NICE and NHS England, and I am encouraged that it attended a meeting with NICE on 4 October to discuss next steps.
Mr Hepburn
As the Minister knows, Orkambi is available for cystic fibrosis sufferers in Ireland, Greece, Denmark and a host of other countries around the world, so when will it be available for cystic fibrosis sufferers in this country?
Nigel Adams
I know that the hon. Gentleman takes a keen interest in this subject and that he campaigns assiduously on behalf of his constituents in this regard. He is right to suggest that Ministers are keeping a very close eye on these negotiations, and we urge Vertex to consider NHS England’s fair and final offer. However, it is absolutely right that we have a system—introduced by the Labour party—in which experts, not politicians, determine the fair price for a drug, based on robust evidence.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
I almost thought you had forgotten about me, Mr Speaker.
Last month, speaking on this very subject, the Secretary of State said that he would not let pharmaceutical companies hold the NHS to ransom, but the 5,200 patients who could benefit from Orkambi are left suffering while this war of words continues. What does the Secretary of State have to say, through his Minister, to those patients who are awaiting a resolution to this stalemate?
Nigel Adams
The hon. Lady makes a correct point, and we are very keen that patients receive this drug. I understand her ire, but perhaps it should be directed at Vertex, the manufacturer. The offer of £500 million over five years for the size of the eligible population is the largest-ever commitment of its kind in the 70-year history of the NHS, and it would guarantee immediate and expanded access to Orkambi and to other drugs.
James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)
The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)
Our NHS offers a range of world-leading preventive care services, but we can go further and faster. The Secretary of State has named prevention as one of his top three priorities, signalling a renewed focus on public health, community and mental health services.
James Cleverly
I thank the Minister for her reply. She will know, because I have spoken about this to the Secretary of State’s team, about the pressures on my constituency, and particularly on the Church Lane GP surgery. Specifically on preventive services, wearable tech, health tech and medical tech provide an opportunity to keep people healthier for longer, and can provide early digital diagnosis that can relieve pressure on medical services. What more can be done to pursue this way of relieving pressure on the health service?
Caroline Dinenage
I completely agree that technology can really help in this way. I recently visited Hampshire County Council, which is using a range of gadgets including a really simple one involving a light bulb that comes on when someone gets out of bed in the night to go for a pee. That is ingenious, and it is helping to prevent avoidable falls.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
My constituent Holly Alliston has contacted me about the epipens that her two-year-old son, who has a severe nut allergy, relies on. There is a national shortage of them, and the Northfield Pharmacy has been emailed by NHS England to say that the situation is critical. What is the Minister doing about this? We hear about the possibility of troops having to distribute stockpiled medicines when we leave the EU, but this is hitting us now.
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to raise this matter. We are working closely with all the manufacturers of adrenaline auto-injectors to improve the supply situation as quickly as possible.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
One in 10 mums gets post-natal depression, and we know that early identification is key to preventing it from becoming more serious. May I urge the Minister to look at the National Childbirth Trust’s campaign to ensure that all mums—as well as all babies—get a six-week check?
Caroline Dinenage
We are really supportive of the Hidden Half campaign, run by the NCT—my colleague the Minister met the trust last week. We must ensure that we are supportive of new mothers’ health needs.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
What improvements have emerged in relation to prostate cancer treatments?
Caroline Dinenage
I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised that. Clearly, early screening is fundamental and one of the key pillars of what we want to focus on with cancers. Prostate cancer affects so many gentlemen up and down the country, and we know that that early detection is the difference between life and death.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
We continue to make good progress against our 2013 AMR strategy ambitions. According to the latest figures, since 2013, antibiotic prescriptions dispensed by GPs have decreased by 13%, and sales of antibiotics for use in food-producing animals dropped by 27%.
Michael Fabricant
That is encouraging to hear because antimicrobial resistance is caused by the excessive and inappropriate use of antibiotics. Given that we have a Matt Hancock app, should not we have a similar app to try to educate people about when it is appropriate and not appropriate to use antibiotics?
Steve Brine
I will look at what can be added to the Matt Hancock app—there is always room for more.
As luck would have it, today Public Health England has launched its latest “Keep Antibiotics Working” national public awareness campaign, which aims to educate the public about the risks of AMR and urges them always to take the advice of their healthcare professionals on antibiotics and, when necessary, to challenge them.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
AMR poses a grave threat to health. Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, told our Health and Social Care Committee inquiry that if action is not taken to address this
“growing threat, modern medicine will be lost.”
Will the Secretary of State and Ministers heed that warning and ensure that AMR is prioritised?
Steve Brine
Absolutely. The UK is a global leader in tackling AMR and we are currently working on the refresh of our strategy. I was at the G20 earlier this month, where Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, showed world leadership and led an exercise with world leaders to strengthen understanding by showing how developed countries would tackle an outbreak.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
This Government have a strong track record on public health. Local authorities in England are supported by ring-fenced public health grants of more than £16 billion over the current spending review period. Decisions on future funding are, of course, for the next spending review.
Diana Johnson
Substance misuse services are due to be slashed by £34 million owing to cuts imposed by central Government. In Hull, and I am sure in many other parts of the country, there is a growing blight on our streets caused by Spice and other substances. How is it in any way helpful to communities, frontline police or the NHS for the Government to cut services that help people deal with their addictions?
Steve Brine
As I said, we are spending £16 billion of our constituents’ money during this spending review period on public health grants. Decisions about where we go in future are of course not a matter for me but for the Chancellor in the spending review. This House decided in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to make every upper tier local authority a public health authority. We believe that it is right for local authorities to make those decisions, with the funding that we give them.
Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)
How many health visitors have been lost since 2015? How will the Minister ensure that important investments are made at the start of life to reduce health inequalities?
Steve Brine
As I suspect the hon. Gentleman knows, I do not have that figure at my fingertips, but I will provide it to him. Health visitors are a critical part of the puzzle, and local authorities are well aware of that, as are Ministers.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
The Department is working with the NHS to ensure that the £20 billion of extra taxpayers’ money is well spent: supporting social care, backing the workforce, using the best modern technology and strengthening prevention. On that note, I can tell the House that we now have a record number of GPs in training: 3,473—10% up on last year.
Huw Merriman
I thank the Secretary of State for so promptly accepting our invitation to visit us in East Sussex in January. He will be warmly welcomed. With that season in mind, what assessment has he made of the NHS’s resilience with winter approaching?
Matt Hancock
Of course winter always challenges the NHS, and this year will be no different. We have put in extra funding, including more capital funding, to ensure that we get the best possible flow through A&E and to ensure there is further funding for social care so that people who do not need to be in hospital can leave hospital.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Last week, The Times reported that a young autistic woman with severe learning disabilities and an IQ of 52 was sexually exploited for months after her care provider had a court accept a plan for her to have sexual relations with men at her home. It is unacceptable that the agency charged with the care of this young woman decided that unsupervised contact with men for sex was in her best interest, yet the Government would give all such care providers a role in assessing the mental capacity of the people for whom they care. Will the Secretary of State urgently investigate this case? Given that the case illustrates the conflict of interest that arises from involving care providers in mental capacity assessments, will he pause the Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill to allow time to make it fit for purpose?
The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to raise this incredibly concerning case. Unfortunately, because the case is ongoing and due to be heard before the High Court very shortly, we are unable to discuss the specifics of the case, but we are incredibly concerned by what it suggests. We have made it clear in statutory guidance to support the implementation of the Care Act 2014 that we expect local authorities to ensure that the services they commission are safe, effective and high quality. Once this case has gone through the High Court, we will look to take further action.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
The Minister for Health (Stephen Barclay)
My hon. Friend is right to highlight this. The Secretary of State was at the trust last week, and I visited earlier in the year. There is a specific range of actions, including partnership with Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; advanced clinical practitioner courses, which started in June; £1.8 million of capital to support improvements to patient flow; and a frailty pilot at Lincoln. There is an intensive programme of work with this trust, because we recognise my hon. Friend’s concerns.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
Stephen Barclay
As the hon. Lady will know, since 2010, the number of paramedics has increased by more than 30% and the pay band has been increased from band 5 to band 6. She will also know from the excellent work of Lord Carter that there was significant variation between ambulance services and a significant opportunity to make savings that can be reinvested in ambulances by addressing differences in sickness rates, “hear and treat” and “see and treat” rates and other variables. We have also committed additional funding for new ambulances, including in the north-west, which will be in place by this winter.
Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Con)
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend is an assiduous supporter of his constituents. I look forward very much to taking up his invitation to visit. I have looked into some of the details of the proposal on the table and, indeed, at some of the other proposals that may benefit the Hillingdon area. I look forward to discussing them with him.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
Matt Hancock
Yes, of course I will make sure the appropriate action is taken in this case. It is a sensitive matter, and I look forward to discussing it with the hon. Lady.
James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
We certainly will. I do not wish to pre-empt what the long-term plan will say, but it is an excellent opportunity for us to look at how the NHS can best support people who have or are at risk of developing diabetes, and that includes transformation funding beyond next spring and how technology can be used to help people better manage that long-term condition.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
Stephen Barclay
I am not aware of the specific details of that, but I am happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss it if he has particular concerns he wishes to raise.
Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)
Steve Brine
We are continuing to review the advice from our expert advisory groups on safe levels of folate intake, but, continuing our tradition of announcing things to the House first, I want to inform the House today that we are going to issue a public consultation, as of now, on adding folic acid to flour.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The service from the East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust has been a considerable disappointment for many of my constituents in recent months. When I met them about the service, they told me that on a huge number of occasions they have ambulances sat waiting outside accident and emergency departments, rather than getting to the next call. What more can the Government do to make sure we get these A&Es cleared?
Stephen Barclay
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we need to improve those handovers. We have improvement programmes in place at 11 hospital sites in the east midlands, alongside which we are making a £4.9 million investment in 37 new ambulances. Part of this is also about the length of stay and addressing the pathway.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Steve Brine
As my hon. Friend, the chair of the all-party group on smoking and health, knows, those groups are key to delivering our tobacco control plan. We are not complacent at all; the delivery plan that was published in June sets out the actions that different agencies will take to deliver the five-year plan, and that absolutely includes mentor cessation services.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I very much welcome news of the consultation on the mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid, but are the Government consulting on whether it should happen or on how it should happen?
Steve Brine
We will be taking evidence, including from the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment, which is meeting as we speak, to look at the safe upper limit of folate levels. I am particularly keen to get that right, but I am convinced that the evidence shows overwhelmingly that this is something we should be doing.
Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend identifies a critical factor in improving the future of the NHS, which is to have stronger leadership at all levels, to be able to support innovation and to find out the best that is happening elsewhere and bring it to trusts. I know he has a particular interest in that, and I look forward to working with him on it.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
Foetal alcohol spectrum disorders mean permanent brain damage. In the United States, studies show that one in 20 children are affected. So when will this Government carry out their own prevalence study, so that we can confirm the extent of this entirely preventable disability in the UK?
Steve Brine
Public Health England collects some data on foetal alcohol syndrome, but we recognise that the data do not reflect the range of FASD. These disorders are difficult to diagnose, which is why we are engaging experts and those affected to explore what more could be done to improve our understanding.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for the extra £5 million for East Midlands ambulance service and for the £4.5 million extra for Nottingham University Hospitals Trust, which will mean at least 150 more beds this winter, all of which will help with winter planning, but does he agree that it behoves us all to play our own part in keeping fit and healthy and to use the NHS services responsibly?
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend makes a very important point, which is that, while we drive to ensure that the NHS is prepared as possible for this winter, it is incumbent on everybody to exercise their judgment, yes, to access the NHS where it is needed and important, but also to make sure that they bear a personal responsibility, too.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals Trust is proposing to close our midwife-led maternity unit, telling me that, while it is safe, unless it has 500 births a year, it is not value for money. Is that a new national standard for midwife maternity units, because if so it would close 90% of free-standing units? Will a Minister meet me on this matter, because it is unfair on local parents, and, frankly, we are sick and tired of losing services from our towns?
Stephen Barclay
I am happy to meet the right hon. Lady and to discuss the matter further.
Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)
I am extremely concerned about the case of Logan, a young boy in my constituency who requires round-the-clock care and the handling of his case by Corby clinical commissioning group. I have written to the Minister raising concerns about this case, but is he willing to meet me and Logan’s parents, Darren and Wendy, to talk about how this could perhaps be resolved and to apply any pressure that he can, because, as a family, they should be making memories at the moment, not battling local NHS bureaucracy?
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
Is it true that the Secretary of State is now so worried about the supply of vital medicines in the event of a no deal or a hard Brexit that he has asked the pharmaceutical industry to extend the period of stockpiling from six weeks to 20 weeks?
Matt Hancock
No, that is not true. We are working very closely with the pharmaceutical industry to make sure that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, which I regard as unlikely, we mitigate as much as possible the impact on the supply of medicines and that the supply of medicines can be unhindered.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend, the Minister with responsibility for antimicrobial resistance, consider a 10% levy on antibiotics? If such a levy were applied globally, it would raise £3 billion a year, which is the amount specified in the O’Neill review to fund research into this area properly.
Steve Brine
I thank my hon. Friend for his consistent work in this area. Stimulating the pipeline for new antimicrobials and alternative treatments is a complex matter. I can assure him that we continue to work with our international partners—I mentioned the G20 earlier —and that absolutely involves market entry awards, which, as he knows, is a global problem that requires a similar solution.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
Every week in this country, two children are born with spina bifida or anencephaly, and I am delighted that the Minister has just announced the consultation on the fortification of flour, which could stop 70% of those birth defects. Can he tell the House how quickly he hopes to bring about the conclusion of the consultation?
Steve Brine
Let me just pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the work that he has done, bringing this matter to the fore and really pushing it forward. The answer is as soon as possible. I also want to make sure that I can involve the other agencies. Public Health England will be very important in this, because, of course, not every woman eats bread and therefore takes the flour supplement.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
I am sure that the Minister is aware that October is breast cancer awareness month. I welcome the ambition that the Prime Minister set out at the party conference for 75% early-stage diagnosis. There is some concern that, as breast cancer is already above that, there is no ambition left for it to do even better. Can he assure me and the breast cancer community that that is not the case?
Steve Brine
That is certainly not the case. We had a very good debate on breast cancer last week. It is BCAM still this month for another week. The 75% was a target, a new national ambition. It most certainly is not the limit of our ambition.
Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)
Will the Government write off the debts of Yorkshire hospitals so that extra money invested can go into patient care?
Stephen Barclay
As the Secretary of State set out, we are making a significant funding commitment to the NHS—the extra £20 billion—but that is not conditional on writing off debt.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
Will the Minister please provide an update to the House on work to ensure that we train more GPs for England, particularly for west Oxfordshire?
Matt Hancock
Yes. My hon. Friend will have heard that we have record numbers of GPs in training— 10% up on last year. I want to see more GPs—5,000 more across the country—and, no doubt, some of those in west Oxfordshire.
Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
I have a constituent who has Turner syndrome, a female-only genetic disorder that affects one in every 2,000 baby girls. Owing to this, she has to take several medications every day of her life, and this is mounting up as she gets older. She works so she is not on any benefits and has to pay for her medications herself. Will the Minister consider exempting those who suffer from lifelong conditions such as Turner syndrome from paying for their prescriptions? Surely, it cannot be right that people in England should be treated differently from those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where such prescription charges have been abolished.
Steve Brine
I would be very happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss her constituent’s case.
Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)
I am hearing deeply concerning reports about ambulance waits outside Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, and the Minister is aware of these concerns. We welcome the capital funding that is going into this trust, but will he meet me to discuss what more can be done to improve patient handover, which is concerning for my constituents?
Stephen Barclay
As my hon. Friend says, there is significant capital investment into Worcestershire, as well as a major programme of improvements addressing variation in ambulances, but of course I am also happy to meet her to discuss the matter.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Last week, the chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry warned that even associate membership of the European Medicines Agency would not do for our life sciences sector, so can the Secretary of State tell us how much longer we will have to wait and how much more we will have to pay for new medicines if we are outside the European medicines market?
Matt Hancock
We will not have to wait longer; we will ensure that we get the best medicines to the people of Britain long after we are members of the European Union, as we did before we were members of the European Union.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
As in the health service under successive Governments of both colours, demand exceeds supply and we cannot carry on indefinitely, but let us hear a few more questions.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Last week, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health revealed that there has been an increase in infant mortality for the first time in 100 years. Four in every 1,000 babies will not reach their first birthday, compared with 2.8 in every 1,000 babies in Europe. This was warned against as an effect of austerity. What assessment has the Health Secretary done on the effects of next week’s Budget on child health and the longevity of our children?
Matt Hancock
I saw that report and we are analysing it. Last week was Baby Loss Awareness Week, and I am glad that there is more awareness of the issue now than there was previously. It is a very important issue that we are looking at right across the board.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
About two hours ago, I rang to book a flu jab less than a mile away from here. Unfortunately, staff said that they had run out and will not be able to do it until 2 November. The Secretary of State is nodding. He seems to know the answer to everything. What is the issue? Will he give me the answer? This never happened under Labour.
Matt Hancock
If the hon. Gentleman is claiming that there were not enough flu jabs under Labour, I might agree with him, because there are now more flu jabs. More than 4 million flu jabs have already taken place. I am delighted that lots of people want flu jabs because everybody who needs one should get one. The arrival of the flu jab medicine is phased, because we have to ensure that we get the right flu jabs. If the hon. Gentleman could carry on promoting flu jabs for the elderly, I would be delighted.
Mr Speaker
Nevertheless, the hon. Gentleman has had his say, and I feel sure that he will say it again as often as is necessary.
Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)
Will the Minister tell me whether the withdrawal of funding for the Healthy Futures programme in the north-west and Public Health Action in the south-west is likely to help or hinder us meeting the smoking cessation targets in the tobacco control programme?
Steve Brine
This comes back to the matter of public health budgets—£16 billion during the current spending review period, with local authorities best placed to make local decisions on what is needed in their local area. That is the same in the right hon. Gentleman’s area as it is in mine.
James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)
Last month, the Mayor of Greater Manchester adopted the five recommendations of my report, “Living Well and Dying Well”, which seeks to include hospice care provision more formally in our NHS and social care planning. Will the Minister meet me and representatives of our hospices to see how we might best make use of these brilliant community health assets?
Caroline Dinenage
Yes, I am happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss the matter. Hospices provide an incredible level of care right across the UK, and we cannot do enough to support them.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. There were 30 topical questions. Although there was scope for many more, I am afraid that we have to stop now. Thank you, colleagues.
Abortion
Tuesday 23rd October 2018
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Abortion Bill 2017-19 View all Abortion Bill 2017-19 Debates Read Hansard Text
12:59 - The House divided: - Ayes: 208 / Noes: 123 - Question accordingly agreed to.
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Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law relating to abortion in England and Wales, and Northern Ireland; to remove criminal liability in respect of abortion performed with the consent of the pregnant woman up to the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy; to repeal sections 59 and 60 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861; to create offences of termination of a pregnancy after its twenty-fourth week and non-consensual termination of a pregnancy; to amend the law relating to conscientious objection to participation in abortion treatment; and for connected purposes.
I thank Gordon Nardell QC and Professor Sally Sheldon for drafting the Bill. It is supported by the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Royal College of Midwives, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Amnesty International, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the Family Planning Association, Marie Stopes International, the End Violence against Women Coalition, Women’s Aid and the TUC.
Abortion in our country is underpinned by the oldest legal framework for any healthcare treatment, with the harshest criminal sentences in the developed world for women having an illegal abortion. Poland, the USA, Canada and parts of Australia do not criminalise women. The law needs to be updated to deal with the advances in women’s healthcare and sex and relationships education, and with the role of the internet—all of which have occurred alongside the changing attitudes in society.
Our current abortion laws date back to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861—back to a time when Queen Victoria was on the throne and women were still decades away from getting the right to vote. Under the 1861 Act, any woman procuring her own miscarriage and anyone assisting her can go to prison for life. In 1967, Parliament voted for the Abortion Act, which gave a route for women in England and Wales to access abortion legally, by setting out specific exemptions and conditions, including the need for signatures from two doctors agreeing that, for example, a termination is necessary to prevent permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. Women’s lives have been saved in their thousands by David Steel’s 1967 Act, which meant that women no longer had to seek out unsafe, unregulated backstreet abortionists.
So, what are the facts about abortion today? One in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. These days, 80% of abortions take place in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and are medically induced by taking tablets, not by surgical procedures. It is the only medical procedure that requires the agreement of two doctors. In 2007, the Science and Technology Committee found no evidence that this requirement
“serves to safeguard women or doctors”.
The 1967 Act has never applied to Northern Ireland, and the chilling effect of the 1861 Act means that abortion hardly ever takes places in Northern Ireland. It is one of the harshest abortion regimes in the world, with no abortion available in cases of rape, incest or fatal foetal abnormality. This is what a woman from Northern Ireland says:
“I spent Christmas Day in casualty with my two children. My husband had beaten me to a pulp…He had repeatedly raped me…Six weeks later I discovered I was pregnant, I could not continue with the pregnancy. Knowing my husband would carry out his threats to kill me if he found out, I went to my GP who told me abortion was illegal in Northern Ireland and refused to help.”
Or let us consider Denise’s story. She was told midway through her pregnancy that her baby had Edwards syndrome and would not survive. Very ill and unable to travel, Denise was forced to continue with her pregnancy because she lived in Northern Ireland. She was repeatedly asked about her baby and that, she said, left her feeling tortured. She said:
“Every minute, every second of the day—you have to live with the knowledge that the child inside you is going to die.”
Or imagine being 18-year-old Emma, who found out at 20 weeks that her baby had anencephaly and would not survive. She could not face traveling to England for an abortion because she wanted to be surrounded by her loving family. She had to continue the pregnancy to term because she lived in Northern Ireland, and she was eventually induced to give birth to her stillborn daughter.
Then there was the mother who found out that her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant and that her abusive partner has threatened to
“kick the baby out and stab it if it is born.”
Feeling that she had no other option, she bought her daughter abortion tablets online. Seeking support for her daughter from their family doctor concerning the abusive relationship—not the abortion—she now faces a potential prison sentence for trying to help her daughter access medical care denied to her by their Government.
Then there is the heartbreaking account this week on Twitter from a Northern Ireland woman who has been live-tweeting at @ratherbehome her experience of having to travel to England for an abortion. She says this:
“I should be at home, in the privacy of my own home. Instead I’m trying to discreetly bleed in a shitty hotel. There’s no dignity. There’s no privacy.”
These are real-life examples of what women in Northern Ireland face under the current abortion law. Consider for a moment the morality of laws that mean that women in Northern Ireland seeking an abortion after being impregnated through a sexual crime, rape or incest, could face a heavier criminal punishment than the perpetrators—the real criminals.
This June, the Supreme Court found that Northern Ireland’s current abortion laws breach women’s human rights in Northern Ireland. In February 2018, the United Nations found that thousands of women and girls in Northern Ireland are subject to grave and systematic violations of their rights, being compelled either to travel outside Northern Ireland for a legal abortion or to carry their pregnancy to term. With the Northern Ireland Assembly not sitting since January 2017, UK politicians can no longer look away while vulnerable women in Northern Ireland, often suffering in desperate circumstances, have their human rights breached. As Hillary Clinton said:
“Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights”.
Let there be no hard borders in the Irish sea over human rights.
Polling research released on 10 October 2018 by Amnesty International shows that 65% of people in Northern Ireland believe that
“having an abortion should not be a crime”,
while 66% supported the view that in the absence of devolved government,
“Westminster should legislate to reform the law”.
If Westminster does decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, it will then be for the Northern Ireland Assembly to decide what abortion provision should look like there.
Meanwhile, even in England and Wales, a woman using abortion tablets bought online is committing a criminal offence punishable by life imprisonment—and it is often the most vulnerable women, finding it difficult to access termination services, who turn to the internet. Women on Web, a doctor-led online medical service, says that 16% of women cite domestic or “honour” violence, and 8% intimate partner violence, as reasons to seek tablets online. Whether in Birmingham, Belfast or Bangor, women need a modern, supportive, humane, properly regulated medical regime that encourages them to come forward for the best professional advice and treatment, not drives them, isolated and scared, into the unregulated internet pills market.
Therefore, my Bill ensures that up to 24 weeks’ foetal gestation, women and clinicians would no longer be subject to the criminal law for consensual abortion. The 24-week time limit remains, and decriminalisation does not mean the deregulation of abortion: safeguards stay in place. My aim is for effective regulation fit for purpose in the 21st century. The existing body of law and professional standards governing medical procedures would stay. It would remain a crime to offer abortion services without being registered to do so, while anyone supplying medication without a legal prescription would breach the Human Medicines Regulations 2012. Clinics would continue to be registered and subject to Care Quality Commission oversight.
Very importantly, my Bill would also strengthen protection for women and target the criminal law on the real criminals. Anyone—an abusive partner, for example —who ends a pregnancy against a woman’s wishes through violence, or by administering abortion pills without the woman’s knowledge, would be subject to a life sentence. My Bill also protects doctors and nurses who conscientiously object to abortion, extending this as a statutory right to Northern Ireland.
It is time to remove Victorian, misogynistic stigma from our abortion laws. My aim is simple—women able to choose what happens to their own bodies: confident, not criminalised, supported, not stigmatised; women able to access professional advice and medical care that is regulated effectively; and an Act of Parliament that is fit for now, not for 51 years ago, and certainly not for 157 years ago.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Whatever Members’ differing views on abortion, if we respect devolution, we should vote against this motion. It proposes far-reaching changes in abortion law, not only for England and Wales but for Northern Ireland, where abortion has been respected as a devolved matter since 1921. Indeed, it would set a dangerous constitutional precedent of interference.
It is not only unconstitutional. It is untimely, at such a sensitive time in relations between the Westminster Government and the Northern Ireland Administration. It would completely undermine the substance and spirit of the Good Friday agreement, and it is unwanted. Northern Ireland is the most recent part of the UK to vote on abortion law, in 2016, and it voted by a clear majority to retain its law as it stands. The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) quoted statistics in her support, but let us hear what the people of Northern Ireland said just last week when asked. Some 66% of women and 70% of 18 to 30-year-olds there said that Westminster should not dictate this change to them.
If, however, the Province in time decides to change its law, that is for them, not for us here as MPs in Westminster to decide. Colleagues will no doubt recall the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland saying in the House recently:
“The Government believe that the question of any future reform in Northern Ireland must be debated and decided by the people of Northern Ireland and their locally elected, and therefore accountable, politicians.”—[Official Report, 5 June 2018; Vol. 642, c. 220.]
That was specifically in respect of abortion. She has also said that
“it would not be right for the UK Government to undermine the devolution settlement by trying to force on the people of Northern Ireland something that we in Westminster think is right”.—[Official Report, 9 May 2018; Vol. 640, c. 661.]
Those sentiments were reinforced by the Prime Minister, when she said:
“Our focus is restoring a democratically accountable devolved government in Northern Ireland”.
In that clear respect, this motion is contrary to Government policy and should be voted down.
Can we in all conscience vote on the one hand tomorrow on a Bill to
“Facilitate the formation of an Executive in Northern Ireland”,
as its long title commences, respecting the authority of that Executive to make decisions on such issues as roads and infrastructure, and then on the other hand today seek to deny Northern Ireland that authority on a matter of such fundamental social significance as abortion? We cannot, and we must not.
Whatever the views of Members across the House on abortion, they should hear what a number of Northern Irish women who wrote to me said:
“Changing the law in Northern Ireland at this sensitive political moment on this sensitive political issue is bad for devolution everywhere.”
The hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) has said from the Scottish National party Benches:
“The decisions of devolved Administrations are taken for reasons that people in those devolved nations understand from their point of view”—[Official Report, 5 June 2018; Vol. 642, c. 228.]
Or, as Ruth Davidson, who is in favour of changing the law on this issue, more bluntly puts it:
“as someone who operates in a devolved administration, I know how angry I would be if the House of Commons legislated on a domestic Scottish issue over the head of Holyrood”.
This motion is an ignoble endeavour to take advantage of a temporary Executive lacuna and to foist legislation unconstitutionally on to the people of Northern Ireland. In so doing, it would radically alter our own abortion laws here in England and Wales.
Although the Bill has yet to be published, let us look at what it would do. It seeks to permit a woman up to 24 weeks pregnant to obtain an abortion for any or no reason at all—abortion on demand up to five months of pregnancy. We already have some of the most extreme abortion laws in the world, but this would make them even more so. There is no public call or appetite for this whatsoever. Indeed, it is the opposite; there is clearly grave public concern. Apart from Brexit, I have had more cards from constituents asking me to vote against this ten-minute rule Bill than on any other issue in this Parliament. Only 21% of women in England and Wales want an extension to our abortion laws, and less than 2% of them are in favour of sex-selective abortion, which the Bill would legalise up to 24 weeks. It is no good the hon. Lady arguing, as she has, that clinicians’ regulations or practice could cover that issue. The fact is that if her proposals go through, sex-selective abortion will not be illegal in this country up to 24 weeks. Do we want to go the way of Canada, which is now described as
“a haven for parents who would terminate female foetuses in favour of having sons”?
Do we really want to support a Bill—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady must be heard. If she wishes to put the matter to the vote, which I believe she does and which is entirely proper, the House will then cast its judgment, but she must be heard with courtesy.
Fiona Bruce
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I do want to put the matter to a vote.
Do we really want to support a Bill that could remove the only opportunity that many women have, often at the most vulnerable stage, to speak confidentially and one-to-one with a doctor about their concerns on abortion and what their alternatives might be? If we really trust women and want them to make the most informed decision and give them the best support we can, surely we should not take away this important legal safeguard. The bottom line is that if there is an abusive relationship, and there is no legal requirement for a doctor’s involvement and no need for a reason to be given for an abortion, it is far more likely that a vulnerable woman will be pressurised into having an abortion by an abusive partner. This Bill does not improve protection for vulnerable women. It reduces it.
The hon. Lady talked about the legislation being out of date, but should we reinforce, as this motion proposes, an outdated 24-week time limit when babies are consistently surviving now at 22 weeks, and some even at 21 weeks and a few days? The Bill is out of step with scientific progress and public opinion. Some 70% of women want this time limit lowered.
In recent weeks, lobbyists supporting this motion, as the hon. Lady said, have said that the UN has called for this change. The UN has done no such thing. The lobbyists for this change cite a report by a minor UN sub-committee, which does not have any standing to rule on the UK’s legal obligations in this respect. As for the non-binding judgment of the Supreme Court, which has also been used to justify this motion, there is nothing in that judgment that could remotely be said to give rise to anything approaching a requirement for the Bill. As Lady Hale said there, we in this place do not have to act.
We should not act, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland, on this issue—not only because it would be unconstitutional, though that is enough, but because the complex ramifications of this proposal, which have clearly not been thought through, would result in contradictory and inconsistent results in different parts of the UK. Those are too detailed to be debated here, but Northern Ireland would in fact be left with a total legal void, with no law covering, for example, the place where an abortion could occur and no legal requirement for abortions to be restricted to legally approved hospitals or clinical settings—abortions for any reason or no reason in any place.
The permanent secretary of the Department of Health in Northern Ireland was asked this year,
“What is the situation if the 1861 Act was to be repealed in the UK?”
His answer was:
“This scenario would leave abortion unregulated in Northern Ireland.”
The best people could hope for there would be some guidance from the Department of Health. The hon. Lady places great reliance on regulators, but regulators do not have the standing of law, as we have recently seen in cases of regulatory failure by the Care Quality Commission. Regulation cannot replace legislation. Taking the responsibility for abortion out of the hands of elected representatives and putting it in the hands of unaccountable medical bodies would be a derogation of our responsibility as Members of Parliament.
To close, I repeat that as Members of Parliament, we must respect our devolution settlements, and particularly in this instance that of Northern Ireland. Whatever Members’ views on abortion, we must vote against this proposal. It is unconstitutional, legally incoherent, untimely and unwanted.
Question put (Standing Order No. 23).
Civil Liability Bill [Lords]
Tuesday 23rd October 2018
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Civil Liability Act 2018 View all Civil Liability Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 23 October 2018 - (23 Oct 2018)
15:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 240 / Noes: 287 - Question accordingly negatived.
15:15 - The House divided: - Ayes: 243 / Noes: 288 - Question accordingly negatived.
17:31 - The House having divided: - Ayes: 243 / Noes: 298 - Question accordingly negatived.
19:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 294 / Noes: 238 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 2—Small Claims Track: Children and Protected Parties—
‘(1) The Small Claims Track Limit in relation to claims made by children and protected parties for whiplash injuries may not be increased unless the increase is to an amount which is not more than the value of £1,000 on 1 April 1999 adjusted for inflation, computed by reference to the consumer prices index.
(2) In subsection (1),
“children” means any person or persons under 18;
“protected parties” means any person who lacks capacity to conduct the proceedings;
“lacks capacity” means lacks capacity within the meaning of the Mental Capacity Act 2005’.
This new clause would limit increases in the small claims track limit for those suffering whiplash injuries to inflationary rises only, for people who are either children or people lacking capacity to make decisions for themselves (as defined in the Mental Capacity Act 2005).
Gloria De Piero
We are again confronted with the reforms in the Bill, which will cost the NHS at least £6 million a year and taxpayers at least £140 million a year, the Government admit. Even they accept that it will result in more than 100,000 injured people not pursuing a legitimate claim that they could pursue now; we say the figure is far higher. Insurers, meanwhile, will get an extra £1.3 billion of profit every year. The Government say that they will hand 80% of that to consumers in the form of reduced premiums, but they have said that before, and insurers have saved over £11 billion since the last Government reforms in this area, in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Despite a brief dip in 2012-13, premiums are now higher than ever.
The Government have moved a little on the Bill, and in Committee the Minister confirmed what he intimated on Second Reading: that vulnerable road users will be exempted from both the Bill and the small claims limit. That is welcome. As Labour has done repeatedly throughout the process, we will attempt today to make the Bill fairer still by setting out some key amendments.
New clause 1 would ensure that the whiplash small claims limit could be increased only in line with inflation based on the consumer prices index, and it follows Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendation that increases should come in £500 increments and only when inflation justifies them.
One of the most disappointing aspects of this package of reforms is the Government’s attempts to sneak through key changes to the small claims track limit through the use of statutory instruments. Today we want to give those changes the scrutiny they sorely deserve and put them in the Bill.
Whereas the threshold for getting legal representation for personal injuries is currently £1,000, the Government are trying to raise it to £2,000 or £5,000, which will make a massive difference to someone injured through no fault of their own. That position is supported by a raft of experts, including some in the Minister’s own ranks—the Tory Chair of the Select Committee on Justice for one. The White Book, which I took the trouble of sharing with the Minister in Committee, shows that there was an effective 20% increase in the small claims limit in 1999 when special damages were removed from the calculation of the limit. I note that the Lord Chancellor conceded in his letter to the Chair of the Justice Committee dated 15 August 2018 that 1999 is the correct date from which to calculate an increase.
It is worth pausing at this point, since the Government now accept that there was a significant change in 1999, to understand what that change meant. An example is given in paragraph 26.6.2 of the White Book:
“a claim for £4,000 for loss of earnings and other losses, plus a claim for £800 for damages for pain and suffering, is a claim which would be allocated to the small claims track”.
In layman’s terms, a claim may be made for under £1,000 for pain and suffering, but when losses and expenses are added in it could be considerably greater. The example in the White Book suggests that, if an £800 pain and suffering award has a losses and expenses claim of £4,000, although the total value of the claim is £4,800, it still falls into the small claims track. We are talking about claims far in excess of the small claims limit.
Lord Justice Jackson, in his review of civil litigation costs, all the recommendations of which the Government accepted and implemented in the 2012 Act, said in paragraph 1.3 of chapter 19 of his 2009 review:
“Personal injuries litigation is the paradigm instance of litigation in which the parties are in an asymmetric relationship.”
In words that we all understand, this is David versus Goliath. Sir Rupert Jackson went on to say that
“the only reason to increase the Personal Injury small claims limit would be to reflect inflation since 1999”
and that
“I propose that the present limit stays at £1,000 until inflation warrants an increase to £1,500”.
He could not have been clearer, yet the Government appear to have plucked the proposed £2,000 limit out of thin air.
The new clause states that the CPI, which is used for the uprating of pensions and benefits paid to injured workers, should be used to calculate the small claims limit. Even the Chief Secretary to the Treasury agrees that CPI is the way to go. She said earlier this year to a House of Lords Committee:
“CPI is a much better measure of inflation…we are seeking to move away from RPI”.
The Governor of the Bank of England agrees, too. He has said:
“We have RPI, which most would acknowledge has known errors. We have CPI, which is what virtually everyone recognises and is in our remit.”
It is perfectly clear what we need to do: enshrine CPI as the key measure in the Bill.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on getting the Government to admit that the increases are arbitrary and not linked to inflation in any way. Is it not the case, therefore, that the only reason for the increases is to prevent injured people from getting representation and thereby preclude people with meritorious cases from getting the damages that they deserve?
Gloria De Piero
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Even if we use RPI, the Government still do not get to their proposed £2,000 new small claims limit. Instead, using the flawed RPI from 1999 would take the £1,000 to roughly £1,700. That is what we on the Labour Benches suspect is going on here.
Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making an argument about whether RPI or CPI should be used, but is there not a bigger point here? For almost all claims generally, outside this area, the small claims track limit is £10,000. If we are to be consistent, is there not a case for making it £10,000, the same as everything else?
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Surely the only gainers here are the insurance companies. Most people, because legal aid has been reduced, cannot afford solicitors.
Gloria De Piero
Exactly. I do not think anybody in this House will want to shed a tear for those insurance companies whose profits are going up and up. In 2017, profits for Direct Line went up 52% to £570 million and Aviva recorded a profit of £1.6 billion—and I have not even talked about the packages that some insurance company bosses take home.
The Government appear to have rounded this figure up. We say base the figure on the advice and recommendations of countless experts and follow the evidence. Even if the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) does not listen to me, I wish he would follow the evidence of the experts. New clause 1 does just that. It would increase the limit only by CPI since 1999 and limit any increase to £1,500. That way, injured people with significant injuries and potentially even more significant losses will get the representation they need and deserve.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that in the case of an accident at work it is even more important that an injured employee is able to get legal representation to take a case against their employer? The employer will be armed with lawyers and their employers’ liability insurance company. That is stacked up against an individual whose task will be hard enough. They will be feeling victimised enough as it is.
Gloria De Piero
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is not an easy thing to take a case against your boss. You need a lawyer to hold your hand, an expert to talk you through, and the Government’s proposals are going to make that so much more difficult. She makes an appropriate point.
New clause 2 would ensure that children and protected persons, for example those lacking mental capacity, are treated the same as other vulnerable groups by excluding them from the small claims limit increase for whiplash injuries. Having made a welcome concession on Second Reading, and clarified in Committee that they would exclude vulnerable road users from the impact of the Bill and secondary measures on the small claims court limit, the Government appear to have forgotten others. Horse riders, pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists are rightly to be excluded from the changes, but some of the most vulnerable in our society, who are currently recognised by the courts as requiring special status, will be left, with everybody else, facing a new small claims limit of £2,000 or £5,000. As it stands, any settlement awarded to those who lack capacity to conduct their own proceedings, such as children or someone suffering with a mental disability, must be rubber-stamped by a judge because of the claimant’s recognised vulnerabilities. That will continue to be the case after these changes are introduced.
The law requires children and other protected people to have a litigation friend to conduct proceedings on their behalf. In the small claims court, those who provide this required representation are not and will not be paid for their time. Yet by increasing the small claims limit, there will be a significant increase in the number of people coming through the small claims court with higher-value and more complex cases, where they need a lawyer more than ever. We are asking a litigation friend to take on potentially complicated matters for those most in need, on their own, in their own time, for no pay. Injured horse riders, cyclists and pedestrians and motorcyclists will not be subject to a tariff. The small claims limit for them will remain at £1,000, meaning that they will get a lawyer to act for them for free in any case over that value.
Can the Government not see that children and protected persons need this support, too? How on earth can the Government justify protecting one vulnerable group but not another? Why is the horse rider worthy of exemption, but not a child or a person without the capacity to conduct proceedings? Are we really willing to let some of the most vulnerable people in our justice system be left simply to hope for the good will of others to protect their interests because we in this House have failed to do so?
I know that the Minister is aware of this issue from discussion in Committee with my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous). The Minister suggested returning to this point and that he would be very interested to see an amendment tabled. So here is his chance: a ready-made amendment that makes a simple correction and is an opportunity for the Government to rectify what I presume is an oversight. It simply extends the exemption already provided to others. It removes children from the changes being made to the small claims limit or tariff, and ensures that protected groups are excluded from the increase, the same as horse riders, cyclists and pedestrians. It removes the double standard of some vulnerable road users being granted an exemption and others not. Ultimately, it does little more than extend the protections already afforded to some and allow the Government to show that they care for all.
Chris Philp
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for calling me so early in this debate. I rise to oppose the Opposition’s new clause 1, which seeks to prevent the Government or any other public body from increasing the small claims track limit in relation to these personal injury cases, particularly road traffic personal injury cases, above £1,500.
I strongly oppose the measure. I touched on one of the reasons for doing so in my intervention on the shadow Minister earlier. For the vast majority of general commercial claims and indeed personal claims, the small claims track limit is £10,000. The reason it is as high as £10,000 is that some level of materiality is applied to the claim in question. The view taken by Parliament in the past, rightly, is that matters below the £10,000 limit should be sufficiently simple for a small claims track procedure to be used without the involvement of often very expensive lawyers.
In response to my intervention, the shadow Minister, before she was distracted by another intervention, drew attention to the fact that these are personal injuries. I accept that point, of course. However, the fact of their being personal injuries is not germane, in my view, to the question, which is: is the matter sufficiently simple to be adjudicated via the small claims track rather than through lawyers? That is the question—not whether the matter is serious or not serious but whether the matter is sufficiently simple to be dealt with properly by the small claims track rather than through lawyers. That is why I think there is a strong a case, on the grounds of consistency, for a £10,000 rather than a £5,000 limit.
Ruth George
In road accident claims and particularly in employment liability cases at work, establishing who is to blame for an accident is far from simple. It is an extremely different sort of case from that of establishing whether a fridge was working or not when it was bought, or whether there is something wrong with a car. I really think the hon. Gentleman is not doing justice to the victims of personal injury accidents by the arguments that he seeks to make.
Chris Philp
Of course the £10,000 small claims track limit applies to a far wider range of issues than simply whether a fridge functions or not. The hon. Lady mentions as an example the question of culpability for a road traffic accident. Given that we are talking about much less serious types of injury if the limit is, say, £5,000, determining responsibility for that road traffic accident does not need to be an enormously complicated procedure. For those of us who have been involved in such road traffic accidents, the minor ones we are talking about here, determining responsibility is not a highly complicated matter. I accept that, in much more difficult cases where very serious injuries have been suffered, one must of course take a lot more legal care and attention. For very minor injuries, however, where by definition the accident is a minor one, I suggest that determining responsibility and culpability does not need to be an extremely complicated matter.
Andy Slaughter
With the greatest respect, I do not think that the hon. Gentleman knows what he is talking about. Given of the relatively low levels of compensation for injury, the effects of a £5,000 injury can be quite severe and debilitating over a period of time. The complexity of personal injury cases, which involve expert evidence and issues of causation, means that they are in a different category. Even the Government accept that, so he is batting on a rather poor wicket.
Chris Philp
The hon. Gentleman’s arguments are ones that the legal community often advance, whether in this arena or others, to justify very high levels of legal and judicial intervention, which is often very expensive. We need to maintain a sense of proportionality, lest legal costs and expenses get out of control.
Chris Philp
I shall in just a moment. I have seen figures suggesting that 47% of the pay-outs made by insurance companies for these relatively minor road traffic injuries get consumed by legal fees. If such a high proportion of pay-outs is being consumed by expenses, it suggests to me that the entire system is out of proportion, and that some reform is therefore needed. I give way to the Chair of the Justice Committee.
Robert Neill
I am afraid that my hon. Friend is not making the best case on the Government side that I have ever heard. Does he accept that lawyers act in the interests of their clients and that when they do, they are bound by professional obligations? Is not a better point that we should assist people through the system by working up a very good and accessible online portal, which the Minister has sought to do, so that we find the means of balancing cost with people’s ability to seek access to justice? I gently say to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) that that is perhaps a stronger point that the Government have been able to advance. The Minister has taken care to delay the implementation of aspects of the Bill in order to get the online portal up and working, and I suggest that that might be a more fruitful area to consider.
Chris Philp
I am always delighted to take advice and guidance from such a distinguished, learned and experienced Member as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). He adds further weight to the case by drawing attention to the benefits of the online portal, which I hope could be used to further simplify such matters and enable claimants to manage them, rather than having to rely on lawyers.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Is the hon. Gentleman aware that in most personal injury claims, there are fixed costs for lawyers’ fees?
Chris Philp
In many cases there are, but in many cases those costs inflate. I referred to the fact that 47% of the value of pay-outs get consumed by legal fees. I hope that the fixed tariffs provision, which is not the subject of any amendment but is in the Bill, will further simplify matters.
One reason why we have a problem that needs solving in this area—new clause 1 would inhibit that solution—is qualified one-way costs shifting, which was introduced a few years ago. I understand why it was introduced—the shadow Minister referred to David and Goliath—but under a system of qualified one-way costs shifting, unless the respondent can prove quite a high level of intention, deceit or malfeasance, the claimant’s legal costs are borne by the respondent in any event, even if the claim is dismissed. That creates significant moral hazard, as it means that claimants can bring claims, even if those claims have relatively little merit, safe in the knowledge that they, or indeed their advisers, will never have to bear the cost of the claim. It is a one-way bet, which means that claimants may as well just have a go and see what happens. The number of cases in which a claimant is shown to be so egregiously fraudulent that they have to pay the cost is extremely small. This one-way bet—this free option—that the legal system now provides is one of the reasons why there has been such an explosion in claim numbers.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
I should declare that I chair the all-party group on insurance and financial services. I agree with my hon. Friend’s opposition to the new clauses. Does he have any thoughts on why personal injury claims have risen by 40% over the last decade, yet during the same period, cars have become safer and accidents have reduced by nearly a third?
Chris Philp
My hon. Friend is right—he makes exactly the point that I was about to come on to. Over about a decade in which accidents have reduced by 30% and cars have become safer, the number of claims has gone up by 40%. He asks why, and I think it goes back to qualified one-way costs shifting. There is a huge financial incentive for claimants to have a go—encouraged, of course, by claims management companies—in the hope that they can make a successful claim. Defendants, typically insurance companies, have rather irresponsibly taken the view that because defending one of these claims—probably successfully—will cost £10,000 or perhaps more, they should simply choose to settle, which may involve paying out £3,000 or £4,000, without bothering to defend the claim. Obviously word has spread both in the claims management community and among the wider public that people can simply make a claim and the insurance company will settle, because it is cheaper for them to settle a bad claim than to fight it. That has created the most extraordinary perverse incentives. Insurance companies have been seriously at fault, as they have set up this situation by paying out for claims with no merit, for understandable commercial reasons, but they have made a big mistake, and we now have to correct it through the Bill.
My hon. Friend asks why the number of claims has increased so dramatically. It is because claims management companies have been phoning around, encouraging the public to submit fraudulent claims, and I will elaborate on that in a moment.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me in saying that insurance companies are paying up on a regular basis. They are not even defending these claims, yet the Bill is designed to protect them. What does he say about that?
Chris Philp
The companies are not defending the claims because qualified one-way costs shifting makes it more expensive for them to successfully defend a claim than simply to pay it out. The system simply is not working.
Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman think that any genuine claimants will be hit by this measure and will not receive the compensation that they should get?
Chris Philp
The right hon. Gentleman raises a fair concern. Of course, we need to make sure that we do not overcompensate and find ourselves in a situation in which genuine claimants are prevented from claiming. The way in which we are legislating strikes that balance and genuine claimants can still make a claim. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to the use of an easy-to-operate online portal as a way of ensuring that claims can be handled easily, even by laypeople. The concern that the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) raises is reasonable, but I think that the Government have addressed it in their handling of the matter. However, I am sure that the Minister will comment further on the right hon. Gentleman’s point.
Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)
This might be a peculiar counter-intuitive point, but it is often the case that whiplash claims are associated with bad headlines in the press. People think that the numbers of claims are dramatically exaggerated. Perhaps it might be helpful if we send a message from the Chamber about discouraging fraudulent claims, which would mean that people with a genuine claim would be more likely to have their cases dealt with more quickly.
Chris Philp
As always, my hon. Friend makes a very good point. As Members of Parliament, we should send out a clear message to our constituents and the wider public that making fraudulent claims is not a victimless crime. They affect the insurance premiums that all of us and all our constituents pay. Fraudulent claims are extremely bad for society as a whole. They encourage a sense that people can somehow get money without really deserving it, which is morally corrosive as well as financially damaging.
Jo Stevens
I am sure that no one in the Chamber thinks that we should encourage fraudulent claims—absolutely not—but may I bring the hon. Gentleman back to some facts? Between 2015 and 2017, the number of registered claims for whiplash fell by 15%, while the number of claims being reported through the police also fell, which might have something to do with the 37% reduction in the number of road traffic police officers in the last 10 years.
Chris Philp
Clearly the number of injury claims made via an insurance company is not related to the number of police officers on the street. The hon. Lady mentions the slight but welcome reduction in the number of whiplash injuries. Over the same period, the number of claims to insurance companies for back injuries has increased, so the total number of claims is down only very slightly over the last couple of years, and is still dramatically up over 10 years, which is clearly a more meaningful period. When the two are taken together, therefore, there has not been a significant reduction.
Robert Neill
The House will know about my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am glad that my hon. Friend has mentioned claims management companies. Would he agree that some of the concerns about balancing access to justice with discouraging fraudulent claims—we all agree about them—would be met by continuing to revise and strengthen the regulation of claims management companies, which are not regulated to the degree that solicitors are, and in particular by bearing down on the employment of paid McKenzie friends—non-qualified, quasi-lawyers who are particularly rife in the claims management sector? Will he work with me in persuading the Government to move swiftly to ban them?
Chris Philp
Once again my hon. Friend makes a very good point—two very good points, in this case. The operation of claims management companies, which have been actively engaged in encouraging the public to commit fraud, has had an extremely negative effect in this area. I want an outright ban on them making cold calls, but I am slightly concerned that even if the Government take all the action that he and I would like, these people, being extremely adept in such matters, would adapt their behaviour to circumvent the legislation and regulation. For example, they might start making cold calls from outside the UK’s legal jurisdiction, as we saw following the ban on referral fees that came into force two or three years ago. Insurance companies were banned from receiving referral fees from claims management companies, but some insurance companies and claims management companies sought to circumvent the ban by setting up what they euphemistically termed “alternative business structures”, whereby the claims management company effectively remunerated the insurance company via an equity stake rather than a referral fee. I am therefore concerned that even if we take all the action we can, these often rather dubious characters will find new and ingenious ways of circumventing the legislation.
Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
I welcome the fact that the hon. Gentleman supports an outright ban on cold calling by claims management companies, but does he agree that the Government’s measures in the Financial Guidance and Claims Act 2018 do not go that far? Rather than punishing injured victims, would it not be far better to introduce that outright ban on claims management companies’ cold calling?
Chris Philp
As I said a moment ago to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, an outright ban would be welcome—it might be something the Government are looking at in any case—but because these people are so ingenious at circumventing even the best-written rules and regulations, there would still be a problem.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way—he is being most generous with his time. May I press him on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) about McKenzie friends? I am going back years now, but in my day, when I first started at the Bar, the concept worked very well: they were volunteers who accompanied people to court and assisted them, and they certainly were not paid. Surely we just need to go back to the system as was, as I suggest that things would then work very well.
Chris Philp
I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend, who I know has a distinguished legal background. Both he and the Chair of the Justice Committee have powerfully made the point that McKenzie friends should be voluntary and unpaid. I hope the Minister heard that excellent recommendation, which has now been made by two learned hon. Members of this House.
Sir Edward Davey
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on making a speech against the Bill. He has admitted that the insurance companies should be fighting the claims, that McKenzie friends should not be paid and that claims management companies should be regulated. He might not have realised it, but he has defeated the Bill by himself.
Chris Philp
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for granting to me such wide-ranging powers of persuasion, but I am not speaking against the Bill; I am speaking only against new clause 1. Despite all the measures we have just been discussing, including the three that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, I do not think that they, on their own, will be enough, for the reasons I have outlined. The financial incentives created by qualified one-way cost shifting will remain, and claims management companies will find ways of circumventing any tightening of the rules that might be legislated for separately. There is no question but that the British public are being incited to submit fraudulent claims on an industrial scale—[Interruption.] The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), is tut-tutting and shaking his head in a way that leads me to believe he disagrees with that statement—I think that I have fairly summarised his view.
Chris Philp
I was about to reply to the shadow Minister’s implied disagreement, but go on then; I give way.
Eddie Hughes
I just wondered if my hon. Friend would comment on a previous interaction between me and my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) about stock car racers, who obviously are involved in multiple collisions and yet do not seem to suffer any whiplash, or at least not to the same extent as others. In addition, people in Greece make far fewer claims than we do in the UK. Will he comment on that?
Chris Philp
Once again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Not only has the number of claims for such injuries dramatically increased over the past 10 years, at a time when the number of road traffic accidents has fallen, but they are far more prevalent here than in other European jurisdictions—not just Greece but countries such as France and Germany. Could it be that British necks are weaker than French and German necks, or could it be that our system encourages fraudulent claims?
Ruth George
The hon. Gentleman, who is making an excellent speech, has answered his own question. He has talked about the prevalence of claims management companies and the way they are inciting people to make claims on an industrial scale. Surely those claims management companies, and the insurance companies they are linked to in most cases, should be bearing the brunt of this problem, not the innocent victims of accidents, as would be the case under the Bill.
Chris Philp
The hon. Lady evidently agrees that claims management companies have been inciting fraud on an industrial scale—a point of view that her Front-Bench colleague perhaps disagrees with. That said, claims management companies are only part of the problem. As I said, the incentives inherent in the system have encouraged the kind of behaviour I have been describing.
I want to come to the implied sedentary disagreement from the shadow Minister earlier. I inferred from his gesticulation that he disagreed with my suggestion that claims management companies were inciting fraud on an industrial scale. I will start with a personal anecdote, which I realise does not make the general point, but I will then come on to that more general point. My interest in this area stems from personal experience. About three or four years ago, just before being first elected, I had a minor road traffic accident while driving along the M5 to Cornwall with my wife and our two small children. [Interruption.] I think I am being heckled by the Chair of the Justice Committee.
Nobody was injured in the accident—the bumper was a bit dented, but that was it. It happened at low speed, the traffic having slowed down. For about a year, however, I was bombarded with calls to my personal mobile by people from claims management companies, I think, that had somehow found out about the bump, trying to persuade me that I or my family had suffered a neck injury. No matter how often or how insistently I told them that everyone was fine, they would say things such as, “If you just say your neck hurts, you’ll get £3,000.” The incitement to commit fraud was clear and direct. Subsequently, as recently as in the last two or three months, I have received repeated automated calls—robocalls—again to my mobile, although wholly unrelated, I think, to the first set of calls. I received a recorded message saying, “We are calling about your accident. Do you want to talk about it?” There was then a pause during which I was expected to reply. That is clearly happening on an industrial scale.
Jo Stevens
Who does the hon. Gentleman think sold his details to that claims management company?
Chris Philp
In the first instance, it was very likely to have been an insurance company that had been circumventing the referral fee ban through an alternative business structure, which is a practice that I wholly deplore, and I encourage the Government to ban it. However, as I have said three or four times before, simply trying to legislate away claims management companies will not in itself be enough when the incentives inherent in the system are so powerful. Raising the small claims track limit to, say, £5,000—which is still half the level of the general small claims track limit—will serve to diminish the financial incentives in the system whereby lawyers are taking nearly half the value of pay-outs.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
I give way to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter).
Andy Slaughter
The proportion of fraudulent claims is about 1%. If I understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument correctly, he is saying that all meritorious claimants should be debarred from proper representation so we can identify that 1%, because it is too difficult for the Government to legislate. Is not the truth of the matter that the Government, as always, are joined at the hip to the Association of British Insurers, and are simply legislating in its interests?
Chris Philp
I disagree with all three things that the hon. Gentleman has said. First, as I said earlier to the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), the Government have no intention at all of preventing legitimate claims from being made. The Government are keen to facilitate those claims, and the online claims portal will help with that. There is categorically no intention of disbarring, preventing or in any other way inhibiting legitimate claims from being made.
Secondly, the hon. Gentleman referred to the 1% fraudulent claims figure. The reason the reported figure, which in my submission is dramatically under-reported, is so low is that insurance companies are, quite wrongly, choosing to settle those claims—even suspicious claims, even claims without merit—without defending them, because the cost of defending them, which is about £10,000 or £15,000, far exceeds the value of the pay-out. So the 1% figure cited by the hon. Gentleman goes nowhere close to reflecting the true scale of fraudulent claims in this area.
Sir Edward Davey
Will the hon. Gentleman respond to a general point? Does he believe that when we are tackling a problem, in any aspect of society, we should deal with the symptom or the cause?
Chris Philp
Of course we should deal principally with the cause, and that is what the Bill seeks to do. [Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman asked about causes. We can talk about claims management companies and we can talk about referral fees—those are important issues to deal with—but the cause of this problem is the financial incentives created by qualified one-way costs shifting, whereby claimants, aided and abetted by claims management companies, can have a crack for free, suffering no loss if their unmeritorious claims are dismissed. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to go into the cause of the problem, that is the cause of it, and elevating the small claims track limit to £5,000 will do a great deal to eliminate the cause. If he wishes to address the cause, as his intervention implied, he should vote against new clause 1.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
I give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle.
Huw Merriman
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. It is not just the case that we do not really know the number of fraudulent cases, although we can certainly make a very fair estimate, given that there are 200,000 extra claims and 85% of them relate to whiplash. The real issue is that we tend not to see any medical reports because of the settlements. It is not just that the cases are not defended; we never see the medical reports, so we do not know exactly what the full figure would be.
Chris Philp
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Because the claims are settled upfront by the payment of, typically, £3,000 or £4,000, there is often no medical examination. There is therefore no evidence on which to assess whether the claim was fraudulent or not, which is why the 1% figure cited by the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) is essentially meaningless.
One of the other provisions in the Bill, which we debated on Second Reading, is the requirement for a medical examination to take place before an offer is made. That is an essential reform. In response to an intervention from me, the Secretary of State for Justice confirmed that such medical examinations would have to be face to face. That would begin to address the issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) has rightly raised.
Jo Stevens
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way to me again; he is being very generous. He mentioned the purpose of raising the small claims limit to £5,000, and what that would do. What it will do is deny victims of injury access to justice, as the Government’s own impact assessment expressly states.
Chris Philp
I do not accept the premise of the hon. Lady’s intervention. I think that in the case of the smaller claims, whose value is less than £5,000, it is perfectly possible and perfectly reasonable for individuals to submit their own claims—these are relatively simple matters—using the online portal to whose importance my hon. Friend hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst drew our attention earlier. Members have also referred to the role that unpaid McKenzie friends can play in assisting members of the public who submit claims. I do not accept the suggestion that bona fide claims will be prevented or inhibited by the proposed reforms.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
The hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) has tried several times to intervene, so I must give him an opportunity to make his point.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because he has been generous. May I put a different scenario to him, because this aspect of what he is saying is confusing me? If, in the course of his employment, a resident of Glasgow South West were injured in Croydon South, why would he be treated less favourably because the injury was sustained in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency than he would be in the constituency of Glasgow South West? In Scotland personal injury claims are exempt from the small claims limit, and civil legal aid is available to claimants.
Chris Philp
I infer from the hon. Gentleman’s question that these matters are devolved in Scotland. Is that the case?
Chris Philp
The two cases are treated differently because there is an entirely different legal system in Scotland, and there is a devolved Government there. It is perfectly within the competence of that devolved Government to take a different view. Clearly the Government in Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament, have taken a different view, as they are entitled to do so, but I, as an English MP—as a London MP—take my own view, and it is the one that I have been expressing here today.
Chris Stephens
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that, but does he realise that the Bill affects 407,000 people—Scottish residents who are employed in England and Wales?
Chris Philp
It may well affect residents of Scotland. Of course, it also affects residents of France, Germany, the United States and Kazakhstan who may choose to visit my constituency. I strongly encourage all of them to do that, by the way. If, heaven forbid, they were to suffer an injury in Croydon South, they would be equivalently affected. The mere fact that there are different rules in different jurisdictions is no reason not to change the rules in this one. Which jurisdiction is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that we align ourselves with? Scotland? France?
Chris Philp
While I admire the hon. Gentleman’s patriotism in inviting us to follow the Scottish example, I am afraid that this Parliament will form its own view on what is appropriate, and I do not think that he can be in any doubt about what I think the right view is on the question before us today.
Ruth George
The hon. Gentleman is indeed being very generous. However, he constantly claims that the injuries sustained in road traffic accidents are minor. Written into the Bill is that an injury caused by the
“rupture of a…tendon or ligament in the neck, back or shoulder”
that lasts for up to two years will be included within the limits. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that sort of “minor injury”, which could affect people for such a large portion of their lives, should be included?
Chris Philp
The Government consulted extensively on the definitions before legislating. I understand that the definition to which the hon. Lady has referred was recommended by the Sentencing Council, and I would certainly not wish to second-guess or naysay the recommendation of such an august institution.
I did not quite have the opportunity to finish a point that I was making in response to the hon. Member for Leeds East who, some moments ago, was expressing disagreement with my suggestion that claims were being farmed on an industrial scale. I have given my own personal example, but I also want to submit to the House, in support of what I said, an example uncovered by The Sunday Times in July 2015. It involved a company called Complete Claim Solutions, which was based principally in Brighton but also had an office in the Borough of Croydon—although not in my constituency, I hasten to add. It was discovered to be systematically encouraging members of the public to submit fraudulent claims. It was such a disreputable organisation that it used the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” as an instructional video illustrating the kind of behaviour it considered appropriate. This is no small company; it was responsible for making no fewer than 7 million outbound calls per year. One of its salespeople, Tom Murray, was recorded boasting to a journalist from The Sunday Times that he was able to easily persuade the public to lie. He said that
“if they want that £2,000, they’ll lie.”
He also said:
“When it comes down to a woman who’s had an accident…I’ll make her cry”
as a way of persuading her to make a claim.
That is just one example of the shocking behaviour of these claims management companies, in this example one making 7 million calls per year.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
I have taken up a great deal of the House’s time. [Interruption.] I am glad that I have at last said something that finds favour with the Opposition Front Bench. I am sure many other colleagues wish to contribute to this debate.
There is overwhelming evidence that our system is broken, in terms not only of the claims management companies and the use of alternative business structures to get information into their hands, but of the fundamental incentives inherent in qualified one-way costs shifting. The proposals the Government are contemplating to increase the small claims track limit will do a great deal to choke off this problem at source—to deal with the cause, as the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton requested a few moments ago. For that reason I will be energetically and enthusiastically voting against new clause 1.
Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I welcome the opportunity to try to counter the worst aspects of this Bill by speaking to Opposition new clauses 1 and 2.
Access to justice may sound like a catchphrase or buzzword, but it underpins so much within our society, and it should not be bandied about and dismissed with the cavalier attitude currently shown by this Government. The Bill will cause a regression in the ability of genuinely injured people to seek compensation and justice for their injuries. The narrative of wanting to clamp down on fraudulent claims has long worn thin and the statistics the Government are using to justify these policies are entirely erroneous. Of course fraudulent claims are wrong and should be investigated and clamped down on, but we are not experiencing the epidemic levels we have been repeatedly warned of. In 2017, 0.22% of all motor claims were proven to be fraudulent; bearing in mind that that is for all motor claims, whiplash injuries will be an even smaller percentage.
Instead of looking at empirical evidence to create legislation, the Government are using disputed statistics to legitimise their agenda. This is wrong, and the impact on access to justice that the Bill will have will be substantial: 350,000 injured people without the free legal cover they are currently able to access. That is the true cost of implementing the Government’s package of measures.
As I outlined on Second Reading and in Committee, the changes to the small claims limit—although not on in the Bill, they are intrinsically related to its content—will be utterly damning on any reasonable definition of access to justice. The proposal to increase the small claims limit from £1,000 to £5,000 in road traffic injury cases and from £1,000 to £2,000 in all other personal injury claims would mean thousands of injured people could fall out of scope for free legal advice and representation and could be denied justice. Costs are not recoverable from the losing party in the small claims court, so injured people will either have to pay their legal costs themselves, which is likely to be cost-prohibitive, or, more likely, forgo legal assistance altogether, or simply not pursue a claim.
In giving evidence during the Justice Committee’s inquiry into the small claims limit, the Minister in the Lords, Lord Keen, suggested that injured people could instead seek advice from their citizens advice bureau. I am sure that many Members will understand the great number of cuts that have befallen citizen advice bureaux in recent years, and this suggestion is not only unfeasible but is completely out of touch. If there is to be any change in the small claims limit, it must be done proportionately by pegging it against consumer price inflation.
Ellie Reeves
I want to make some progress.
That this must be done in this proportionate way is a widely held view, and those who advocate the approach include the Justice Committee, which published a recommendation in its small claims limit report in May; trade unions, including USDAW; the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers; the Law Society; and over 50 Members of this House who have signed my early-day motion calling for the increase to be in line with CPI inflation. These disproportionate and misguided hikes are, it seems, favoured only by this Tory Government and the insurance industry.
New clause 1 in my name and those of my hon. Friends would limit increase in the whiplash small claims limit in line with inflation and permit the limit to increase only when inflation had increased the existing rate by £500 since it was last set. By linking any rise to inflation, it would remove the power from the Lord Chancellor to determine the level and would instead tie it to an economic measure used by both Government and the Bank of England. The Lord Chancellor has an important role, but it is not one that should be afforded powers to artificially dictate rates such as the small claims limit for political reasoning or motivation. If we remove the politics from the decision-making process by using a widely recognised measure such as CPI, people, whether insurers or injured people, can have confidence in the system. It would provide certainty and clarity, be easy to track and would allow stakeholders to adjust for subsequent rises accordingly.
Complementing new clause 1, new clause 2 would firm up the proposal made by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) in Committee that would limit increases in the small claims limit for children and people lacking capacity to make decisions for themselves. The Minister stated in Committee that vulnerable road users will be excluded from the Bill and from secondary measures on the small claims limit. This is welcome, but it is disappointing that no Government amendments have been tabled on Report to shore up that promise and include it in the Bill immediately. I hope that this is not a repeat of the Government’s promise to pass the predicted £1.3 billion-worth of insurance industry savings on to customers. I am afraid that the amendment in Committee on that issue was little more than a fudge, and its effect on customers’ premiums will be negligible at best, while the aggressive changes in the draft tariff system will involve reductions of up to 87% in payments for pain, suffering and loss of amenity from road traffic accident-related soft tissue injuries. Under the proposed tariffs, people will be compensated more for a flight delayed for three hours than for being injured for three months. The widely held and understood values of access to justice should not be undermined on a whim to satisfy the insurance industry.
What these Opposition new clauses highlight above all else is the true damage this Bill will do to access to justice and the principles that uphold the right to access to justice. In Committee, I warned the Minister that the changes made by the Government’s package of measures will be similar in scope to the disproportionate implications of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012—LASPO—and the unlawful introduction of employment tribunal fees, both of which are key pieces of Tory legislation that have done nothing but remove the rights of many people in seeking access to justice. What we have been left with is an 84% fall in civil legal aid and a 68% fall in the number of employment tribunal cases as a result of these Tory policies.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that this is part of a wider package of pressure on people who have some of the lowest incomes in our society? I wish to be associated with her new clauses and her points, and does she agree that the Government’s proposed measures are part of a wider package of pressure on the most vulnerable people in society?
Ellie Reeves
I agree with my hon. Friend. This is yet another attack on ordinary people’s access to justice. Should the Bill pass its remaining stages today, those shunned by LASPO and tribunal fees will be joined by an additional 350,000 injured people who will be left without the free legal cover they can currently access.
John Howell
I thank the hon. Lady and fellow Select Committee member for giving way. She has talked about access to justice, but she has not mentioned at all the impact of the online courts. Does she have a feeling about what sort of effect that would have for increasing access to justice?
Ellie Reeves
I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point.
The Bill will have a significant impact on access to justice, and we know that the portal system is nowhere near ready to accommodate the changes. It has not been properly tested. Under successive Tory Governments, access to justice has fast become a luxury available only to the few. A recent survey showed that 63% of Unison members would not proceed or be confident to proceed with a claim without legal representation. The small claims limit changes in the Bill will push nearly two thirds of genuinely injured people away from pursuing a claim if they do not meet the arbitrarily imposed criteria dictated by the Lord Chancellor. The idiom of adding insult to injury has never been more apt, and it is surely time to think again.
Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
I have done something a bit novel: I have listened to what has been said in the debate, and my remarks will focus on that. I did not come here with a prepared speech; I came here and listened to the contributions from both sides.
I would like to start by responding to the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) and taking up a couple of points that she made. The first relates to the idea that the Government are somehow doing this because of special pleading from the insurance industry and that they are somehow in bed with the industry. The aim of the Bill is to reduce premiums for individuals. That is the focus of the Bill. If I were the insurance industry, I would want premiums to go up, but the aim of this package of measures is for premiums to go down for ordinary people. I therefore do not agree with her assertion.
Another point that the hon. Lady made was that the setting of the limit by the Lord Chancellor, or any future Lord Chancellor, was arbitrary, unfair and unjust, but that is why we have this House and why we have Ministers. They are not here just to do interviews on the “Today” programme. We have Ministers to make judgments that they are then held democratically accountable for. I accept that Labour Members—or, indeed, at some point in the very distant future, Conservative Members, when they are sitting on the Opposition Benches—might dislike a judgment that is made by a future Lord Chancellor, but we settle these things through the democratic accountability of this House. To reject that principle and to suggest that every limit in any area of law, whether this or anything else, should somehow not—
Ellie Reeves
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He talks with great passion about the democratic accountability of this House. Does he therefore agree that any changes to the small claims limit should not be done by negative statutory instrument, as the Government are proposing, and that they should instead be debated on the Floor of the House?
Bim Afolami
That is an interesting point. I have served on many Committees, as we all have, and some have huge amounts of engagement from lots of Members while others have less. But this House is not just this Chamber; it is also all the Committee Rooms. Negative statutory instruments provide a way for significant amounts of secondary legislation—I do not know how many pieces of legislation; probably hundreds—to go through Parliament. I cannot agree with the hon. Lady 100% that using that procedure will always result in a lack of democratic accountability, because frankly, in modern government, it plays a significant part in our governance process. I recognise the point she makes, however, and it is fair to say that sometimes people do not pay as much attention in Committees as they might do, but that is fundamentally the case for this Chamber, too.
Ruth George
Does the hon. Gentleman therefore agree that, on occasions, statutory instrument Committees do not provide a democratic procedure, as in the case of the cuts to criminal injuries compensation in 2012? At the time, one Committee completely overturned the Minister’s proposals and asked for them to be brought back. A separate Committee was then reconvened, made up of Parliamentary Private Secretaries, and it railroaded through exactly the same criminal injuries compensation cuts. This House should not be seeking to use that kind of procedure for something that is so important to hundreds of thousands of accident victims.
Bim Afolami
I do not want to leave the House, or the hon. Lady, with the impression that I believe that statutory instruments are undemocratic. They are democratic, and they are a form of how we do things in this House. I was unaware of the case that she mentioned. The broader point is that getting primary legislation through, particularly in a hung Parliament such as this, will always be difficult—[Interruption.] No, primary legislation is not always the place where we make every single change. That is why we have a Committee system.
Bambos Charalambous
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that many of these claims companies operate on a no win, no fee basis? Therefore, if no payment is made and a claim is defended, the claimant will not be paid if they are defeated.
Bim Afolami
That is obviously factually accurate, but we need to ensure that we deal with the cause of these problems. As I have said, the Bill does not deal with everything, but it does deal with at least part of the problem. That, in and of itself, is a valuable thing.
Ruth George
The hon. Gentleman talks about the underlying cause that makes these changes necessary, as has the hon. Member for Croydon South. As they have both identified, that underlying cause is surely the fact that insurance companies should not be defending claims that could be fraudulent.
Bim Afolami
It is partly that, but the important point is that no single piece of legislation in this House can deal with every single problem. We can identify a particular problem and deal with it in a particular piece of legislation.
Huw Merriman
Does my hon. Friend agree that we can speak proudly from these Benches about the fact that civil litigation reform over the past few years has led to changes in no win, no fee, as well as to the banning of referral fees and the use of benefits by these companies? Government Members actually have something to say on this. Those changes have also led to a reduction of about £50 in insurance premiums.
Bim Afolami
I agree with my hon. Friend. I reiterate that the point of this legislation is to bring down insurance premiums for ordinary people by, I think, between 35% and 40%. I look to the Minister to check whether that is right.
Jo Stevens
The UK’s leading insurance companies earned more than £2.6 billion in profits in 2016, up on 2015. The proposed changes do not guarantee any reductions in premiums; they simply say that the premiums may fall. There is no guarantee that they will, and we know from previous Bills that this does not happen. Why does the hon. Gentleman suppose that things will be different this time?
Bim Afolami
I take the hon. Lady’s point. The industry has pledged to pass this on. My understanding is that premiums fell by an average of roughly £50 a year in 2012. When we talk about averages, we must bear in mind that if premiums were to fall by an average of, say, £35 under this legislation, the figure in some instances would be much greater—especially for young drivers, for example. Those are my remarks, based on what I have seen and heard today, and I commend this speech to the House.
Andy Slaughter
I did not intend to speak, therefore I will be brief. The House is being treated to ad hoc speeches, which are always a delight. They sometimes benefit from a little knowledge of the subject, I gently say to the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami). I also urge him not to be quite so credulous of what insurance companies tell us because experience shows that they always say that premiums will go down, and sometimes they go down and then up again, and sometimes they do not go down at all.
I also wonder about the hon. Gentleman’s question of whether we can expect everything to be done in a single Bill. I would argue that the two main things that the Bill will do are to prevent people with meritorious claims and those with often serious injuries from getting into court, and, if they get there, to reduce the legitimate level of damages that they can expect to receive. Would not it be better to have a Bill that deals with a matter that probably everybody in the Chamber thinks is right to tackle: strengthening defences against fraud? There has already been some change in legislation to make it easier to defend fraud cases, yet one may ask why insurers still do not instruct lawyers—whom they are able to employ, unlike claimants, perhaps, after the Bill is passed—to defend those cases. Why do they not insist on medical evidence? Why do they in fact encourage fraud? Why does a proportion of insurance companies’ profits come either from selling information on, which perpetuates claims management companies, or from owning claims management companies themselves?
The problem with the Bill is that it has the wrong targets. I made that point earlier when I intervened on the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp). All Labour Members can be brief because he substantially made the case for why this is a bad Bill, as the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) said.
However, the hon. Member for Croydon South said that the limit should be £10,000, as if personal injury claims were the same as simple money claims, which no one has ever argued. We are arguing about a difference in what the limit should be. In employers’ liability cases, the difference is relatively small, but the difference in road traffic accident cases is substantial: between what inflation would provide—around £1,500 as a small claims limit—and £5,000, which the Bill proposes.
The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers said about the Bill:
“Claims under £5,000 are not minor, and an increase in the small claims limit will cover far more than soft tissue injuries. These claims could include a brain or head injury, injuries to the eyes, a collapsed lung, or fractured cheekbones. This is a disproportionate response to the stated aim of dealing with whiplash claims.”
That must be right. We are talking about people who are in a vulnerable condition, having suffered personal injury. As has been said, the inequality of arms is apparent not just in the courtroom but in the background to the case, particularly in the case of employees who take on their employers. That is often done with the assistance of a trade union, lawyers and other advisers. We should not replace that tried and trusted system with McKenzie Friends—whether unpaid or unpaid— who often do more damage than good to the clients they intend to represent. I urge the Minister, even at this stage, to listen not only to Opposition Members but to some Government Members and particularly to the Justice Committee.
I went through the painful experience of the stages of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and I have therefore heard many of the arguments trotted out before. We went from a situation whereby legal aid was available for personal injury to no win, no fee cases, and now to qualified one way costs shifting—QOWCS. It is increasingly difficult even for those with the most meritorious cases to get representation. There is not the same availability of representation as there was.
The review of the law post-LASPO is due to report shortly. It will cover not only part 1 but part 2 of LASPO, and if we had waited, we could have seen the effect of the reform to civil litigation, but no, the Government wish to take a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The overwhelming majority—estimates are around 90% of road traffic claims—of cases will be taken out of a costs regime. That means that all those people have to sink or swim on their own. No one, not just the lawyers here, truly believes that it is easy for many people who have suffered accident and injury to navigate through the court system, particularly when they are opposed by an insurance company, with all the resources that it has.
The Bill will not benefit the motorist or the interests of justice. Above all, it will not benefit people who, through no fault of their own, have suffered often serious injuries. It is disgraceful that the Government are legislating once again in the sectional interests of the insurance industry and against those who have suffered injury.
Mr Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)
I rise to support the Bill and speak against new clauses 1 and 2 because, whether through ending rip-off energy bills, freezing fuel duty or increasing the personal allowance for income tax, the Government’s constant focus has been to make sure that the consumer is at the heart of their work and to reduce the cost of living for millions of people.
I am therefore pleased that Ministers have identified another area in which the cost of living is artificially and unfairly inflated. At a time when our cars and roads are safer than ever, one would expect the price of motor insurance to come down. Instead, the opposite has happened. Since 2010, there has been an almost 50% increase in the cost of comprehensive insurance premiums, and a near 80% increase in the cost of third-party fire and theft insurance premiums.
Ruth George
Does not the hon. Gentleman agree that the rise in the cost of insurance is, as we have heard in the debate, down to insurance companies not tackling possibly fraudulent claims, thereby creating the problem and making huge additional profits? Does he accept that consumers are also victims of accidents and will be severely affected by the Bill?
Mr Clarke
The hon. Lady is right to say that insurance companies have a duty to tackle fraudulent claims—that is certainly the message that the Government would send out and that I endorse—but the proportion of such claims is relatively small. We need to get the incentives in the system right so that the most serious cases receive the compensation and the attention that they deserve in the legal system and that the less serious cases receive a proportionate response. Whiplash is a horrible injury, which can be very severe, but we must ensure that the incentives in the system are not so skewed as to push all cases into the most extreme bracket. That simply does not reflect the nature of the injuries that are being suffered and it is not in the country’s public policy interest to have insurance rendered hugely more expensive, which the current system does.
Ruth George
Is the hon. Gentleman saying that the tariff for compensation for injuries, which judges currently use, is unfair and overcompensates people with more minor injuries? It covers a range of injuries, not just whiplash.
Mr Clarke
I am saying that there is a need for a proportionate system for compensation. The number of road traffic accident-related personal injury claims has increased by 200,000 since 2006—a rise of approximately 40%. That suggests to me that the incentives in the system are skewed. Insurers predict that, without reform, motor premiums could continue to rise at a rate of about 10% annually. That constitutes a significant burden on the cost of living for millions of us who are dependent on our cars for daily travel, especially in rural communities.
Jo Stevens
Does the hon. Gentleman not think that the UK’s leading insurers paying out £2 billion to their shareholders in 2016 might have something to do with the rising cost of insurance premiums?
Mr Clarke
The Bill is designed to make sure there is a closer connection between whiplash claims and medical evidence by introducing a ban on seeking or offering to settle whiplash claims without the appropriate medical evidence. That will discourage fraudulent claims, encourage insurers to investigate claims properly and protect genuine claimants from accepting a settlement without knowing the full extent of their injury.
Bambos Charalambous
Madam Deputy Speaker, is it appropriate for me to speak to new clause 2?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
For the sake of clarity, yes, you may speak to new clause 2.
Bambos Charalambous
I support new clause 2, which is in my name and in the name of other hon. Members. I am concerned that the Bill takes away the protection for children and protected parties such as people with a mental capacity disability.
Under the current civil procedure rules, children and protected parties are required to have legal representation in court when there is a settlement following a civil claim. Children and protected parties are not excluded from the Bill as vulnerable road users. Prior to introducing the Bill, the Government gave exemptions to a small category of vulnerable road users, including cyclists and horse riders, but no such exemption was given to children or protected parties despite their being protected under rule 21 of the civil procedure rules.
The Government should exempt children and protected parties in accordance with rule 21, and the Minister’s own Department, the Ministry of Justice, is responsible for setting these rules. I raised this issue with him when the Bill was in Committee and, being a man of his word, he duly got back to me, but his response was disappointing. Part 21 of the civil procedure rules states that for a child or protected party settlement to be made it has to be with the approval of the court. The settlement has to go before a court; there is no issue of it going to a portal. For court approval, children and protected parties need legal representation.
The Minister’s response to me suggested that the insurance industry would provide legal representation and that this would solve the problem. Except there would be a clear conflict of interest if the same party were paying for the legal representation of both sides. When choosing a litigation friend for a child or protected party, one of the criteria, under paragraph 3.3 of practice direction 21, is that the party seeking to represent the child or protected party as a litigation friend should have
“no interest adverse to that of the child or protected party”.
Clearly someone who is being paid by the insurance industry against the child’s claim cannot say that they have no adverse interest.
Sometimes children will be suing their parents in a road traffic accident personal injury case, meaning that the parents will have an adverse interest and cannot act for or represent their children. By not excluding children and protected parties from this Bill, the Minister is making a mockery of the current rules that govern personal injury in England and Wales.
Why should a child be able to access legal representation in a case where they have been injured at, say, an amusement park but not when they suffer the same injuries in a road accident? As things stand, the child or protected party would still have to get a legal opinion before the court makes a settlement, but the cost of the advice would not be recoverable from the negligent defendant, or their insurer, in cases subject to the small claims tariff. Why does the Minister want to take money away from children and protected parties in order to benefit insurers?
There are complexities in these cases, and legal representation is needed more than ever in matters involving children and protected parties. I cannot understand the Government’s logic or rationale in excluding horse riders and cyclists from this Bill but not children or protected parties. Are they saying that injuries suffered by children and protected parties through no fault of their own should be treated less seriously than injuries suffered by cyclists or horse riders? This goes to the heart of the Bill, which is ill-conceived and drafted solely from the point of view of the insurance industry and not of innocent victims who make a claim.
It is shameful that the Government are willing to sacrifice the interests of innocent injured children, and to take away the protection they currently have, enshrined in law, to give the multi-billion pound insurance industry an even bigger advantage in court.
Ruth George
I rise to speak to amendment 1. This Bill was drafted at the behest of the insurance industry, as is clear from every speech in favour of it.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
I think the hon. Lady is speaking to new clause 1, rather than amendment 1. We would not want people to be confused.
Ruth George
I beg your pardon, Madam Deputy Speaker.
New clause 1 would amend some of the worst failings of the Bill, which has been drafted at the behest of the insurance industry over several years. The industry has failed to tackle fraudulent claims. We have heard from hon. Members on both sides of the House this afternoon that the industry, which is responsible for so many of the claims management companies and for passing information on to them, is producing the problems that the Government are now seeking to address by further victimising the victims of accidents.
The insurance industry is making billions of pounds of profit and will make a further £1.3 billion from this Bill through the reduction in claims. Victims of accidents are not the people who tend to go to court. Those who lose will be denied access to justice, as both the impact assessment and the excellent report from the Justice Committee make clear.
It is a huge undertaking for a layperson to take a case to court. Most would not even dream of it, especially a case against their employer, who will be armed with their own lawyers and often with an insurance company, which will also be armed with its own lawyers. Unison, the public sector union, surveyed its members 60% and said they would not have taken a case against their employer to get the compensation they deserved for their injury at work if they had to take the case on their own without the support of a lawyer.
It is extremely difficult to determine liability in the case of many accidents at work, especially in instances like those I saw when I worked for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers. Deliveries are made to stores by a third party and there are incidents in warehouses that may be the fault of one party, the fault of another company or the fault of the employee. Those arguments are exceedingly difficult to pin down, especially for an individual claimant, and they require the assistance of a lawyer.
The Government assure us there will be an easy online portal for claimants to register a claim. I am sorry, but I am a member of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions and we were told that there would be an online portal for universal credit, yet 47% of claimants are unable to access the portal. An online portal is, of itself, not an easy thing to access, particularly for people for whom IT is not their natural sphere. I ask the Minister to commit the Government not to roll out these changes to the small claims limit until the portal has been demonstrated to be easily usable by at least 95% of those who seek to use it. I hope that that commitment will be made during the passage of this Bill because, as we have heard, the portal is nowhere near ready and even the pilots have been found by firms of lawyers to be difficult to access.
The arguments made in favour of the Bill have been about the cost of insurance but, as we have heard, that cost has been rising at the same time as insurance companies’ profits have been rising. It is not the cost of personal injury claims that has increased insurance; those bodily injury claims have actually reduced by £850 million since 2013. A large degree of the cost rises has been due to the costs of vehicle damage, which have become far higher in the last five years—nearly £700 a year more—because cars are more complicated.
The Bill has been introduced, it is claimed, to crack down on whiplash claims, but it covers far more than simply whiplash. The definition of whiplash itself has been extended far beyond a medical definition, to include all injuries to necks and backs that relate to rupture or strain of muscles, tendons or ligaments lasting up to two years. I hope that no one on either side of the House would feel that such injuries are minor. The Bill also deals with accidents at work, public liability claims and medical negligence. USDAW has estimated that five times as many cases would be caught by this small claims limit as are caught currently. According to the TUC, only one in seven workers make a claim against their employer for an accident at work. So we can see that this move will have a severe impact on the number of claims being made.
Jo Stevens
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill will make workplaces more dangerous? I know from experience that, if employers are litigated against as a result of accidents in the workplace, they review their safety policies and make workplaces safer. This Bill will have the opposite effect.
Ruth George
I absolutely concur with my hon. Friend’s point, which I raised with the Health and Safety Executive, whose laboratory is in my constituency. It concurred that one of its major concerns is that without claims being made against employers they will cease to militate against risk in the workplace. That is just one of the many problems the Bill will cause, both for victims of accidents and for all other employees in the workplace.
The Minister has heard many examples this afternoon of how the Government could crack down on fraud and on the costs of insurance without cracking down on innocent victims of accidents. The requirement in the Bill for medical reports prior to offers being made is an important one, which all sides are supporting. We hope that the Government would seek to assess the impact of that change before impacting on victims. We have also heard many calls from Members on both sides of the House for claims management companies to be acted against because they are obviously playing the system and we need to make sure that that cannot continue.
This Bill is seeking to make the innocent victims of accidents pay for the fact that insurance companies are not prepared to crack down on fraud and so have come to this Government seeking their help. We have no guarantee that insurance costs will fall, but we do know that insurance companies will make £1.3 billion more a year out of this legislation and that innocent victims of accidents will suffer. I very much hope that the Minister has listened to the arguments being made on both sides of the House today and will accept the new clause.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Let me begin by paying tribute to the high quality of debate today from hon. and right hon. Members on all sides of the House. This has been a serious business. The consultation on the issue began in 2012 and the detailed measures we are debating today were announced in the Budget in autumn 2015. There are disagreements on every side of the House, which are expressed in new clauses 1 and 2, but, more generally, I hope that everybody in the House will recognise that the Bill has been adapted as we have listened a great deal to suggestions made by the Opposition and others. I pay tribute to the hon. and right hon. Members on all sides who pushed for the changes we have introduced on vulnerable road users, on the new role of the consultation with the Lord Chief Justice and on definitions, particularly in respect of whiplash. I also pay tribute to what happened in the other House, where this legislation was considerably revised and improved by efforts from Cross-Bench peers, as well as Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative peers.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that claims against employers above £2,000 are taken outside the scope of this? It is right in those circumstances, where it can be difficult to make the claim stick, that people should be entitled to recover their costs in the event of a successful claim. Does he agree that making that change was a critical improvement to this Bill?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, which should, to some extent, reassure the hon. Member for High Peak, some of whose arguments rested on damages in the workplace. The rise to £5,000 does not relate to damages in the workplace. As has been pointed out, it relates only to whiplash injuries suffered in a vehicle.
Robert Neill
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I take on board his point that the appropriate test for a small claims regime is complexity or otherwise, but will he recognise that there is a risk that perceived complexity might make claimants vulnerable to the operations of claims management companies, which do not have the high standards and good regulation of personal injury lawyers, as he rightly recognises? What safeguards do the Government intend to put in place beyond this Bill and more generally to make sure that we do not have a displacement effect from well-regulated personal injuries lawyers to unregulated, unscrupulous claims managers of the kind to which my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) and others referred? What more can we do to safeguard against that unintended consequence?
Rory Stewart
This is an issue on which my hon. Friend has been very thoughtful in his role as Chair of the Justice Committee. There are obviously three things that we are endeavouring to do and we are open to more ideas. One of them, of course, is that, through this package of measures, we disincentivise claims management companies from having a significant financial interest in pursuing this type of case. The second, as my hon. Friend pointed out, is the setting up of an online portal to reassure individuals that they will have a more predictable, more transparent and more straightforward system for pursuing their claims in person. Finally, through consultation with the judiciary, we are looking at the issue of paid McKenzie friends. We are waiting for the judiciary to report back so that we can take action on that issue.
Ruth George
The Minister claimed that raising the limit for workplace accidents to £2,000 would allay my fears, but given that USDAW and other unions have said that this will actually increase the numbers needing to go to the small claims court by five times, it certainly does not. There are still wide concerns around taking cases against employers, as he will know. Will he make any assurance that the portal will be tested, and that it will be ensured that an ordinary layperson can use it before any claims are implemented?
Rory Stewart
Clearly two different cases are being made here. On the question of the online portal, a very serious group of people, which includes insurers and lawyers, is testing it. One of the concessions that was made in the House of Lords—I think it is a good one—is to extend the time before this is rolled out by 12 months so that we have more time to make sure that the testing is done and that the portal operates properly. That is a good challenge.
The point about injuries in the workplace is that that, I am afraid, is outside the scope of the Bill, which is very narrowly defined to deal with whiplash injuries. Indeed, new clause 1 is also very narrowly defined as it deals with only the question of a “relevant injury”, which, in this case, is a whiplash injury. Therefore, while arguments about other forms of injury and employment are very interesting, they are not relevant to the debate on new clauses 1 or 2.
Moving on to the next question about simplicity and inflation, I just wish to point out that the previous Labour Government accepted the principle that inflation was not the only determinant of the levels that the small claims court should meet, because, of course, the small claims limit was raised from £1,000 in 1991 to £3,000 in 1996, and then to £5,000 in 1999 under the Labour Government before it was raised to £10,000 in 2013. Quite clearly those rises were well in advance of inflation and were driven, as indeed was the case for European small claims, by the notion of the simplicity of claims, not a change in either the CPI or the RPI.
Even if one were to accept that there should be a relationship to inflation, the mechanism proposed in new clause 1 seems to be a recipe for falling behind inflation. In effect, the proposal is that an increase should only take place if there had been a rise of at least £500, and should then be limited to £500. It would not take many years of slightly higher inflation than we have now to end up in a situation where, over a five and 10-year period, the increase would be considerably in excess of £1,000, which would then allow for a rise, but we would then find a syncopated system that, very rapidly, would be falling behind inflation.
The more fundamental point is a constitutional one. This is not an issue that is traditionally dealt with through primary legislation, and it is not an issue that is dealt with in the Bill. That is because increases to the small claims limit are properly an issue for the Civil Procedure Rules Committee, on which the Master of the Rolls, district judges, senior judges, personal injury lawyers—barristers and solicitors, including the president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers—and representatives for consumer bodies such as Which? sit. That is a better way of looking at the proper limits than trying take forward primary legislation on the Floor of the House. Technically, there is also another issue with the new clause, which is that subsection (4) should include paragraphs (a), (b) and (c).
That brings me to new clause 2. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) quite rightly drew our attention to potentially vulnerable litigants, such as infants, children and other protected parties. He argues—on this we absolutely agree—that they suffer the same forms of injuries as any other human, and are entitled to fair compensation and the same degree of representation that would be afforded to any adult. At the moment, that is, of course, provided by the allocation of a litigation partner by the judge concerned.
The hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Ashfield asked what happens if that does not work and whether an increase in the number of cases would undermine that system. We have looked at this carefully, because the hon. Gentleman raised the matter in Committee. Our conclusion, having consulted a wide range of individuals, is that we do not believe that that would occur, but a number of safeguards are in place in the worst-case scenario. In most cases, an individual who is in that situation, such as an infant, would be represented by their parents. In a situation in which they were suing their parents, because the parents were, for example, driving the car, a litigation friend would be appointed by the court. In the case that they would be unable to find a competent adult who met all the criteria stated by the hon. Gentleman, including there not being a conflict of interest from that individual, it would be possible to appoint the official solicitor. In a case in which that, too, failed, judicial discretion remains to move the case of the infant out of the small claims track into the fast track, where the legal costs would be recoverable. Of course, judges would still have a very serious role to play in approving any settlement made to an infant or any protected party. That was why Lord Justice Patten made this ruling in the case of Dockerill v. Tullet:
“I can see no reason in principle why a small damages claim made by an infant should be taken out of the small claims track merely because of the age of the claimant. It is also clear that the premise on which CPR 45.7 operates is that the normal track for damages by infants will be the small claims track.”
That brings me to my conclusion. This very impressive piece of legislation has involved the upper House, the Opposition and civil society members throughout its Committee stages. The Government have made a number of very serious concessions to make the process more workable. I pay particular tribute to the Justice Committee for the pressure that it has put on us in relation to a very large number of issues, ranging from the online portal to paid McKenzie friends and vulnerable road users. We have now ended up with a Bill that does not do everything that was set out when the Lord Chancellor initially announced it in autumn 2015. Instead, with a series of realistic, focused and pragmatic compromises, we have struck the right balance between the protection of genuine claimants who have suffered genuine injuries, and the protection of different forms of public interest—in particular, the public interest of people, especially in rural areas, who need to be able to afford their motor insurance in order to move around. This Bill will remove unnecessary complexity, unnecessary costs and, in particular, the moral damage and hazard that currently exist in the form of claims management companies and a few unscrupulous individuals.
As Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood—the previous president of the Supreme Court—pointed out in the upper House, this country is now known throughout the world as a haven for unnecessary whiplash claims. Despite a significant reduction in the number of car accidents and an increase in vehicle safety measures over the past 15 years, if not over the last three, we have seen a significant increase in the number of whiplash claims, which can be accounted for only on the basis of fraudulent and exaggerated claims.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Gloria De Piero
I beg to move amendment 2, page 3, line 14, leave out clauses 3 to 5.
This amendment would remove the creation of tariffs for whiplash injuries and retain the existing system where judges decide compensation levels with reference to Judicial College Guidelines.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendment 1.
Gloria De Piero
Amendment 2 gets to the heart of our issues with the Bill and would remove the whiplash compensation tariff system altogether. We are dealing with human beings who experience pain differently, who have different lives and who will all be affected by a similar injury in a slightly different way. We would not accept a pricing of insurance premiums that did not take account of whether we drove a Mini or a Maserati, and we would not accept a standard payment for damage to a car, regardless of its state after an accident. Where is the justification for using such a blunt instrument as a tariff to calculate pain?
We all want to stamp out false whiplash claims, but why should HGV drivers, firefighters or parents driving their kids to school be treated like fraudsters claiming falsely for whiplash, left with tariff compensation and no legal help? As Lord Woolf, the eminent former Law Lord who carried out a review of civil justice after being commissioned by a previous Conservative Government, pointed out in the Lords:
“The effect of whiplash injuries, with which we are concerned, can vary substantially according to the physical and mental sturdiness of the victim. This means that the appropriate amount of damages for a whiplash injury can vary substantially... I suggest that they are not suited to a fixed cap, as proposed by the Government.”
He went on to say that a tariff
“offends an important principle of justice, because it reduces the damages that will be received by an honest litigant because of the activities of dishonest litigants.”
The Government’s proposals will punish the honest based on the behaviour of the dishonest, but how big is that dishonest group? The ABI said in 2017 that insurers paid out in 99% of all cases and that fraud was proven in only 0.22% of cases. Woolf decried the Government’s move to
“interfere with the Judicial College guidelines by substituting tariffs or a cap, which lack the flexibility of the guidelines.”
He went on in speaking against the proposed dismissal of a tried and tested system of justice to say that the Lord Chancellor
“is motivated, at least in part, not by the normal principles of justice as I understand them but by saving insurers money, in the belief that this will result in a reduction in premiums for motorists who are insured when they come to pay for their insurance.”
Later, he put it as strongly as simply saying:
“There is no precedent for this intervention in the assessment of damages in civil proceedings.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1593-1595.]
He went on to quote Sir Rupert Jackson, who said:
“It is the function of judges (not Parliament) to set the tariffs for pain, suffering and loss of amenities in respect of different categories of personal injuries”.
Lawyers who deal with such issues all the time have pointed out how people who are already suffering, and perhaps unable to earn a living due to their injury, will be worse off under the proposed tariff. They include experienced legal practitioners from the Tory Back Benches, such as Baroness Berridge, who said:
“I have met many a claimant for whom the difference in damages now proposed by the introduction of the tariff, taking some damages from four figures—£1,200 or £1,400—down to the likes of £470 is a significant matter for many peoples’ incomes up and down this country. I cannot have it portrayed that this might not make a great deal of difference to many ordinary people in the country.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1611.]
That is from a Government Back Bencher.
Alex Chalk
The hon. Lady is making fair points, but it is important to take into account that the claim may consist partly of a general damages component and also a special damages component. Does she agree that if the individual had, for example, been required to take time off work and had incurred costs—or losses—in the process, he would still be able to litigate and seek to recover those damages?
Gloria De Piero
The tariff system would mean that somebody who today was entitled to £1,200 or £1,400 would be compensated with far less. I am quoting Baroness Berridge.
Alex Chalk
We have to be really careful in this debate to draw a distinction between general damages, which are for pain, suffering and loss of amenity, as with whiplash, and special damages, such as the cost of taxis or lost employment. Does the hon. Lady agree that special damages will still be recoverable in the normal way and that we should not be confusing the two?
Gloria De Piero
I am choosing to focus on the injuries incurred. For a soft tissue injury lasting six months, an individual would today get between £2,150 and £3,810 but, if the Bill passes, they would get £805. I am choosing to focus my speech on those huge differences. That is the practical reality of what this tariff system will mean.
There is another important principle. It is a significant step to mess with the proud tradition of an independent judiciary in this country, and the Government should not take that lightly. The Justice Committee, too, could not have been clearer in its criticism of how the tariff system will harm access to justice. We hope the Government will listen to the Justice Committee and eminent judges—and, yes, us—and accept this amendment to remove the tariff system.
Mr Simon Clarke
It is a pleasure both to speak in support of the Bill and, unfortunately, against the amendment put forward by the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero). It is really important that the Bill is proportionate in achieving the outcomes we want of ensuring that the public get the protection they need from injuries that can be so devastating, while at the same time compensating them in such a way that we do not burden the wider consumer with unsupportable bills. Earlier, I spoke about the fact that premiums need to remain affordable.
Amendment 2 would remove the ability to set a fixed tariff for whiplash compensation in regulations. As I mentioned earlier, the tariff system will ensure that claimants receive a proportionate level of compensation. This will significantly reduce and control the spiralling cost of whiplash claims and disincentivise unmeritorious claims. As with any such tariff system, I can understand the concern that it may not provide the flexibility necessary to ensure that compensation accurately reflects the true nature of someone’s injuries.
However, the Government have taken a number of important steps to ensure that such flexibility still exists. First, the tariff would not be flat for all cases, but staggered, depending on the severity of injury. Secondly, in addition to a tariff payment, all claimants will continue to receive special damages covering compensation for any actual financial losses suffered as a result of their accident. Finally, clause 5 gives the court discretion to deviate from the tariff in exceptional circumstances and when it is clear that a higher level of compensation would be appropriate.
This therefore seems to me to be exactly the type of Bill we should be bringing forward. It is sensible, and it does indeed allow us to provide the protection that people need, without the risk of putting up premiums. I do not believe that amendment 2 would achieve very much, other than wrecking the central point of the Bill, which as I say is to achieve such an upsurge in affordability.
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend makes a fair point. Opposition Members have referred to the Justice Committee’s report, but has he noted that although the noble Lord Woolf was indeed critical of the changes in the terms that have been quoted today, the noble Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former justice of the Supreme Court, did not have an in-principle objection to the tariff system? Does he agree that the devil in the detail is what will be in the regulations on the exceptional circumstances uplift and how that will apply? Is he, like me, pleased to see that there is a commitment to consult the Lord Chief Justice on those regulations, and does he agree that it is important that that consultation is real, thorough and detailed?
Mr Clarke
My hon. Friend speaks with the authority of not just a Select Committee Chair but someone who thinks deeply about these issues. There are safeguards built into the Bill, precisely to ensure that we achieve the robust, balanced and responsive framework that good legislation should aim for. I noted earlier that the Lord Chancellor will have a duty to keep all the relevant legislation under review on a triennial basis, so there will be checks to ensure that compensation thresholds do not become wildly out of kilter. Indeed, part of the reason why the Bill is necessary is that the thresholds have been allowed to drift for a very long time without being amended. That has led to a more dramatic uplift than is customary or than I would ever hope to see in future. We want to ensure that we always have a rolling programme rather than dramatic changes, which unfortunately affect more people than a more staged mechanism would. However, that does not mean that there is not a case for acting, so unfortunately I cannot support amendment 2.
Andy Slaughter
I will speak only briefly, because a number of the points to be made in this debate are the same ones that we made in the previous debate. There is no logic or sense to the Government’s rationale; they simply want to minimise the damages paid to litigants who have legitimate and in some cases serious injuries.
The noble Lord Woolf has been quoted several times. The Woolf report led to progressive and now legendary reform of the civil justice system, so he very much knows what he is talking about on this issue as on so many others. He said that the tariff
“results in injustice and it is known to result in injustice. Indeed, no one can deny that it results in injustice. There has never been a case where legislation deliberately introduces injustice into our law. It may be that it is only in regard to small claims, but surely it is important that we pause before we do that.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1620.]
I agree that the Government should pause, and I would say that there is an objection in principle to the tariff in this case. No good reason has been given why this should not be a judicial process rather than an administrative or politically affected process.
There is also an issue of quantum to consider. The proposed sums in the tariff are derisory for what are often quite serious injuries lasting for periods up to 24 months. An injury that lasts for two years is likely to be serious and is certainly a persistent one that will cause a lot of pain and suffering. It has been pointed out that at the lower end of the spectrum—nought to three months, which still includes cases of pain and discomfort lasting a significant time—the proposed sum is £235. The Law Society’s briefing compares that with the amount of compensation that somebody might get for a flight that has been delayed for three hours, which could be considerably in excess of that amount. As well as the matter of principle, there is the point that the actual financial compensation is being minimised for no good reason.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman talks about injustice. Is it not an injustice that many motorists are paying inflated insurance premiums because some people are getting an unreasonable level of compensation for their injuries? Is that not what the Bill is intended to prevent?
Andy Slaughter
It is not, because I do not know what the hon. Gentleman means by an unreasonable level of compensation—
Andy Slaughter
Please give me a moment to answer the first point, then I will willingly give way.
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is saying that it is unreasonable because these injuries are exaggerated or fraudulent, or that people should not be compensated according to accepted judicial tariffs. Nobody has ever said—that I know of—that the levels of compensation that are awarded under the Judicial Studies Board guidelines are over-generous in this country. What we are doing is simply taking those realistic—some would say, rather parsimonious—levels and reducing them by a substantial degree, so I think the point is nonsense, frankly. However, I give way to the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), who will make a much more sensible point, I am sure.
Rebecca Pow
On that point, from the general public’s point of view, there is a consensus that people are taken for a ride over all these claims. Many of them are encouraged to go into this system of claiming when perhaps they do not necessarily have a great case. A great deal of money is made through the legal system, and people want to see fairness. My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) is absolutely right: most people’s motor insurance is going up and up to compensate. Does the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) agree that that is not fair? What we are trying to do with the Bill is to introduce fairness to a system that frankly—many people would say—has got out of control.
Andy Slaughter
I congratulate the hon. Lady on getting a helter skelter of nonsense into one intervention, with every prejudice and false statement that has been made in the tabloid press about these matters for about the last 10 years—well done on that. I could make a long speech dealing with the specific issues of—[Hon. Members: “Go on!] We have got time, haven’t we? No, I will not. I could go into detail about some of the myths about whiplash and soft tissue injuries and what is actually happening in relation to accidents, the insurance industry and premiums, because I have been an observer of that for a long time. However, let me limit myself to a fairly narrow point.
I have listened to the arguments from Government Members, and they are just non-sequiturs, frankly. We have heard that insurance premiums are the issue. Let us imagine that we give the benefit of the doubt there, which I certainly do not, and say that premiums are likely to fall significantly and that that is a factor relating to claims rather than to insurance companies’ profits, the other activities that they indulge in and the way that their businesses are run. I do not accept that, but let us assume that we do for a moment.
The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) is no longer in his place, but he made a surprisingly illogical—for him—intervention. He said, “Look, people will still get special damages.” Of course they will get special damages, but special damages are what the name suggests—they are to compensate for specific items of loss. Why should the fact that someone still gets compensation for their loss of earnings or their medical bills, or something of that nature, mean that it is right to diminish their compensation for pain and suffering and loss of amenity? These are all non-sequiturs. The worst calumny of all is to say, “We are reducing the level of damages from slightly mean levels to absolutely parsimonious levels because of fraud”, which is exactly what we heard in relation to the small claims limit. So many members of the senior judiciary and indeed, of Select Committees, including not just the Justice Committee, but the Transport Committee, have said that it is plain wrong to say that because there may be instances of fraud, of which very few are identified, all litigants should suffer by having their damages reduced.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying about quantum, but I would be interested to know, theoretically, whether he objects to the idea of tariffs being appropriate for this sort of compensation. I remind him that Lord Brown said
“I am in broad agreement with the whole idea of tariffs for injuries, certainly for lesser injuries, and indeed even of reducing awards in respect of a number of these lesser injuries.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2018; Vol. 791, c. 306.]
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that tariffs can be appropriate with, for example, criminal injuries compensation?
Andy Slaughter
There is an element of semantics going on here. We have guidelines at the moment. Judges do not pluck figures out of thin air. They look at the guidelines and hear submissions, or they would have heard submissions when representation was available—it seems it no longer will be—and they make a decision, but they have discretion around the individual circumstances of the case. That is a basic and fundamental principle of law, but one that we are deviating from. I cannot say strongly enough that that is wrong.
To add insult to injury—if I may put it that way—rather than taking the average in the guidelines and having a rough rule of thumb that someone will get a bit more or a bit less than their individual case deserves, or going for an average and calling that a tariff, we are saying that a tariff should be a tiny percentage of the current award. This is nothing but an attempt to say, “We do not wish to pay out money in this way. We wish to diminish both the ability to make a claim and the compensation paid.” Whatever one’s view on fraud, the massive majority of cases will be meritorious and honest cases in which people have genuinely suffered injury.
I will conclude with the words of the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge, on Report in the other place:
“What I cannot accept is a solution which means that a dishonest claim is handled in exactly the same way as an honest one. We cannot have dishonesty informing the way in which those who have suffered genuine injuries are dealt with. That is simply not justice. There should not be any idea that an honest claim for a whiplash injury made by the victim of a car accident should be less well compensated than an identical injury suffered by someone at work.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1600.]
That is what the Government are doing in the Bill and what is so inherently unfair, and they are doing it at the behest of special interests. They may genuinely believe that there is a problem to be resolved with whiplash. I could dispute that—we could go on for a lot longer than we are today—but even if they are right, there are other, better and fairer ways to tackle that issue.
Bambos Charalambous
Is my hon. Friend aware that under the criminal injuries compensation scheme someone gets £1,000 for a whiplash injury lasting six to 13 weeks but that under this tariff scheme the proposal is for £470 for three to six months?
Andy Slaughter
My hon. Friend, who knows far more about these matters than I do—and more, I suspect, than many on the Government Front Bench—is quite right. He draws attention to the fact that there is no logic in the system.
I feel a bit sorry for the Minister as he has to push these proposals forward; he is normally a very logical and fair man. It is difficult to speak at the Dispatch Box having been given a brief of this quality. When parliamentarians of his stature and of the stature of the hon. Member for Cheltenham, with his spurious points about special damages, are reduced to this level, and when Government Back-Bench Members are hauled in here, as we saw in the previous debate, to make speeches only to be told to stop making them because they are talking such arrant nonsense, one does despair. I hope even at the 11th hour that the Government might take pity on us, listen to the wise voices in the other place and support us on these amendments.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
A number of the things that the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) suggested as being completely outrageous many of his constituents and certainly a lot of mine would completely agree with.
The Transport Committee, of which I was a member for three years, looked at this issue, and it was apparent even then that whiplash was a peculiarly British phenomenon. On the continent, particularly Germany, they do not have nearly as many whiplash injuries. I suggested at a previous stage of the Bill that this had nothing to do with the physiognomy of Germans as against that of British people. I made the point very clearly that I did not believe that their necks were more robust than good old-fashioned British necks. It was a flippant way of making a salient point: this is a national issue. In Britain, we seem to suffer from these injuries a lot more than people in other countries.
Rebecca Pow
My hon. Friend has made an amusing start to his speech. Is it not strange that while the number of traffic accidents has gone down, the proportion of whiplash claims has gone up? Is it that our necks have become flimsier? What does he put this down to? Do we not need to seriously address this issue, as we are doing in the Bill?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I am not an anatomist. I am not a biological specialist. I cannot give any scientific explanations for why our necks have become flimsier, or less sturdy, over the last 10 years. It may be related to obesity; I do not know.
This is, however, a serious issue, which has come up again and again over the last 15 years. As my hon. Friends have suggested, the number of claims has risen while the traffic accident rate has gone down. It is entirely legitimate for a Government, and, indeed, parliamentarians to ask what is going on. Something is not quite right. It is apparent that many people are making claims, which may or not be fraudulent—let us give them the benefit of the doubt—and clearly it often makes sense to an insurer to do a deal, as it were, and pay the money before the veracity or otherwise of the claim has been established, simply because the legal process would take too long.
Bambos Charalambous
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that by paying early, insurance companies are encouraging people to make these allegedly fraudulent claims?
Kwasi Kwarteng
The hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. It may well be the case that the companies are paying early, and clearly if they are paying early, people will be incentivised to make claims. The hon. Gentleman’s colleagues, however, are suggesting that no fraudulent claims are ever made, or that only a tiny proportion of claims are fraudulent. Logically, the more that insurers pay early, the more incentive there is to make a fraudulent claim. That is pure logic, and no great subtlety is required to appreciate it.
We have a problem. I think it entirely legitimate for insurers to pay out in order to forgo expensive legal costs. They have to manage their books and their businesses on a daily basis, and they will take a hit—if that is the right way to describe it—in order to facilitate business and manage cash flow. As we have heard throughout the debate, they are quite likely to make early payments, and as the hon. Gentleman has suggested, the more an insurer pays early, the greater incentive that gives someone to make a fraudulent or insubstantial claim.
Bambos Charalambous
Surely the answer is to fight those claims so that they do not succeed, and send the message that insurers will fight them and there will be no easy money for allegedly fraudulent claims.
Kwasi Kwarteng
If the hon. Gentleman were an insurer, managing a business on a daily basis, he would have to make a call every single day on which claims to fight and which not to fight. Often, for reasons of cost, the insurer will simply pay the money, without regard to the veracity or otherwise of the claim.
Rory Stewart
Does my hon. Friend accept that there is also the serious issue of asymmetry of information? In the case of injuries lasting less than six months, it is very difficult to prove through any medical means whether or not the injuries occurred, and therefore very difficult to defend against the claim.
Kwasi Kwarteng
In his usual philosophical way, the Minister has made an observation that goes to the heart of the problem. I opened my remarks by suggesting that insurers were very likely to pay out on claims early. He has made the point that even if it were possible to test the veracity or otherwise, it would be very difficult. Given the nature of evidence and the question of how it can be proved that an injury has actually been sustained, this will often resolve itself into an issue of one person’s word against another’s. The Minister has backed up my initial argument in his characteristically pithy way. The whole process is expensive, and for an insurer managing a business and managing a book, it is much easier and, I think, much more tempting to come up with an easy, quick-fix settlement or payment.
As the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) suggested, that in itself will incentivise and motivate claims that may be frivolous, which is a problem. He has eloquently described the circumstances in which fraudulent claims can be made, yet other Opposition Members are saying that such fraudulent claims are rarely if ever made. They are suggesting that all the claims are true and that somehow grave injustices would be perpetrated if, as often occurs across the judicial system, we were to set a tariff in this particular case.
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend is making some fair points. He says that this is not necessarily a role for judges, but would he conclude that while it may well be, as Lord Brown said in the other place, appropriate for Government to legislate for tariff-isation as a matter of policy, the views of the judges must be fully taken into account by way of consultation in setting what the level or quantum of that tariff should be and how it should operate and what practical impacts it should have?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My understanding given the nature of the Bill is that there is ample scope for a dialogue or conversation between judges—the judiciary—and the Government. However, what I am reluctant to see, and what I think many of our constituents and voters would be reluctant to see, is the power exclusively residing in the hands of judges. The Government have a duty of care to the taxpayers and to people who have insurance to try to keep these costs low. It is very funny to see Opposition Members frowning when I suggest the Government have a role to play. They are on the side of the political argument that believes in wholescale nationalisation; they want the Government to control everything. Yet in this particular instance they are expressing surprise and bewilderment, and I suggest that is completely spurious and fake.
Robert Neill
Does my hon. Friend agree that the logic of his position, which I understand, is that if we are to have credibility in taking this policy decision, those savings must actually be passed on to motorists? Does he recognise that there has been some cynicism about that in the past? We need to have mechanisms to measure very carefully that the insurance industry comes up to the mark, because it has not always had a terribly good track record in the past on that?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I agree with my hon. Friend. He is right that the insurance companies have in the past—I stress in the past—had a questionable record on some of these issues, but I repeat what I said on Second Reading: it is entirely unhelpful to bash the insurance industry or denounce it as a bunch of shysters who are ripping the public off. As I said in that debate, the insurance industry is one of our world-leading industries. We should celebrate it and be grateful for it: our insurance industry is a world-beating industry. There are not that many industries left in Britain that we can call truly world class, but the insurance industry happens to be one that is. It was nauseating and disconcerting on Second Reading—it has not happened so much today—to hear speaker after speaker on the Opposition Benches denouncing the insurance industry. They were scandalised that, God forbid, the industry should make profits, as though making a profit were in itself a moral crime. We have to try to shift the nature of the debate. The insurance industry is a world-beating industry. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has suggested, we need to have some oversight to ensure that savings are passed through to the customers, our constituents.
Mrs Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware that, according to statistics from the ABI, the myth about profit-making by insurance companies is a little bit overstated, and that motor insurers are actually not making a profit? The figures are being conflated with those of other parts of the insurance industry.
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. As any student of basic economics will know, in a highly competitive industry the ability to make extraordinary profits is severely reduced. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of insurers in our highly developed, highly sophisticated market. As I have said, we are a world beater in this area, and that means that we have lots of diversity in the insurance market. Lots of insurers are going bust, but many are making money because they are well managed. That is exactly what we would expect in a competitive industry that has reached a high degree of maturity, as the insurance industry has in this country.
Going back to the provisions in the Bill, I believe that the Government are trying to do a very measured and reasonable thing. We are trying to limit the fraud—or the escalation of whiplash claims to the point that they drive up pricing in insurance. We are also saying that we will engage with the courts, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggested. There is a role for the judiciary to play in this debate and in the management and setting of tariffs. Also, I would expect Opposition Members to be more enthusiastic about the fact that there is a role for the Government and the Lord Chancellor in ensuring that insurance premiums do not become excessive. There is absolutely a role for political engagement in the ability to cap a tariff, to ensure that premiums are low. This makes for a very reasonable and equitable set of demands, which is to be welcomed, and I hope that the Bill proceeds on its serene course through our Parliament.
Huw Merriman
It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate, and I am proud to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng). I freely admit that having a tariff system in place could well result in some people receiving less compensation, but that is exactly why I support the Bill. At its heart lies an acknowledgement by those on this side of the House that insurance premiums have got too expensive and that we have to look at measures to try to reduce them.
Let us look at the logic of the position. Cars now have much safer designs and there are fewer claims overall, yet we are seeing an extra 200,000 category claims, 85% of which relate to whiplash compensation. It strikes me as completely illogical to state that there is not an issue here, when the statistics are so counter-intuitive. Something very strange is going on. The analysis shows that it is impossible to ascertain whether these extra claims are genuine, because the nature of the legal system means that it is much cheaper to settle a case and never even consider any medical evidence or reports on whether there has been an injury. To a certain extent, we could say that that is no skin off the bone for the insurers, because the cost is always paid on to the consumer. I am surprised at the Opposition’s attitude in that regard because this is one of the principles that benefits the many—those who have to pay the insurance, which is mandatory—versus the few who abuse the system. I believe that the Bill is needed.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I know that my hon. Friend has a financial background. Does he accept that, if he were managing an insurance book, it would be very tempting—indeed, almost obligatory—to reach a settlement and to make the payments? Insurers are not being vicious or in some way prejudicial if they just pay the settlement. That is how a business is managed—it just has to cut its losses at some point.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is spot on. In the seven years before I came to this place, I managed the legal team that was unwinding the Lehman Brothers estate. In many instances, we looked to sue, but of course, we considered the cost of the claim and then worked out whether settlement was a better option. Settlement should always be a better option. For someone running a business, it will always be the better option if it is cheaper to settle than to pursue. All businesses operate in that manner.
It is all well and good for the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), who is no longer in his place, to say that there should be a duty on insurers to take those cases forward, but they will not because it is not cost-effective. In addition, it is difficult to disprove those particular injuries.
Victoria Prentis
Does my hon. Friend accept that there is an emotional gain from settlement? Even those of us who are lawyers and enjoy the cut and thrust of the legal process know that bringing cases forward is a stressful experience for all claimants. It is important that we put energy and effort into making claims settlable at an early stage.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is right. When I was running the legal team, it always distressed me when we settled because, as a lawyer, I found the whole court process incredibly interesting, but those on the financial side insisted that we settle because that was the better business decision to make. However, my hon. Friend is right about the distress of individuals going through the process. Of course, insurers have to focus not just on the money, but on the valuable human resource implication—the manpower it takes to fight the claims.
That comes back to my point that it is not an issue for insurers if ultimately their costs are covered because the price of premium for everybody else goes up. It is no skin off the bone for them to settle, and that is what occurs. For change, Government action is required. Although I readily accept that a tariff situation is genuinely not to be found in common law, the position that we have got ourselves into means that we need to look at the system akin to the way that we consider the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, which fixes the tariff in the same way. That is not unusual if we look at our European friends such as Italy, France and Spain, where similar systems are in place.
I represent a largely rural constituency of 200 square miles. I have many younger constituents who find the price of insurance too great. Studies show that, for those aged between 18 and 21, 10% of their wage will be taken just to cover their insurance. In a rural constituency, there is no choice. If people do not have a car, they find it very difficult to travel. The bus services are not as they were and, without a car, people cannot get from A to B or go to work. That has a knock-on effect because 28% of my constituents are over 65—the national average is 17%—so I have a lot of older constituents who need looking after. We have high social care bills. If we lose our younger people to the cities because they cannot afford to travel around a rural constituency, the balance goes completely.
Kevin Hollinrake
Thirsk and Malton also has high social care bills, so I understand exactly what my hon. Friend says. His point about reducing the cost of premiums is very important but, fundamentally, the Bill’s provisions were set out in our 2017 manifesto. The measure is a manifesto promise, and amendment 2 simply wrecks a key premise of the Bill. That is contrary to what most people would expect when we have made a promise in our manifesto.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The amendment drives a coach and horses through the Bill. Yes, of course it is right to clamp down on those who claim fraudulently, and the Bill will act as an incentive for people not to do so, but the ultimate gain is that the money saved will go back into the pockets of those consumers who are currently being overcharged because of fraudulent claims. Like him, I intend that we legislate on all our manifesto commitments, this being one of them, which is why I support the Bill.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
What strikes me as perverse is that the original impetus for the initiative on which we are now legislating came from Labour Members. I remember Jack Straw waxing lyrical about the need to deliver what we are delivering now, and we are right to do so.
Huw Merriman
I lack my right hon. Friend’s longevity in this place to make such historical references, but it would strike anyone as common sense to look after the bulk of our constituents—our voters—by making sure they have more money in their pocket. We should all subscribe to that.
Kwasi Kwarteng
Does my hon. Friend agree that the insurance industry in Britain is something we should broadly celebrate? This idea that anyone is in cahoots with the industry, and that the industry is trying to rip off the public, needs to be addressed squarely and rejected.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is right. Britain is the leading country in the European Union when it comes to insurance. The top 10 insurers are based in London, and I celebrate this international market.
Of course, the insurance industry is very critical of the Conservative party for introducing and increasing the insurance premium tax, so any suggestion that this party does everything the insurance industry would like us to do is not backed up by our decisions.
It is undoubtedly the case that our cars are now much safer and that design and technology mean that injuries should not be as prevalent as we are seeing. We have also seen the growth of claims management companies, which have driven and fuelled claims. Sometimes we see such industries moving on from one sector to take advantage of another—holiday insurance is a good example; the claims management companies have already moved into that sphere. Equally, I would like to see more done with technology to address the ability of such companies to contact me and my constituents directly. People register with BT in order not to receive unsolicited calls, yet such calls still come through regularly. I hope that the technology will eventually keep pace and close down such calls.
I have made my points more than once, and I absolutely support the Bill. Although I can see that the Opposition’s intentions are good, if the amendment were accepted, it would drive a coach and horses through the very intention of this Bill, which is to reduce premiums for all our constituents and to make it easier for them to manage and live their lives.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
Although I originally studied law and was called to the Bar, I never practised, so I hope I may speak in the debate without being tied to any particular interest. This debate is increasingly showing a division between those on the side of personal injury practitioners, and those on the side of the overwhelming majority of our constituents who face the costs arising from an ever-escalating number of claims, of escalating value, for relatively minor injuries. My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) was right to draw the House’s attention to the remarks of the former Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw. If my memory serves correctly, he told The Law Society Gazette that he was in favour of banning compensation for soft tissue injury altogether. Clearly the Bill does not go anywhere near as far as that.
Kwasi Kwarteng
So a former Labour Lord Chancellor suggested that he would ban this compensation entirely. What on earth possessed him to suggest that as a policy?
Mike Wood
Reading through The Law Society Gazette, I see that Jack Straw’s actual comment was:
“Whiplash is an innovation of fertile legal minds which has no real foundation in medical knowledge. Everybody knows the vast majority of whiplash claims are completely unjustified. I support any measures to eliminate soft-tissue injuries.”
I understand that he was referring to compensation for soft tissue injuries, rather than eliminating the injuries altogether.
Hon. Members have spoken about the apparent paradox when we have the long-term reduction in the number of road traffic accidents, the increasing safety of more of the cars on the road and the long-term reduction in the number of deaths and serious injuries as a result of road traffic accidents, and yet the number of personal injury claims for whiplash and other minor injuries having increased significantly—it has gone up by 30% in 12 years. That enormous statistical increase cannot be dismissed as coincidental.
It has been suggested that the idea of a compensation culture is more about perception than reality, but how many of us have not had regular phone calls inviting us to claim for an accident that we have not had, encouraging us with the idea that a fortune was surely around the corner if only we referred the case to the firm that was ringing us up. I have no problem with solicitors—some of my best friends are solicitors, as they say. Indeed, many years ago my wife worked with one of the country’s leading personal injury solicitors’ firms, mostly doing administration on road traffic accident claims. But we need to look at the state we are now in. All the empirical evidence suggests that the initial intentions behind addressing no-win, no-fee claims for personal injuries have generated a spiralling increase in claims that are not the result of pecuniary loss—they are about not loss of earnings or quantifiable losses, but a figure being placed on pain, suffering and loss of amenity.
Previous studies have suggested that, contrary to what others have been saying, the amounts awarded by courts in England and Wales are significantly higher than those awarded in most other European jurisdictions for personal injury claims. When there is a serious injury, especially if the effects are permanent or long-lasting, or even if it results in disability, clearly no one disputes that it is right that there is compensation, especially for the loss of opportunity and amenity caused by that injury. However, shorter-term soft-tissue injuries do not really fall within that category. That is why it is proportionate for the Bill to introduce a tariff that sets out the amounts payable for certain categories of minor, non-permanent injuries.
Bambos Charalambous
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that, under the criminal injuries compensation scheme—one of the Government’s own schemes—a person can get £1,000 for a criminal injury of whiplash? Under these tariffs, however, someone would get £470 for the same injury, except it would not have been the result of a criminal event.
Rory Stewart
Does my hon. Friend agree that these discrepancies already exist, because the criminal injuries compensation scheme is, in fact, already an example of a tariff-based system? As those discrepancies have existed since 1962, nothing in the Bill changes their basic nature.
Mike Wood
The Minister, as ever, speaks straight to the point that bringing this system in line with the criminal injuries compensation scheme is actually making parallel systems more consistent, and it is entirely logical that they should operate on similar tariff-based systems. One of the flaws in the current system is that, as the Judicial College is setting its guidelines, the awards it uses for deciding the amounts in the guidelines are not the overall amounts that are payable in the event of a road traffic accident leading to personal injury, but are based on the awards made by the court in the relatively small proportion of claims that proceed to trial and are then adjudicated by a judge. The system does not consider the very large number of claims that are settled at an earlier date when the figure would tend to be lower.
Clearly, cases that proceed to full trial are more likely to be the more complex ones. This has the effect of institutionalising an inflationary element within the guidelines as they are reviewed, because the review is only ever based on those types of claim that actually end up being the higher awards anyway. It can only ever lead to an increasing amount. The impact of that falls clearly on our constituents. We rightly insist on mandatory motor insurance. As hon. Members have said, motor insurance premiums increase rapidly. One reason why they increase rapidly is that there has recently been a large increase in the average amounts paid out for personal injury claims. If we fail to take this sensible action, those amounts can only increase, and we can expect premiums to continue to increase at around 10% annually, quickly putting them out of reach.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I am delighted that my hon. Friend is making this point. What is his view on whether the Lord Chancellor should be setting the tariff? Does that not bolster what my hon. Friend suggests—that there is a role for the Government in trying to keep insurance premium costs low?
Mike Wood
Absolutely. Although I tend to argue for a slightly slimmer role for the Government, I do think that there is a place for them in this regard. When we insist on mandatory motor insurance, there is a clear role for the Government in ensuring that pressures on the price of that mandatory insurance are kept under control as much as possible. Having the Lord Chancellor’s oversight of the tariffs is one way in which we can ensure that the people who are already struggling with the escalating costs of motor insurance do not see them taken even further out of reach.
There is a clear risk of a serious moral hazard when it comes to escalating motor insurance. The more that premiums increase, the greater the risk—the greater the temptation, we might say—for some people to take the chance illegally to fail to take out motor insurance and to drive on our roads uninsured, with everything that that implies for safety and for coverage of third parties. Given the current high levels of motor insurance premiums, research suggests that around a quarter of 18 to 24-year-olds have been tempted to try to make savings by not taking out or not renewing their motor insurance policy—driving without insurance. Surely that number can only increase if the cost of motor insurance becomes ever more expensive and increases by far more than inflation or incomes.
As the real cost of motor insurance spirals, more people will be tempted to take the risk of driving without insurance, and young people are more vulnerable to this by far because their premiums are already so much higher. Such behaviour puts other people’s safety at risk and leaves them in an even more difficult situation in the event that they need to make a claim. The number of claims against uninsured drivers increased significantly last year.
The measures in the Bill are designed to keep insurance premiums under control, which is essential if we are to have a functioning motor insurance system. That is why I am not able to support the amendment, why I shall be supporting the Bill, and why I believe that the tariff system for minor injuries is absolutely necessary and must be retained in this legislation.
Alex Chalk
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood).
Whether we sit on the Government Benches or the Opposition Benches, the first thing that hon. Members have to recognise is that we do have a problem in this country; of that there can be no doubt. Other hon. Members have mentioned the statistics, but they bear repeating. In 2005-2006, there were 460,000 or so road traffic accident-related personal injury claims. Just a decade later, that number had soared by 40-odd per cent. to 650,000. There must be concern that the circumstances exist in our country to create an unnecessarily fertile ground for spurious and unfounded claims. What are those circumstances? They include the fact that instead of challenging whether a whiplash claim is dishonest or otherwise unfounded, insurers will take a commercial decision to pay out, because that will be in their interest. As other Members have indicated, the effect of that is that ordinary people living on modest incomes are finding themselves having to pay more for their car insurance than would otherwise be the case.
It is a great mistake to say, as some do, that a car is a luxury—to say, “You don’t need your car; alternative transport methods should be satisfactory.” For plenty of my constituents, that simply is not the case. We currently have a big issue in Cheltenham with the closure of Boots Corner, a key arterial route through the town. One argument made by those who favour closing off the road is that people can get around on bikes. That might be okay for some people, but for plenty of my constituents—including nurses, people ferrying around their children, and people with disabilities—it is not. We have a duty in this House, wherever we stand, to drive down the costs of living for hard-working people and their families.
We have to be clear on what the legislation is not about. A lot of the points made by Opposition Members are motivated by the best of intentions. I have served on the Justice Committee with several Opposition Members, and they have shown great distinction—if I may be so bold—and argued vigorously and passionately for the principle of access to justice and on employment tribunal fees, to which the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) referred. But that is not what this legislation is about. It is important not to set up straw men to knock down. Were this debate about LASPO, access to justice and ensuring that people could get early legal advice and assistance, I would have an awful lot more sympathy, but in fact is far more restricted, calibrated and proportionate.
First, this debate and the provisions in the Bill are not about people who sustain whiplash injuries and whose pain, suffering and loss of amenity last beyond two years. If they do last for longer than two years, the case of course falls outwith the tariff system. Secondly, this debate is not about special damages. Let us consider a run-of-the-mill case in which somebody is involved in an accident, makes a whiplash claim because they have a sore neck, spends time off work and incurs taxi fees going to and from the doctor and various other fees. Such special damages would not be subject to any kind of tariff and could be claimed in the normal way. In other words, if someone was off work for, say, nine months, the mere fact that their general damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity had been capped would not in any way preclude them from seeking the full extent of their special damages. That is why it is important to draw a distinction.
Andy Slaughter
I should say that I have secured a three-hour Westminster Hall debate on the LASPO review, access to justice and all such matters on 1 November. I look forward to having the hon. Gentleman join us and to his being fully supportive of my speech.
On this issue, the hon. Gentleman may want to address specifically the issue of the level of the tariff. I hear what he is saying, but what about the level of damages, which cannot in any way compensate for what are in many cases real injuries?
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point about LASPO, because if I may say so he is on stronger ground on that territory and I look forward to attending his debate and making some observations. That debate truly is about a cardinal principle that we in this Chamber should all share: whatever a person’s circumstances, they should be entitled to access to justice. It would be quite wrong, though, to conflate that debate with the one we are having.
On the tariffs, I do not suggest that this is the case for the hon. Gentleman, but there cannot be synthetic outrage. If someone has suffered pain, suffering and loss of amenity to the extent that their symptoms endure beyond two years, they are entitled to get whatever the judge thinks appropriate. We are dealing with claims that, although not insignificant, are towards the lower end of the spectrum. That needs to be borne in mind.
Ellie Reeves
The hon. Gentleman is right in saying that special damages are not included in the tariff. However, the point that needs to be made is that under the tariff system someone could, as he rightly points out, be off work for a very, very long time, but because of the way that the tariffs are set, their claim would fall into the small claims track, meaning that they would not be able to have their legal costs covered, so would be unlikely to get representation for their claim. That is likely to mean that they could have a big special damages claim that is never recoverable because they will be unable to afford to pursue their claim. Does he agree?
Alex Chalk
No, I do not. First, in any event, as the hon. Lady knows, if the person’s claim extends beyond £5,000, it will go on to the fast track, so they will be entitled to get that cost. Secondly, the concern that a number of solicitors raise about this is to say, “The really difficult thing that you need to claim—the thing that is hard sometimes to prove—is the general damages element.” That is why they have become so indignant about it. In fact, the special damages claim is rather easier to quantify, and I do not think that people would, in effect, be frozen out of justice. Thirdly—if this aspect of the Bill had not been changed, I think I would be opposing it—for the really difficult claims where, for example, somebody has been injured at work and faces, as I accept entirely, the added burden of having to take on their employer, the threshold does not apply in the same way. It is absolutely right that the Government have moved on that to ensure that anything above £2,000 means that people go on to the fast track.
On the hon. Lady’s specific point about the tariff, is it right to say that this is an egregious departure from anything that we have known before in English law? That is putting it far too high. My hon. Friend the Minister has already indicated that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority sets that principle in any event. Furthermore, it is a principle adopted in plenty of other countries that are signatories to the European convention on human rights, Italy for one.
It is also worth stepping back to consider the criminal law. Before the Sentencing Guidelines Council, as it was then called, started to set its guidelines in terms of tariffs for criminal penalties, there was a concern that it would be intruding on the discretion of the courts, but in fact it has worked very well. Defendants, lawyers and judges have really welcomed the guidelines, which set clearer tariffs, because that provides a degree of clarity. Of course, it is not a direct equivalent because judges still retain some discretion within the guidelines, but it does make the point that completely open-ended discretion does not exist everywhere throughout the legal system.
There are other mitigating factors that allow me, and people like me, to conclude that these are fair and proportionate proposals. First and most important is the exceptional circumstances uplift. Clause 5(1) says:
“Regulations made by the Lord Chancellor may provide for a court—
(a) to determine that the amount of damages payable for pain, suffering and loss of amenity in respect of one or more whiplash injuries is an amount greater than the tariff amount relating to that injury”.
In other words, there is a safety net in circumstances where the law would otherwise do an injustice. That is really important and ought to give a lot of comfort to Opposition Members who might otherwise be concerned. The second reason I feel comforted is that the tariffs are clearly going to have the engagement and input of the judges. That is why Lord Brown concluded that there was nothing wrong in principle with a tariff system.
There are of course things that have to be got right. It is critically important that any savings that are derived from this are truly passed on to motorists. I want to ensure that constituents in Cheltenham receive the benefits. We need to ensure that young people who are setting out on their careers and need their car for work, for whom every last £10 is critically important, will be receiving these benefits. If they do, then my clear view is that these principles are sensible, proportionate and calibrated, and have a safety net. Even though—I probably ought to have declared this at the beginning, Madam Deputy Speaker—my wife is a personal injury lawyer, I feel confident that I can take on the domestic dispute just as I have taken on Opposition Members in this House.
Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and to speak in the debate, to oppose amendment 2, tabled by those on the Labour Front Bench. I will add to the remarks that I made on Second Reading and in the Public Bill Committee.
This is a very important piece of legislation for the insurance industry and, more importantly, for customers of the insurance industry—our constituents up and down the country—who will benefit from it. As I found in my Westminster Hall debate on road safety last week, which I was pleased to secure, there is great interest from Members right across the House in matters relating to traffic accidents and the causes and mitigation of crashes. It is not a surprise to me that this legislation regarding appropriate compensation for certain collisions has attracted a great deal of interest and scrutiny.
Our debate in Westminster Hall attracted a range of thoughtful and personal contributions about specific cases in Members’ constituencies. That is relevant to this amendment, because many Members raised the importance of addressing this not just through legislation but, importantly, through action on the entire road network. I was pleased to see the report by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, in association with Ageas Insurance, which looks at a systemic approach to improving road safety, so that we can reduce the number of whiplash claims and, most importantly, the number of people seriously injured or killed on our road network.
I am grateful to the Minister for the clarity that he brought to aspects of the Bill in Committee. Although I thought the Committee was dealt with very efficiently and we got through it pretty quickly, we had a great number of interesting contributions from Members across the Committee. I am sure the Minister’s remarks will be similarly informative and comprehensive today.
I want to move on to safer vehicles, particularly in relation to whiplash. One notable feature of any debate on road safety and traffic collisions is the focus on how much safer our cars, vans and lorries are today than they were only a decade ago. They are safer by design, and the advances in building motor vehicles that cause much fewer more serious injuries on impact are hugely welcome. Indeed, the number of accidents has fallen by almost a third since 2005.
As the Minister noted in Committee, the percentage of cars with safety features specifically designed to reduce whiplash has increased from only 15% in 2005 to nearly 85% now—that is to say, the position is completely reversed. Whereas only 15% of cars used to have anti-whiplash safety features, now only 15% do not have them. That is still too high a percentage, but vast progress has been made. Despite the 30% reduction in road traffic accidents, the number of whiplash claims has increased remarkably, by 40%. Something does not add up, and the Bill seeks to address concerns that certain claims are either exaggerated or unfounded, forcing up insurance premiums at an alarming rate.
I have something of an interest to declare. As I said on Second Reading, as a young driver I will be particularly advantaged by this legislation. I have been hit by higher insurance rates, which are adding significant costs for people of my generation and for our constituents right across the country. I am reassured that there has been meaningful engagement with the insurance industry by the Government throughout the process of the Bill, with both Government and industry working to get the legislation right for consumers and focusing on how we can ensure that insurance premiums do come down.
As I have said before, Ageas Insurance, which is one of the largest insurance providers in the UK, employs more than 400 people in my constituency. It has very much given me the assurance that it absolutely persists in its support for the changes proposed, which will entirely benefit its policy holders and our constituents. Those policy holders have faced massive increases in bills, but they should now at last see some respite and reductions.
The insurance industry’s support for the legislation is shared by the vast majority of the public. This is not just about the insurance industry pushing an issue; it is about the majority of the public pushing for what they believe is the right thing to do. We are fair-minded people in this country and, particularly in Stoke-on-Trent, we are not comfortable with the idea of a compensation culture. While resolutely recognising that, where there is clear medical evidence, liability must of course mean consequences for those at fault, that should not apply to those who seek to abuse the system.
What will the Bill do? It will reduce insurance premiums for hard-pressed motorists by adjusting how the personal injury discount rate is set. It is not about stopping those who genuinely deserve compensation from getting the settlement they justly deserve. It is of course a matter of justice that we have a system of rules under which everyone plays by those rules, without allowing them to play the system.
It is very welcome that the Government are introducing a new tariff specifically to target the exaggerated and fraudulent whiplash claims that have driven up insurance premiums. The creation of a new fixed compensation level for whiplash injuries is exactly the right thing to do to address the general and obvious anomaly that the number of accidents is going down but the number of claims for whiplash is going up. Equally, it is the right thing to do to ensure that there are provisions to increase compensation in exceptional circumstances. That stands in stark contrast with the current situation, where financial compensation figures are negotiated by the force of will and expertise in the opaque language or legalese of the interested parties.
I stress that these changes are not about denying genuine claims, but about discouraging speculative or exaggerated claims and claims with no just foundation. Such claims have the unjust consequence of forcing up insurance premiums to pay claims-chasing lawyers. I am glad that the Government have been so clear in attempting to get the balance right. As the Minister said in Committee, the Lord Chief Justice should be consulted on the levels of tariffs, as well as on the percentage uplift for judicial discretion. It is right that this should be done in an accountable, responsible, transparent and predictable fashion. I am sure the Lord Chancellor will be in no doubt about the feeling of this House that that should be done. He is accountable to this House, of course, and it should be reassuring to Members that his Ministry has modelled its approach to setting the tariff on that used in other countries, such as France and Italy.
It should be remembered that the bone of contention is not damages paid out for serious, long-lasting cases of whiplash but the anomalous prevalence of minor claims. The Bill addresses that by ensuring that when someone makes a claim for whiplash injuries, it is backed up by medical evidence and the damages are proportionate to the injury suffered. It will also ensure that those who have suffered life-changing injuries continue to receive 100% compensation—that is a key principle of the Bill.
Clearly the current balance is not right, with ordinary motorists being unfairly penalised through needlessly over-inflated premiums. That does not seem the best value for taxpayers’ money. Without reform, motor premiums could continue to rise by about 10% a year, which is shockingly high and unsustainable for working families and, especially, younger motorists. The Government argue that the whiplash reforms in the Bill will restore a sense of balance to the insurance and claims system, delivering about £1.1 billion of consumer savings every year. That could mean motorists’ insurance premiums falling by an average of £35 a year, with the high level of competition that is currently prevalent in the industry ensuring that it is the customers—our constituents—who benefit by far the most. This cannot and will not, of course, be a straight switch from a money grab by lawyers to a money grab by insurers.
I want to go through some of the key things that the Bill will achieve in this area. About 650,000 road traffic accident-related personal injury claims were made in 2017-18—nearly 200,000 more than in 2005-06. The Government estimate that about 85% of them were for whiplash-related injuries. Those figures remain high despite a reduction in the number of road traffic accidents reported to the police and improved vehicle safety. The continuing high number and cost of claims increases the cost of motor insurance premiums to ordinary customers and consumers, which was why, as has been said today, the 2017 manifesto included a commitment to reduce insurance costs for ordinary motorists by tackling fraudulent and exaggerated whiplash claims. That is a key commitment for the Conservative Government.
The introduction of a tariff will both simplify the process for genuinely injured whiplash claimants and ensure that they receive proportionate compensation. In addition to a tariff payment, all claimants will continue to receive special damages covering compensation for any actual financial losses suffered as a result of their accident. The new measures will reduce and control the cost of whiplash claims and disincentivise unmeritorious claims. A tariff system is consistent with other schemes, such as the criminal injuries compensation scheme, which other countries right across the world use.
Having introduced a tariff system, it is essential that we provide that the Lord Chancellor must regularly review the level of the tariff, as clause 4 provides for. However, the Government recognise that there may be exceptional circumstances in which higher levels of compensation are needed, and I very much welcome that. For that reason, clause 4 also allows a judge to determine a higher level of damages. It is right that that remains part of the Bill.
Mrs Badenoch
I rise to speak in support of the Bill and to oppose amendment 2. First, however, I will remind the House why we need the Bill; we have heard it over and over again in the debate. I know that other Members have had similar experiences of nuisance calls from ambulance-chasing companies, and many of my constituents certainly have. As of this week, I am still receiving calls from companies telling me that they had heard I had been in a car accident that was not my fault—this must have been the 10th time that I received such a call this year. Needless to say, I have not been involved in any car accident then or since.
However, this debate is not about nuisance calls, but about the incentives behind them, which are to encourage unnecessary and, in many cases, fraudulent insurance claims that are difficult, if not impossible, to prove. If we remove the incentive for claims companies to act in this way, we will get rid of the ones encouraging fraud and probably the nuisance calls as well. So many would welcome this. Because of the actions of these companies, insurance premiums for honest, safe and sensible drivers reached a record high of £493 at the end of 2017. As other Members have mentioned, young drivers in particular already pay over double the average premium.
For so many of us, motor insurance premiums are one of the highest bills we pay. The Government have repeatedly expressed that their mission is to get a country that works for everyone, and reducing costs for the “just about managing” is one way to do that. It has also been said several times in the debate that these measures, alongside the secondary legislation, will reduce the cost of motor insurance premiums on average by around £35 a year. I know that many of my constituents would appreciate much lower motor insurance premiums.
I also echo the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) about the strain on public services. At present, with a discount rate of minus 0.75%, the NHS is overpaying on claims for clinical negligence, which is adding to pressure on the public purse. In 2017-18, around £400 million in additional funds had to be provided to the NHS as a consequence of the change in the discount rate. In 2016-17, the NHS spent £1.7 billion on clinical negligence cases. The annual cost has almost doubled since 2010, with an average 13.5% increase every year. Like everyone in this House, I am looking forward to the end of austerity, and perhaps this Bill can help us to get there.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. She brought up the discount rate and I could not resist the temptation to intervene. I absolutely welcome changes to the discount rate, but would she like to see a future in which, rather than one lump sum being paid out for compensation for the rest of someone’s life, we look more at doing this on an annual basis? That may make the overall costs more reasonable and make it less likely that investments will go wrong.
Mrs Badenoch
I thank my hon. Friend for making that very good point. This argument was made during the Justice Committee’s evidence sessions, and I am in two minds about it. There are good reasons to have both. An annual payment can help to reduce strain in the long term, but for some people, the constant payments would be a reminder of a particularly traumatic accident. Perhaps we need a flexible system that can accommodate both, depending on a claimant’s particular circumstances, but I thank him for raising that point.
I do not believe we need amendment 2. The purpose of the tariff as set out in clause 3 is to simplify the process for those who have been injured while ensuring they receive compensation that is proportionate. Not only that, but claimants will continue to receive special damages for any financial losses they suffer as a result. Similar systems are in use in countries such as Italy and Spain, which have already seen positive impacts on both the number of claims and the cost of premiums.
The Opposition are concerned that the tariff cannot be varied according to individual circumstances, but this is not the case. As my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) has already noted, the tariff is staggered to account for the duration of the injury, whether that be between four and six months or, at the highest end of the spectrum, 19 and 24 months. Furthermore, clause 5 allows judges the discretion to make awards above the tariff level when the individual circumstances merit it. Amendment 2 seeks to remove this clause, as well as clause 4, under which the Lord Chancellor can regularly review the tariff. That would not be right.
The Government have noted that about 650,000 road traffic accident personal injury claims were made in 2017-18. An estimated 85% of those claims were for whiplash-related injuries. That is over 550,000 whiplash claims. As many Members have said, however, there has simultaneously been a reduction in the number of road traffic accidents reported to the police, while improvements continue to be made in vehicle safety. This is leading to increasing premiums for my constituents, and that cannot be right.
It seems to me, from listening to this debate, that Parliament is caught in a technical argument between the insurance lobbyists and the legal services lobbyists. I speak here on behalf on my constituents. I am keen to hear from the Minister how the Government can ensure that cost savings reach the consumer and are not negated by future policy proposals. Having said that, the Bill is an opportunity for the Government to bring down premiums and let people keep more of their own money in their pockets. That is a principled and Conservative ideal. Removing clauses 3, 4 and 5 would go against all efforts to help them and the taxpayer.
Huw Merriman
Would my hon. Friend also recognise that we have a good track record on this? A few years ago, when the Government made changes to the civil litigation procedure, an average of £50 was knocked off insurance premiums as a result.
Mrs Badenoch
I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. It is something I would have liked to say earlier, and I am glad he was able to make it for me.
In conclusion, the Bill fulfils a manifesto commitment by my party and should make it easier for genuine whiplash claimants. I will be supporting it tonight, but not, I am afraid, Opposition amendment 2.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Mrs Badenoch). As we have heard, the Bill makes important changes to our personal injury compensation system, and although I broadly support its aims and measures, I would like to put on the record a few of my concerns and those raised with me by lawyers and constituents.
The Bill is long overdue. The last increase to the small claims limit was made in 1991. As we have heard, data from the Department for Work and Pensions reveal that about 650,000 road traffic accident-related personal injury claims were made in 2017-18 and that about 85% of these were for whiplash-related injuries—a higher rate than in any other European country. Department for Transport figures, however, show that from 2007 to 2017 reported RTAs fell by 30%.
Clause 3 introduces a tariff for compensation in whiplash claims. Lawyers who have contacted me and met to discuss this have supported the arguments made by the Access to Justice Foundation, which has estimated that the proposed new tariff would deny 600,000 people injured on our roads each year the right to legal advice when seeking compensation.
The question I have asked is: how does this value equality and fairness in comparing types of injury under the compensation regime? For instance, under the proposed tariff, if I experienced an injury in a road traffic accident that lasted up to three months—as I have in the past—I would receive £235 in compensation. Compensation varies across many sectors. If my train journey from London to Stockport, a route on which I travel every week, were delayed by two hours, I could receive up to £338. Under these proposals, the same injury would attract less compensation simply because it was sustained in a road traffic accident rather than in another way.
Rory Stewart
I am interested by my hon. Friend’s speech. She said that she would be entitled to compensation amounting to £338 for a two-hour delay. Is that compensation for the ticket that was purchased? What is the nature of the compensation?
Mary Robinson
I am talking about the compensation that would normally be paid by train operators.
It is important that we tackle whiplash fraud, but it is hard to explain to those who are injured that the same injuries sustained in different circumstances—for example, a comparable injury at work—should be compensated differently. Under the reform proposals, someone who had been involved in a road accident would be entitled to £3,910 for a whiplash injury lasting up to two years, but would be unable to recover the cost of paying a lawyer to assert their rights. Someone who suffered an identical injury at work would be entitled to £6,500, and would be able to recover costs. For many people, it goes to the heart of ensuring fairness that comparable injuries should attract comparable awards—if awards are indeed to be given—whether those injuries were sustained in a road traffic accident or incurred at a place of work.
If, as is hoped and predicted, these changes result in savings to the insurance industry, it is important for members of the public to see that the savings are passed on via reduced premiums. Concerns were raised about that in Committee, and I am encouraged that the Government accepted amendments that will hold insurers to account. As amended, the Bill places a statutory requirement on insurers to provide the Financial Conduct Authority with certain information to enable Treasury Ministers to report to Parliament on whether the insurers have upheld their public commitments by passing on savings. The Government have estimated that these measures would lead to a reduction in motor insurance premiums of approximately £40 per customer per year. I expect the industry to demonstrate that savings are being appropriately passed on, so that consumers can see fairness in the insurance system.
Craig Tracey
Is my hon. Friend aware of the support for the Bill in its current form? A survey conducted by Consumer Intelligence showed that the most important factor in a low-value personal injury claim was a simple claims process, and the least important factor was the ability to claim back their legal costs.
Mary Robinson
It is absolutely right that people support reform of the system, and I support the Government’s action in doing so. I am keen to ensure that we can secure fairness for everyone through the Bill.
According to the recent AA British insurance premium index, these reforms have already triggered a fall in premiums owing to the expectation that claim costs will fall, and only yesterday it was reported that motor premiums had fallen for the first time in years: last month they were almost 10% lower than they had been in the same month in 2017. That means that the average driver is £45 better off as a result. Consumers will be pleased with lower premiums, but they must be convinced that that is worth any detriment that they may experience should they become victims of traffic accidents.
We might not be having this debate at all were it not for fraudulent claims. I can almost guarantee that, at some point in the past year, every Member—including, perhaps, the Minister—will have been contacted by a claims management company, usually wrongly asserting that they have been involved in a car accident recently, and can lodge a claim. That seriously concerns and aggravates many people. A 2017 YouGov report shows that more than two thirds of people are in favour of a ban on cold calling for personal injury claims. Cold calling is a particular issue for the vulnerable and the elderly, who may be talked into making fake or exaggerated claims. A Justice Committee report earlier this year stated that the recent restrictions on cold calling by claims companies
“do not go far enough and that an outright ban should be introduced.”
Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)
My hon. Friend will know that I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on nuisance calls. This Bill goes some way towards addressing the issue—there is no denying that—but does she believe that we could go further and hold the directors of companies who are responsible for cold calling directly responsible for any fines that arise from their activities?
Mary Robinson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. That should be explored and people would welcome it because they would see that we were being positive in addressing this.
Throughout the Bill’s passage, I have met regularly in my weekly surgeries with solicitors and law firms that have been engaged in this process. They have impressed me, and impressed upon me their pursuit to help the vulnerable who are injured and to ensure that we have a justice system that works, is fair and protects people.
I thank the Minister for his continued engagement and openness with me and colleagues as the Bill has progressed through both Houses. He has been open to all my questions and I am grateful for the way he has dealt with them. I look forward to this Bill progressing. I know that there will be a spirit of openness and transparency as it does.
Rory Stewart
I again thank all Members who have participated.
Amendment 2 relates centrally to the core of this Bill, which is about the question of the setting of tariffs. We have discussed this with great verve and vigour from many different sides. The first debate that has taken place in the last hour and a half has been about the purpose of these tariffs: why we are introducing them in the first place. The reason why comes out of a perception of an anomaly. That anomaly can be seen either, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) pointed out, in terms of the fact that the number of car crashes is coming down and cars are getting safer, but at the same time the number of whiplash claims over the same period has increased dramatically; or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) pointed out, in terms of national differences. There are many more whiplash claims from Britain per head of population compared with Germany or France, leading to my hon. Friend speculating on biological differences.
The second debate has been about proportionality. That argument was made by, for example, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke). He was essentially arguing, along with the former president of the Supreme Court, Lord Brown, that there needs to be a closer relationship between the amount of compensation paid and the nature of the injury suffered. As Lord Brown said in the House of Lords:
“lesser injuries were altogether too generously compensated, certainly in comparison to the graver injuries”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2018; Vol. 791, c. 306.]
The idea of proportional compensation for a type of injury was central to the argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) reminded us that the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, had serious concerns about compensation for soft tissue injury and that this form of car insurance is mandatory, putting a particular obligation on the House of Commons when it considers it. But, characteristically, the most “sensible, proportionate and calibrated” speech came from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who, by using those three adjectives to define the nature of the tariffs, brought us, in a huge move, from jurisprudential reflections on the nature of tariff systems to a disquisition on rural transport in Cheltenham. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) brought it down to earth with a good focus on safety in vehicles.
Robert Neill
I cannot let the Minister move on from the important and significant points of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) without observing that he emphasised the role of the Lord Chancellor in consulting with the Lord Chief Justice in the setting of the tariffs. That is an important safeguard. Can the Minister tell us a little more about how it is envisaged that that will work?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. This is a concession that we have inserted into the Bill partly due to pressure from my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Justice Committee, and from other Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson). It means that the Lord Chancellor, when reflecting on the nature of the tariff in a judicial capacity, will consult the Lord Chief Justice. That concession in the Bill, combined with the strong emphasis on judicial discretion allowing the tariffs to be uplifted, will be central to our attempt to reconcile a tariff-based system with the tradition of English common law. Through it, we hope to address some of the concerns raised by Lord Woolf.
We have discussed the purpose of the Bill, and the way in which getting rid of the tariffs as suggested in amendment 2 would undermine the central purpose of getting a more affordable system into place. We have made a number of concessions in order to meet concerns raised by many distinguished colleagues around the House, including individuals with experience of personal injury law and those with experience as constituency MPs of the honourable and serious work done by personal injury lawyers. I shall show respect to the House and touch on some of those concessions.
In the initial proposals put forward by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the autumn of 2015, the suggestion was that there would be no general damages payable at all. That was roughly the argument made by the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw. We have moved away from that position and accepted that general damages should be paid, but we have suggested that there should be a tariff for those damages. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has said, we will consult the Lord Chief Justice on that tariff and there will be judicial discretion. There is a precedent on tariffs—they exist in Italy and Spain—and there is even a precedent in English common law in the criminal injuries compensation scheme.
The benefits that we believe a tariff system will deliver include a reduction in the cost of this form of transaction and, hopefully, through that, a reduction in the number of potentially exaggerated or fraudulent claims. That would have an advantage for general public policy in that people would not be encouraged to make fraudulent claims. We believe that the system will also provide certainty and predictability to claimants, especially when they are connected to an online portal that will ensure that they follow a particular sequence. They will proceed to the online portal, then, for the first time, they will be required to go to a medical practitioner specialising in whiplash claims who would give them a prognosis of, for example, six months, 12 months or 24 months. On the basis of that prognosis, through the portal, a fixed tariff would then tell them exactly how much they would be given. This should mean that in the overwhelming majority of cases there would be absolutely no requirement to proceed to court. In any cases where we did proceed to court, we would rely on the small claims process in order to settle the claim, using the tariffs to reinforce the process.
The speeches so far have not touched on Government amendment 1, which I hope all Members, including Opposition Members, will be happy to accept. Clause 5(7)(a) states that the term “tariff amount” means
“in relation to one or more whiplash injuries, the amount specified in respect of the injury by regulations under section 3(2)”.
Clause 3(2) refers to the
“amount of damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity payable in respect of the whiplash injury or injuries”.
In other words, clause 3 refers to “injury or injuries”, whereas clause 5 refers simply to “the injury”. The proposal in Government amendment 1, recommended by parliamentary counsel, is that we deal with the discrepancy by inserting “or injuries” after “the injury” in clause 5(7)(a). I hope that the Opposition will be happy to accept that suggestion.
That brings us back to the central issue of the way in which tariffs are set. The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) focused a great deal on the notion that the tariffs were somehow inequitable in terms of the damage that individuals have suffered. The hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) said several times that we should not refer to these types of injuries as minor. I want to emphasise that the phrase “minor injuries” is derived from Judicial College guidelines, not from the Government or any political party. It is simply a long-standing convention to refer to injuries of under two years’ duration as minor injuries, and that relates to Sentencing Council guidelines for injuries of under two years’ duration.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 6MC.]
As hon. Members have pointed out, people who suffer, particularly from whiplash injuries of longer duration, might also lose earnings, have considerable medical costs, have to go to a physiotherapist and so on. Although those arguments were well made, for example by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on Second Reading, they overlook the central fact that the tariffs will apply only to general damages. An individual who has suffered loss of earnings or who needs extra care costs can apply for special damages in the normal way. The Government propose no change to special damages.
On the arguments of the hon. Member for Hammersmith about the levels of the tariffs, we have attempted to achieve a reduction in the tariff at the lower end. For example, an individual who suffers an injury of under three months’ duration could receive damages considerably less than those in the current guidelines, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman accepts that, as we approach a duration of two years, the compensation offered begins to merge much more closely with the existing guidelines at a level of £3,600.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 6MC.]
In addition, as the Chairman of the Justice Committee pointed out, the levels of the tariffs are currently proposals about which the Lord Chancellor will consult the Lord Chief Justice. He will do that not just once but regularly, on a three-yearly basis, to ensure that our calculations on pain, suffering and loss of amenity reflect judges’ views.
It must be remembered that, ultimately, judgments on pain, suffering and loss of amenity are difficult. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) pointed out, the question of how much compensation somebody receives for a loss of earnings is relatively easy to calculate, because the figure can be derived from the earnings. The amount of money to which someone is entitled for medical costs is, of course, directly derived from the cost of medical care provided. However, in the case of general damages, a judge must attempt to decide the subjective impact of pain on the individual and assign a financial cost to it. That cannot be anything other than a subjective judgment. There is no objective scientific formula for comparing pain with cash, because the cash is designed not to eliminate that pain, but in some way to acknowledge it. Whether we are talking about the criminal injuries compensation scheme, under which our constituents frequently come forward with examples of what they rightly and subjectively experience as a huge discrepancy between the depth of horror they have suffered at the hands of criminals and the amount of compensation offered, or the tariffs for pain, suffering and loss of amenity under the Bill, in the end the compensation provided cannot constitute anything other than a symbolic judgment, with the court or the Government acknowledging that no amount of money can remove the pain, but with the amount designed to be a public recognition that that pain exists.
The former Justice of the Supreme Court, Lord Brown, is an important guide, and his statements in the House of Lords give us all a sense of reassurance on a tricky bit of law. He feels that two important principles are at stake. The first is that there is a moral hazard and societal issue taking place, in that both the incidence of car crashes and, on a national comparison with Germany and France, the disproportionate number of whiplash claims compared with what would be expected both in terms of automobile design and the biology of the human body, need to be addressed—in other words, fraud needs to be addressed. The second is that there has been an anomaly in law whereby some of the graver injustices, and graver injuries and suffering, have been proportionally undercompensated compared with cases of suffering minor whiplash injuries—the majority of cases before the courts—which involve a duration of only three or six months.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I will now suspend the House for no more than five minutes in order to make a decision about certification. The Division bells will be rung two minutes before the House resumes. Following certification, the Government will table the appropriate consent motions, copies of which will be made available in the Vote Office and distributed by the Doorkeepers.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I can now inform the House that I have completed certification of the Bill, as required by the Standing Order. I have confirmed the view expressed in the Speaker’s provisional certificate issued yesterday. Copies of the final certificate will be made available in the Vote Office and on the parliamentary website. Under Standing Order No. 83M, a consent motion is therefore required for the Bill to proceed. Copies of the motion are available in the Vote Office and on the parliamentary website, and have been made available to Members in the Chamber. Does the Minister intend to move the consent motion?
Rory Stewart
indicated assent.
The House forthwith resolved itself into the Legislative Grand Committee (England and Wales) (Standing Order No. 83M).
[Sir Lindsay Hoyle in the Chair]
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I remind hon. Members that, if there is a Division, only Members representing constituencies in England and Wales may vote.
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That the Committee consents to the Civil Liability Bill [Lords].—(Rory Stewart.)
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Lindsay, especially when we are in such privileged surroundings as the de facto English Parliament. As you know, I always think that it is important that we mark and commemorate these auspicious occasions when English Members of Parliament get the opportunity to express their true English political values and to get to their feet, en masse, to discuss and debate these critical English-only issues. I also like to make a contribution in these events, as you know, Sir Lindsay. I have the proud record of having taken every single opportunity to speak when the English Parliament has met. In fact I have got the record—I have taken up something like 80% of the time in the English Parliament.
What surprises me is that when this opportunity is available to English Members, they cannot seem to bring themselves to actually consider and debate these critically important issues. There are important issues in this Bill that are English-only. In fact, the whole Bill is English-only, which rather prompts the question of why on earth we are doing this. I know that the Serjeant at Arms needs a bit of exercise, and it is quite an onerous responsibility to take the Mace down and then put it back up. We obviously need an opportunity to see if the Division bells are still working, so the bells will go on and off, but then nothing ever happens. What is the point of this ludicrous session that we go through every time that a Bill has been certified in this way?
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to ask what is the point because under the Government’s position, this English Parliament passes a legislative consent motion, but the experience of the Scottish Parliament is that legislative consent motions are worthless, and that the Government do not need legislative consent motions from the constituent parts of the United Kingdom to pass their legislation.
Pete Wishart
My hon. Friend makes a good and valid point, because legislative consent does seem to mean different things in different Parliaments. Here, for example, we have the Legislative Grand Committee: an innovation of this Parliament to allow English Members the opportunity to put forward their own particular English-only issues and amendments. In Scotland, of course, we have legislative consent motions that require our Scottish Parliament to agree, on its own behalf, to legislation passed in this House. There seems to be a particular problem with this. We have our own Parliament that is responsible for legislative consent motions, which are now more or less ignored by this Parliament. Here we have the English Legislative Grand Committee squatting in the UK Parliament. This is the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but somehow it still operates as a de facto English Parliament and as the venue for this Legislative Grand Committee.
It strikes me that that might be a bit odd. I have a little solution that I have presented to this House before, thus far without any great success and without anybody really paying attention to what was suggested, so I will make one more attempt: how about English Members getting their own Parliament? Then there will be a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh Assembly, a Northern Ireland Assembly and an English Parliament. Then, instead of having all these Legislative Grand Committees, we can all come together in a United Kingdom Parliament that is responsible for particular, defined issues, instead of having this ridiculous notion where English colleagues seem almost to squat in this place in order attend a debate that nobody takes part in.
Pete Wishart
I give way to the Minister first, because I am particularly interested in his views about this.
Rory Stewart
I would be grateful to know how Union issues of foreign affairs and defence, which the people of Scotland voted in a referendum should continue to be dealt with by the United Kingdom, would be covered by the hon. Gentleman’s proposal.
Pete Wishart
I only have a few seconds left. I am surprised at the Minister, because he is an erudite chap who understands constitutional issues and the history of this nation. Quite succinctly, I will tell him what it is called. It is called federalism, which is where there are constituent Assemblies that have equal power and authority, and there is then another stratum of government, which would be the UK Parliament—
The Chairman
Order. You did better than normal, Mr Wishart.
Debate interrupted (Programme Order, 4 September).
The Chair put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair (Standing Order No. 83M(5)),
That the Committee consents to the Civil Liability Bill [Lords].
Question agreed to.
The occupant of the Chair left the Chair to report the decision of the Committee (Standing Order No. 83M(6)).
The Deputy Speaker resumed the Chair; decision reported.
Third Reading
Rory Stewart
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on Third Reading. This Bill has been a long time coming. The first suggestions of the Bill’s introduction date back to 2012, six years ago, and the precise measures in the Bill were proposed by the Chancellor in an autumn statement in 2015, more than three years ago. Since then, there has been a series of detailed consultations. I would like to pay tribute to the Justice Committee for its prelegislative scrutiny, particularly on the issue of discount rates. Perhaps the biggest tribute must be paid to all Members of the other House, who undertook a very serious series of debates, which led to a number of significant changes to the Bill that I hope all Members of the House agree are significant improvements.
Perhaps the most dramatic improvement is the Government amendment that ensures insurers pass on savings to their customers. A number of learned, hon. and right hon. Friends have expressed concerns that were we to achieve a situation in which the insurance companies paid out less to claimants, that would simply go into the insurance companies’ bottom line. We have therefore introduced through an amendment perhaps the most detailed and unprecedented reporting requirements incumbent on the insurance companies to the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Rory Stewart
I will give way in one moment. To clarify, the intention is that the companies not just may but will pass this information to the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority not just may but will request that information, so that we can accurately explain to Parliament and the people how much money the insurance companies are making from their premiums, how much they are paying out to claimants, how much savings they are making and how much of those savings they are passing on to their customers.
Julian Knight
Will the Minister confirm that this is an unprecedented level of oversight, in terms of what the Government are challenging the insurance industry to perform for its customers?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. It is an unprecedented move. The fundamental idea is that the insurance companies are operating in a competitive market, so this is not simply a question of how much money they take in premiums or how much money they pay out; it is also about attracting customers, and in order to attract customers, they need to compete with one another on price. If they were not to do so, they would in effect be running a cartel, and the information they give to the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority would provide exactly the evidence to display that kind of unfair practice. We are therefore guaranteeing that the commitment made by 85% of the insurance industry to pass on these savings to customers will be upheld. I give way to the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly). [Interruption.] Oh, no, she was not intervening on me. I apologise.
Simon Hoare
I must say that I have been confused with many things, but to be confused with an hon. Lady from the DUP is a first.
My hon. Friend the Minister, perfectly properly and quite rightly, is placing very important obligations on the insurance industry. The FCA has a raft of things of which it has oversight. How is he proposing, alongside the Treasury, to communicate to the FCA that this House has the legitimate expectation that the FCA should be robust in seeking that information from the insurers?
Rory Stewart
This is a very good challenge, and we will reinforce that duty on the FCA through both the legislation and the statements within the amendment proposed by the Government. We will also reinforce it through this statement from the Dispatch Box: we will require the insurers to pass this information on and we will require the Treasury and the FCA to request it. The purpose of requesting that information is rigorously to hold the insurance industry to account and ensure that the savings are passed on to customers.
I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the personal injury lawyers. One of the problems in this debate has been the suggestion that it is a black-and-white, sometimes Manichean dispute, with the press and civil society sometimes unfairly implying that the personal injury lawyers are somehow to blame. We must put on the record very clearly our respect for the personal injury lawyers and the work they do.
In addition, we must send a very strong message of respect towards people who are genuine victims of whiplash injuries, or indeed of any other form of personal injury. They are entitled to a fair level of compensation and to an adequate level of representation. We believe very strongly that the measures in the Bill strike a proportionate and reasonable balance between fair compensation, reasonable representation and the costs imposed on the rest of society.
Kevin Hollinrake
My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the personal injury lawyers. One of the provisions in the Bill—I think it is clause 8—states that claims management companies will be regulated by the FCA. We already regulate the insurance industry, so how do we make sure there is no conflict of interest in the regulation of both those parties, which often have competing interests?
Rory Stewart
This is a very interesting point, and I am very happy to follow up on it in more detail. The nature of the regulation in each case is quite distinct. In relation to the insurance industry, the regulation proposed is to ensure that we have the financial information to prove that the savings the insurance industry has derived from these reforms are passed on to customers. In the case of the claims management companies, the regulation is to ensure that they comply with the law, particularly the legal changes introduced by previous legislation. In accordance with the suggestions from the Justice Committee, we are also looking at the advice forthcoming from the judiciary to ensure that we can deal with other issues involving claims management companies.
If I may, I will come back to the core of the Bill. We are dealing with a perfect storm of three things. First, at the minor end of whiplash injuries—the three-to-six-month end—this is a condition that, in effect, is unverifiable and difficult to disprove. The polite way of expressing this is to say that there is an asymmetry of information. Somebody suffering a whiplash injury will experience genuine and sincere pain, but that pain cannot be detected at the minor end through any medical instruments. That is the first challenge involved in this type of injury.
The second challenge is of course the level of payments offered to individuals suffering these injuries. The third is the level of recoverable costs which meant, in effect, that a no win, no fee process was operating in which people could apply to a lawyer to represent them and be confident that the legal costs would be recoverable from the defendant. When that is connected to the fact that for all the reasons I have given—particularly the first, asymmetry of information—the insurance companies are not contesting claims, we end up with a discrepancy rapidly emerging between the number of motor vehicle accidents and the number of claims, and between the number of claims made in the United Kingdom and the number made in other jurisdictions.
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former justice of the Supreme Court, stated that he was
“reluctantly persuaded that this provision is justified: it is surely intolerable that we are known as the whiplash capital of the world, so I have concluded that it is open to government, as a matter of policy, to seek to deter dishonest claims in this way.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1603.]
Kwasi Kwarteng
Does my hon. Friend have any idea why the situation has developed in which we are the whiplash capital of the world, as the noble Lord put it?
Rory Stewart
It is a sensitive issue, because of course many individuals who have even quite a minor road accident experience a whiplash injury and have significant pain, particularly in the soft tissue of the neck and shoulders, which can last three to six months in the majority of cases or longer in a minority of cases. However, the New England Journal of Medicine, which conducted a significant study across various countries, concluded that the prognosis for a whiplash injury was significantly worse in countries in which compensation existed. In other words, there appears to be some form of medical relationship between the compensation offered and the prognosis for the whiplash injury.
How that relationship operates is a matter of speculation, but the following things may explain it. First, compensation payments and the encouragement provided by claims management companies, particularly on the telephone—we have heard a great deal of anecdotal evidence about that today—could encourage individuals to make claims that they may not themselves feel are as justified as the claims management companies imply. That leads to serious problems, the first of which is moral. It is a problem of dishonesty. In effect, it appears that some people—we do not know how many, but certainly a significant minority—are being encouraged to make dishonest insurance claims. As hon. Members have pointed out, that is potentially morally corrosive to our society. We do not want to encourage a system in which people feel that they can make such claims.
The second problem is that the situation has had a disproportionate impact on court time. Lord Faulks has said:
“If there was to be a reduction for really serious injuries, I can imagine why noble Lords would baulk at the imposition of a tariff. However, we are for the most part talking about pain and discomfort of a relatively transient nature…So these reforms—quite modest though they are—are a proper response to what I would describe as a racket.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1607.]
The cost to society imposed by this compensation is disproportionate to the severity of injury.
Eddie Hughes
This might sound like an unrelated point, but surely the best way to deal with whiplash is to prevent it from happening in the first place. I believe that in 2015, the Government committed to spending £1.5 billion on 10 smart motorway schemes, the idea of which is to keep traffic flowing at a constant speed. If people are stopping and starting all the time, they lose concentration and are more likely to drive into the car in front of them, resulting in a possible claim for whiplash. The Government are dealing not just with the problem itself but with the root cause.
Rory Stewart
That is a very good point. Fundamentally, our prime obligation must be to improve road safety. Both the Labour Government and our own Government have made progress in that regard. In fact, over the past 15 years we have seen a 35% reduction in road traffic accidents, and, as we have heard, the safety equipment in vehicles has improved dramatically. Whereas 15 years ago only 15% of vehicles were fitted with equipment that can protect someone from whiplash, 85% now are, so people are safer in their car and less likely to have an accident. However, my hon. Friend’s central point is absolutely right. Very tragically—I have experience of this through my constituents, as will other hon. and right hon. Members—if someone who was killed in a motor car did not have a dependant, their family would be entitled to almost no compensation at all. Our obligation must be to prevent the accident from happening in the first place.
John Howell
Earlier this afternoon, the Minister will have heard my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) give an example of how he was approached—hassled, in fact—by a claims management company. I, too, have been in that situation for a fictitious accident and I still get calls about that. Is dealing with this not one of the real ways that we will be able to prevent our being the whiplash capital?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which has been made by the shadow Front-Bench team and others: dealing with claims management companies is going to be a central part of this. Consultation has taken place on this, and measures have been taken against claims management companies. A significant issue remains, which we are consulting on and trying to resolve—to be honest with the House, it is the fact that many of these calls come from foreign jurisdictions, so the challenge is trying to work out the best way to deal with that.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 7MC.] On my way into the Second Reading debate, I received exactly that kind of call, encouraging me to make a whiplash claim for a car accident that I had suffered. For a moment, I wondered whether somebody had not put somebody else up to calling me in this fashion and whether this was not some kind of fuss. Sure enough, however, this is continuing to happen.
Julian Knight
Perhaps the company in question knew that the Minister was in for a bruising time in that debate. The absolute key to this whole debate is that this is about confidence in our legal system and in justice in compensation. The reality is that these phone calls and companies, which try to encourage people to make claims for any particular reason, are destroying confidence in that system. That is why the Bill is so necessary.
Rory Stewart
This is a really important point. At the core of our legal system there needs to be public trust and confidence in that system, and having an honest, proportionate, credible and calibrated system is absolutely central to the public continuing to have confidence.
With your permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to make one slightly technical point relating to the Bill, and in particular to the injuries mentioned in clause 1(2) and (3). Subsection (2) states:
“An injury falls within this subsection if it is—
(a) a sprain, strain, tear, rupture or lesser damage of a muscle, tendon or ligament in the neck, back or shoulder, or
(b) an injury of soft tissue associated with a muscle, tendon or ligament in the neck, back or shoulder.”
Subsection (3) states:
“An injury is excepted by this subsection if—
(a) it is an injury of soft tissue which is a part of or connected to another injury”.
I wish to pause on that point for a second, because we wish to make it clear, as the Government, that when we refer to the question of something being “connected”, we are not referring to it being connected simply by virtue of it taking place within the same accident.
I have the following on a formal piece of paper here, so that I can make my Pepper v. Hart statement to make sure that this is clear for the judiciary. In subsection (3), therefore, we have excluded those soft tissue injuries in the neck, back or shoulder which are part of or connected to another injury, so long as the other injury is not covered by subsection (2). The effect of subsection (3) would be to exclude, for example, damage to soft tissue which results only from the fracture of an adjoining bone or the tearing of muscles arising from a penetrating injury, which would otherwise fall within subsection (2). It has been suggested that the words “connected to another injury” in subsection (3)(a) could mean an injury resulting from the same accident. There is therefore a concern that a number of soft tissue injuries that would otherwise fall under the definition of whiplash injury will be excluded, and so not subject to the tariff of damages, simply by reason of being suffered on the same occasion as a whiplash injury.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 8MC.]
This is absolutely not the intention behind subsection (3). Nor is it an interpretation that stands scrutiny. The effect of that interpretation would be to significantly limit the scope of clause 1, in a quite arbitrary way, based on whether a person happened to have incurred any other injury in the same road traffic accident. That is not the intended effect, and nor do we believe that the clause will be interpreted by the courts in this way, as it would not be the normal meaning of the word “connected” in this context. To clarify then: the words “connected to” do not, and are not intended to, extend to situations where two or more injuries are connected solely by their cause—for example, a road traffic accident.
Stephen Kerr
Since the Minister was taking interventions, I thought I would chance my arm and intervene to ask, as a Scottish Member, what discussions he has had with his Scottish counterpart. The Scottish Government committed to introducing draft legislation mirroring this Bill, which is for England and Wales only. Where is that Bill? I understand that it has not even begun to make progress in the Scottish Parliament. What has the conversation been like with the Scottish Minister?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. That is not the issue before us.
Rory Stewart
Unfortunately, tempted though I am to respond, as you point out, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not entitled, particularly following some of the comic interventions from the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), to speculate on what the Scottish Government think they are doing. My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, however, that they chose to withdraw from this Bill.
We have talked a great deal about whiplash injuries and how we have attempted to address them, and I am happy for others to return to that question in interventions if they wish to do so, but we have perhaps had less time to address another central issue, which is the second part of the Bill, on the discount rate.
Robert Neill
I am pleased the Minister is mentioning that, because although we have concentrated on some controversial areas, putting the discount rate on a more modern footing is important and largely welcome, as is of course the prohibition on settlement without medical reports, which again has not been touched on but is very significant and an advance.
I want to use this opportunity to thank the Minister for what he said about the Justice Committee and the way he engaged with us and me personally. We have raised caveats with some of the objectives, and he has met us on a number of issues, if not all of them, which has enabled those of us who want to keep an eye on this and hold the Government and the industry’s feet to the fire to adopt Lord Brown of, um, Eaton, um—
Robert Neill
That one. I ought to know him, as a fellow bencher of Middle Temple, and to get his title right. The noble Lord Brown has said that with some reluctance—because it is a balancing act—he can accept the Government’s intentions in this regard. The way the Minister has handled this difficult balancing act in the Bill has made it much easier for a number of hon. Members to do the same.
Rory Stewart
I am tempted to reflect on the question from my hon. Friend the Chair of the Justice Committee. There is a central issue and challenge at the heart of the Bill. Dealing with this perfect storm of problems—unprovable conditions, high payments, recoverable costs and the actions of the insurance industry—is not easily done through primary legislation, so I pay tribute to right hon. and hon. Members on both sides for their focus on not just the primary legislation but elements of secondary legislation and some of the requirements around it.
The only way this reform will work—the only way to prevent excessive whiplash claims—is by being very nimble in anticipating exactly how claims management companies will operate and predicting how this phenomenon could change in the future. As my hon. Friend has pointed out, that means putting in place an absolute insistence that someone must have a medical examination. At the moment, many of these claims are settled without anybody having any medical examination at all. There must be a medical examination, and it must be conducted by a qualified GP, who is currently allocated through the portal in a random fashion so that people are not in a position to be able to conspire in any way as a result of the kind of doctor whom they are given. An approved GP with the right kind of training, or a medical specialist of another sort, will then give a prognosis that will allow them to proceed in a much more straightforward way.
That brings us to the second aspect, which, again, is not primarily a question of primary legislation. I refer to the design of the online portal. It is important to ensure that, as cases move to the small claims court, people have a straightforward, intuitive way of logging claims. One of the things that we will be doing over the next year is testing and retesting the portal in as many ways as we can to ensure that it actually works.
John Howell
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. He is being most generous.
I have been a great champion of the online work that is being done in the judiciary. I have spoken to Lord Briggs, and in my time in the courts, sitting with judges, I have championed it there. Does my hon. Friend agree that a very important element of the online system is the dramatic improvement in access to justice for people who are making claims? I know that a great deal of testing is involved, but does he also agree that the delay in its introduction is regrettable because it deprives people of that access to justice?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend has made a good point, but there is, of course, a delicate balance to be achieved. It is absolutely true that really good online systems can transform people’s lives and make access to justice much easier for them, but, equally, the Government do not always have an unblemished record when it comes to the delivery of IT systems. It is important to ensure that the system really works and that we have tested it again and again before rolling it out, because otherwise a system designed to increase access to justice may inadvertently decrease that access through the malfunctioning of the online portal.
Robert Neill
I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s generosity.
Some of the powerful evidence given to the Justice Committee came from two members of the judiciary who spoke about the potential unintended consequences and adverse impacts on the courts of the inability of an increasing number of litigants in person to work their way through the portal. Will my hon. Friend undertake to ensure that throughout the ongoing work on its design, the issues raised by members of the judiciary will remain central to the discussions, and that they will have a full role in the testing and roll-out?
Rory Stewart
The answer to both those questions is yes. An important concession was made in the House of Lords to extend the amount of time for testing, so that there is more time in which to make sure that the portal has been properly tested by, among others, the judiciary.
Part 2 of the Bill relates to the discount rate, and results from a very sudden change in the way in which compensation was paid to catastrophically injured victims. After 16 years in which the discount rate was set at a positive 2.5%, the last Lord Chancellor but one decided to reduce it to minus 0.75%, which radically changed what happens when someone is allocated a lump sum.
Let me remind the House of the formula that is applied. If, Mr Deputy Speaker, you were attempting to receive compensation for a projected 10 years of life, you were seeking £100,000 of care costs for each of those years, and inflation was, for the sake of argument, zero, you would receive only £1 million to cover you for your 10 years of projected life. Obviously, if inflation was higher, the real-terms increase in your care costs would mean that you would have to be afforded more, and the calculation that would need to be made in the awarding of the money would be how much of a return you could reasonably expect to receive for your money. If you could reasonably expect to receive a higher return for your £1 million, it might be possible to cover you for more years, and vice versa: fewer years would mean a lower return. The discount rate has been applied since the 1970s by the judiciary, and since 2001 by the Lord Chancellor, to enable the courts to calculate the fair rate to apply to a lump sum in the case of catastrophic injury. That sudden change from 2.5% to minus 0.75% meant that in the single year 2017-18 the NHS faced £404 million of costs. Projected forward at that rate, there are potentially not just hundreds of millions, but billions, of pounds of costs attached to the public Exchequer and through insurance premiums on the public themselves. Therefore, through the pre-legislative scrutiny conducted by the Justice Committee and the Government Actuary’s Department we have attempted to strike a proportional balance between the interests of often very vulnerable, catastrophically injured victims and those of society as a whole.
Julian Knight
Is it not the case that the mechanics of the discount rate as it was constituted by the Lord Chancellor before the previous one effectively mean that claimants are estimated to be receiving substantially more than 100% entitlement, and that is not what the system is about? We need a system that reflects current investment strategies and current investment returns.
Rory Stewart
This is a serious issue. The intention of the award made by the court is to provide 100% compensation. In other words, the intent of the court is to make sure that catastrophically injured victims receive the sum of money required to cover their lifetime care costs or loss of earnings. The best way of doing this is through a periodic payment order, which is why we have asked the Master of the Rolls and his committee to look at the use of PPOs. Under such orders, the real costs of people’s care year on year to the moment of their death will be covered; that is how the PPO operates. There is no need to give people a lump sum and speculate somehow on how long they are going to live.
In all cases we would encourage people to make much more use of PPOs. It is true that victims often do not want to accept PPOs. They would rather accept a lump sum either because they believe they can invest it and potentially generate more money or because they feel that were they to die prematurely they could pass on that lump sum to their relatives, but that is not the intention of the award. The award is designed to produce 100% compensation for their care costs.
Mary Robinson
We must get this right for people who have had those catastrophic injuries; their lives are changed forever. Getting this discount rate right is also important because it will affect how they will invest. What more can we do to ensure that they are not forced into, or tempted to, make riskier investments over the course of their lifetime, which will affect their care?
Rory Stewart
That is absolutely right. First, we must bear it in mind that when looking at compensation for somebody in terms of their lifetime care costs, there are a number of uncertainties. First, the court has to make a judgment as to how long they believe that catastrophically injured victim will live, which is very difficult. Secondly, they have to make some kind of judgment of the future performance of the financial markets in order to work out what a reasonable rate of return would be to cover those lifetime care costs. For that reason, the PPO is a much more reliable mechanism. However, in relation to the question of the risks taken by the individual, we have made it clear both in the Bill and subsequent statements what we intend in the decision of the Lord Chancellor. This will be a decision of the Lord Chancellor acting in a quasi-judicial role; this is not the Lord Chancellor acting on behalf of the Treasury, which is why the Lord Chancellor before the previous one ended up at a minus 0.75% rate, which would not have been the preferred Treasury rate. The Lord Chancellor is to make that decision on the basis that the individual concerned is a low-risk investor, and we would expect that individual to be taking less risk than would be taken by a traditional widows and orphans fund. In other words, because of the vulnerability of the investor and the importance of the return in covering things such as their lifetime care costs, we would be conservative in setting this rate.
We are confident that the rate that would be set would be better than the current rate, which imagines simply a gilt return, which does not reflect the actual nature of investing or of returns.
We are also clear that we are aiming for 100% compensation. We are not chasing a median compensation in which 50% would be under-compensated and 50% over-compensated. In fact, the Lord Chancellor would retain the discretion, on the advice of the expert committee and the Government Actuary’s Department, to be able to vary that rate. The judiciary would have the possibility of varying the rate in exceptional circumstances. Let us be in no doubt that we have an obligation to the public purse, to the NHS and to the public as a whole to control the costs. We have a moral responsibility to ensure that the compensation paid is 100% and not 125%, but we also have a moral obligation to ensure that vulnerable individuals who have suffered catastrophic injuries are properly compensated.
The Bill contains measures to reform whiplash claims and the discount rate, and it is the result of an admirable exercise in serious discussion in the upper House, in Committee, with the Justice Committee and through engagement with civil society since 2012. It contains a pragmatic, nuanced and calibrated set of measures that will deal with the excessive costs of whiplash and ensure that the discount rate is set in a way that balances the needs of our most vulnerable victims with the needs of the public purse. On the basis of that, and with great thanks to right hon. and hon. Members, I commend the Bill to the House.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
It is regrettable that we are here for the Third Reading of yet another Conservative Bill that unleashes a Tory attack on the rights of victims and undermines access to justice. When the record of this Conservative Government is written—probably sooner rather than later, if the media reports are to be believed—the way in which they have entrenched a two-tier justice system will be writ large on the political epitaph of the Prime Minister and this Government. The cruelty of the Conservatives’ cuts to legal aid will be one example of that. Their wilful policy of making it harder for people to take on dodgy landlords or to challenge a flawed benefits decision or cruel immigration decision will be another, at a time when people need that kind of support more than ever. The Conservatives’ record on employment tribunal fees will also be something that we in this country will look back on shame. It is not only unlawful, as the Supreme Court decided, but immoral.
Richard Burgon
I will not.
The Government’s intent was clear for all to see. They are making it harder for workers to take on unscrupulous bosses—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) wishes to speak for the insurance industry, he can do so. Step up!
Kevin Hollinrake
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I was not going to speak for the insurance companies. I was going to ask whether he welcomed the fact that the Bill will lower the price of insurance for consumers. Does he not welcome that?
Richard Burgon
There is absolutely no guarantee of that happening as a result of the Bill. That is not its real purpose. It actually undermines access to justice. As I said on Second Reading, this is yet another attack by the Government on our justice system and on the vulnerable. It is an attack that will, in practice, enrich the Conservatives’ friends in the insurance industry—[Interruption.] As we can hear, Conservative Members do not like that allegation, and they did not like it when I made it on Second Reading. Maybe it touches a nerve. The Government had a chance to disprove it by their actions, by backing amendments that would have ensured that the Bill would not simply line the pockets of the insurers, but they did not do that.
In their media briefing, the Government claim that the Bill is about cutting the number of fraudulent whiplash claims. Of course, no one would disagree with doing that, and had the Government taken measures that did that in reality and simply stopped there, they would undoubtedly have built a broad consensus and the Bill would have been uncontentious. They did not do that, however. Instead, they pressed on with measures that will penalise the many. That, alongside their dire record on access to justice, is why we still believe that these reforms are a smokescreen. I know that there are many Conservative Members who pride themselves on defending our justice system, on upholding the rule of law and on promoting access to justice. Today is the day for those Members to show that they put their commitment to those important principles above narrow party interest by rejecting the unjust proposals.
The Bill started in the Lords, where it faced substantial opposition, not only from Labour Members or Members representing other political parties, but pre-eminent legal experts, including former Lord Chief Justices, who expressed their concerns about the Bill’s impact on access to justice and the independence of the judiciary. The Government only narrowly defeated amendments—similar to those we have discussed today—that would have fundamentally altered the Bill for the better. Since then, they have not taken the opportunity to listen, not even to those pre-eminent legal experts. They have not tried to negotiate or to remove the barriers to justice that define the Bill. For those reasons and others that I will set out, Labour Members will vote against it.
Before addressing the Bill’s provisions, I wish to place on record other elements of the package of reforms that are intended to be passed through statutory instruments. Through that route, the Government want to increase the small claims limit from £1,000 to £2,000 in all cases and from £1,000 to £5,000 in road traffic accident cases. That will make it much harder for workers to get compensation for workplace injuries, and for genuinely injured people to get a fair settlement. A significantly greater number of claims will be dealt with through the small claims procedure, whereby no legal costs are usually awarded, even in successful claims.
When legal fees are not covered, tens of thousands of working people will simply be priced out of obtaining legal assistance, resulting in many pulling, dropping or not pursuing their cases. Of course, others, determined to secure justice, will fight on, but by representing themselves, at a massive disadvantage. An insurance company will be served by a legal expert fighting their case. The victim will be left to try to navigate a complicated legal procedure, placing greater pressure on our already overstrained courts. Some will choose to pay their legal fees out of their compensation, but then, in practice, they will be compensated less than a court found appropriate. As always, the wealthy will be able to afford the best legal advice and the rest will have to suffer.
Justice for the many, not the few is mere rhetoric for the Government. In reality, it is justice for the few, not the many. Is that why the Government are trying to sneak measures through the back door rather than putting them in the Bill so that they could be debated and amended? That is a cowardly attack on workers’ rights, pushed through without real debate or scrutiny. That just about sums the Government up.
I want to give some real-life examples of people affected by the reforms because far too often their voices are not heard in this place.
Mr Speaker
Order. I gently say to the shadow Secretary of State, who has come on later than he might have expected to speak—the Minister was within his rights to speak for an unusually long time for Third Reading—that the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) indicated to me several hours ago that she wished to contribute on Third Reading. It would be most unfortunate if there were not an opportunity for Back-Bench Members to speak. I am not blaming the hon. Gentleman, but I ask him whether he might take account of the interest on both sides of the House.
Richard Burgon
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.
Those people include a driver, working to take disabled people to and from a day centre, who, because he had not been properly trained, fell off the vehicle while assisting a wheelchair user and suffered a back injury. They include a cleaner in a hospital who, while mopping the floor, went to pick up some papers and pricked her finger on an unsafely discarded needle. She suffered a psychological and physical injury. Just imagine the fear she must have felt as she waited for the test results. Those are examples of cases that have been sent to my office, and of real people who would be penalised by the new system. Those are the people whose voices the Government are content to drown out with their rhetoric that labels people fraudsters and says that they are on the make when they are anything but.
When we consider the Bill, we should not forget that there was a 90% drop-off in employment tribunal claims when employments tribunal fees came into effect. Something similar could happen again with personal injury cases, with genuine victims priced out of justice and deterred from pursuing a claim for an injury that was not their fault.
It is not only Labour who oppose this Conservative attack on access to justice. The Justice Committee has explained that
“increasing the small claims limit for personal injury creates significant access to justice concerns.”
We agree with the Justice Committee and the recommendation of the Lord Justice Jackson review that the small claims limit should be increased in line with inflation, which would mean a rise to £1,500, not the £2,000 currently proposed. We have repeatedly tabled amendments to the Bill, and it is a shame that the Government have not listened. We have also made clear our position on tariffs, and it is a shame that the Government have not responded in a meaningful way to those amendments.
I am conscious that Mr Speaker has asked that I shortly draw my remarks to a conclusion, but I urge every Member of this House to look at the chart produced by the House of Commons Library at page 30 of the briefing and ask themselves whether this is just. What does the chart show? It shows that compensation for an injury lasting up to six months will fall to a fixed £470, down from the current average of £2,150—down by three quarters. Compensation for an injury lasting 10 to 12 months will be £1,250, down from the current average of £3,100—down 60%. Compensation for an injury lasting 16 to 18 months will be £2,790, down from £3,950—down by 30%. Is that what the Conservatives mean by justice?
Injured people who have done nothing wrong are losing out and being placed at a huge disadvantage. If Conservative Members do not want to take Labour’s word for it, they should at least think very carefully about what was said in the House of Lords. The point has already been made that this Bill undermines the independence of the judiciary with the tariff system. We have commented on the definition of whiplash and on the fact that the Government are making out that fraud is taking place on an industrial scale. Do something about cold calling from claims management companies; do not target injured people.
Why not exempt children? People outside this place will not believe that the Government did not concede on our common-sense amendment and have refused to budge on the discount rate.
The central purpose of the Bill is to tip the scales of justice against injured people and in favour of insurance companies’ profits. The Conservatives have shown that this is about lining the pockets of insurance companies by refusing to vote for Labour’s considered amendments, which would have protected vulnerable people and safeguarded fair treatment for victims. This attack on justice is not the first by this Government since 2010—after legal aid and employment tribunal fees—and I fear it will not be the last Tory attack on access to justice.
The wider measures that the Conservatives plan to introduce alongside the Bill will leave tens of thousands of people unable to enforce their legal rights. The Bill may well turn out to be the thin end of the wedge for yet more restrictions on justice in all personal injury cases. If it passes, it will be celebrated as a great victory by the insurance companies in whose interests it has been conceived and drafted, and it will be ordinary people, whose rights are gradually chipped away, who pay the price. That is why Labour will be voting against Third Reading tonight.
Eddie Hughes
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), although I was slightly concerned that, as he reached his peroration, a sudden stop in his speaking might have caused some whiplash to himself, but he seems to have escaped from the Dispatch Box unaffected.
The Joseph Malins poem “The Ambulance down in the Valley” tells the story of a village on a cliff edge and, instead of putting up a fence around the cliff edge, the residents decide to put an ambulance down in the valley to treat people when they fall and are injured at the bottom, but that is not this Conservative Government’s approach.
The Government announced in 2015 that they were investing £1.5 billion in smart motorways to help to alleviate the stop-start traffic that is so often the cause of collisions that result in whiplash. Although I am sure you and I are not prone to this, Mr Speaker, lesser mortals than us occasionally use their mobile phone while driving, and this terrible distraction can also lead to accidents that cause whiplash. So what have this Government done about it? In 2017 they increased the penalty for those caught using a mobile phone while driving to six points and a fine of £200. For those caught a second time, the penalty rises to 12 points, a possible ban and a possible £1,000 fine. So it is important that we do not just talk about dealing with the problem of whiplash—how about we try to alleviate it or remove it in the first place? That is what this Government are doing.
This Government are also making sure that we look after the just about managing. In my constituency, which I understand is the most deprived one represented by a Conservative MP, every pound these people have matters to them; it is incredibly important. So if this Bill can go some way to reducing insurance premiums, surely that is to be valued. I have heard the figure of £35 mentioned. Some people might consider that to be insignificant, but when someone is on a low salary, as people in my constituency are, of course every pound matters.
That is not the only thing we have done. When I think about my constituents tuning into Parliament TV, as I am sure they often do at 10 to 7 on a Tuesday evening, I often think they will be considering the debate in isolation. So my job, as their MP, is to try to bring some context to the discussion. They will think, “This is good. I am glad we are introducing this policy that might help to reduce my insurance premium. But what else are you doing on our behalf, Eddie?” I would say, “Well, I am part of the Government that increased the tax-free allowance to £11,850 last year.” To people in my constituency on an average salary of £27,000 that is a hugely significant difference. What else did we do? We increased the minimum wage to £7.83, which has helped 2 million workers. Therefore, we need to consider this in context.
It is so important that we have the injury tariff in this Bill, because that will give us the opportunity to streamline claims and lower premiums, with the hope that that will then be passed on to my constituents. There are a number of things to be valued in the Bill, all of them good Conservative principles. They are just one part of a theme that runs through this Parliament, which is about looking after all the people of the United Kingdom.
Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)
Thank you for the opportunity to speak in the debate, Mr Speaker. I will try to be as brief as possible. Of course, all the Bill’s clauses refer and apply only to England and Wales, so I thank the Minister for his engagement with me about them, many of which will be of benefit, including those on access to justice at the lower end in relation to the whiplash issues and on the adjustment of the discount rate. I want to raise a particular issue on which I have engaged with the Minister on an ongoing basis: the discount rate situation in Northern Ireland.
As a result of the stagnant and stalled political solution in Northern Ireland, we have not been able to address the unfair discount rate of 2.5%. Let me put that into context. Under that discount rate, an 18-year-old with £100,000 per annum of requirements will get about £5 million to £6 million, whereas under the changed UK rate, that sum would be £9 million. We are therefore talking about a hugely significant difference, particularly for those who have suffered catastrophic injuries through no fault of their own, and it needs to be addressed urgently. Yes, the adjustment of the discount rate under this Bill will narrow the gap, but that gap will still be significant. I have asked the Minister to consider extending the Bill to cover Northern Ireland. I know the legislation will head back to the House of Lords and I understand fully the challenges in introducing this issue, but it is now clear that it could be extended. This is a non-controversial issue. There are people in need and an unfairness in place, so I ask the Minister seriously to consider extending the provision to address this injustice in Northern Ireland.
I beg your indulgence, Mr Speaker, in my putting on record the fact that today is the 25th anniversary of the Shankill bomb. That IRA bomb killed nine innocent civilians, including two children—13-year-old Leanne and seven-year-old Michelle. I just want to pay a tribute, because this Bill is about access to justice. The person who was convicted of that bombing served just seven years and was released under the terms of the Belfast agreement in 2007—that was seven years for nine innocent lives taken by that bomb. I do want to say on record that my thoughts are with the families at this very difficult time. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Kevin Hollinrake
May I concur with the comments of the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) about that terrible tragedy, and also the terrible injustice that followed in the process of the prosecution of that crime? Our thoughts are with all the families at this moment in time.
The Bill is surely about fairness—making sure that we look after the interests of consumers. I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) when he said that this Government are championing the cause of the consumer and making sure that we drive down the costs of living. There have been many examples of where we have been able to do that over recent months, such as the cap on energy costs, of course, and the Tenant Fees Bill, which is, as you know, Mr Speaker, something that is very close to my heart as it is related to my previous profession. I say that despite the significant hit to our business—Members can check my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—because it is absolutely the right thing to do. We should look after the interests of consumers and make sure that their interests are fairly represented.
There are other areas in which we seek to legislate, such as leasehold reform to make sure that people do not find that they are paying unfair charges for leasehold properties. That is another instance of how we are trying to drive down the costs of living for our consumers.
The hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) indicated from a sedentary position that he questioned the relevance of my hon. Friend’s points about the fact that we are trying to drive up the standard of living and reduce the costs of living, but it was absolutely relevant, as this is a key strategy of the Government. We want to make sure that we reduce the cost of living and increase the standard of living.
The Bill also, of course, fulfils a manifesto commitment. We were clear in our 2017 manifesto that we would deliver on the promise to reduce insurance costs, and that is what this is all about. We are still making sure that people get fair compensation, but we are reducing car insurance costs for the majority. That, along with simplifying the system, is the principle of this Bill.
It is very disturbing to hear my hon. Friend’s comment that this country is the whiplash capital of the world. It is therefore only right that we take action in this area and try to reduce the excessive costs of whiplash compensation, which do, of course, affect us all. This is not about saying that we will not give people fair and appropriate compensation when accidents happen, but it is about clamping down on the worst excesses. With a 40% increase in the number of claims since 2005-06, it is only right, when our roads are actually safer, that we make sure that any compensation paid for accidents on the road is commensurate with the injury itself.
It is absolutely right that we stand up for genuine claimants, but we must provide fair compensation for those claimants. The Opposition’s amendment 2 was simply a wrecking amendment. It is clear what this Bill is about, and that amendment would have hit right at its heart. Without being able to control the tariffs for compensation, the Bill would have been pointless. I guess that it will not be the last wrecking amendment that we will see in this place over the next few months, but it is absolutely right that this Bill, which implements a manifesto commitment, passes through the House.
It is also right that we try to make sure that insurers pass on the savings from which they will benefit as a result of the Bill. It is right, too, that there is clear supervision of the rules to make sure that those savings are passed on to the consumer.
Let me briefly touch on claims management companies. As my hon. Friend pointed out, despite the fact that many have a bad reputation, they do a very good job in making sure that, when compensation is due, that compensation is paid. I have slight concerns that these claims management companies will now come under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority. Hon. Members will recognise that much of the work that I have done in this place has had the aim of trying to hold the banks to account for some of their worst excesses, particularly against small businesses, following the financial crash in 2008, but the regulator has seemed incapable of doing that in many cases. Many people think that the regulator is too close to the banking sector, and I am slightly concerned that it is regulating both ends of the process.
Business without Debate
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Speaker
We come now to a number of motions that would, if objected to, be subject to the deferred Division procedure. I would like to take motion 3 first, and on its own.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Electricity
That the draft Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2018, which was laid before this House on 19 July, be approved.—(Iain Stewart.)
The Speaker’s opinion as to the decision of the Question being challenged, the Division was deferred until Wednesday 24 October (Standing Order No. 41A).
Mr Speaker
With the leave of the House, I propose to take motions 4 to 8 together.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Exiting the European Union (Fees and Charges)
That the draft Department for Transport (Fees) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 19 July, be approved.
Local Government
That the draft Newcastle Upon Tyne, North Tyneside and Northumberland Combined Authority (Establishment and Functions) Order 2018, which was laid before this House on 4 September, be approved.
Armed Forces
That the draft Armed Forces (Terms of Service) (Amendments Relating to Flexible Working) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 18 July, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Civil Aviation)
That the draft Civil Aviation (Insurance) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 23 July, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Merchant Shipping)
That the draft Merchant Shipping (Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of Carbon Dioxide Emissions) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 23 July, be approved.—(Iain Stewart.)
Question agreed to.
Mr Speaker
We come to motion 9. Not moved.
SITTING IN WESTMINSTER HALL (29 OCTOBER)
Ordered,
That, notwithstanding the provisions of Standing Order No 10(1)(a), the sitting in Westminster Hall on Monday 29 October shall begin at 5.30 pm and may then continue for up to three hours.—(Iain Stewart.)
Delegated Legislation (Committees)
Ordered,
That the motion in the name of Andrea Leadsom relating to the Electoral Commission be referred to a Delegated Legislation Committee.—(Iain Stewart.)
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I notice that the Government decided not to move motion 9 on time limits on speeches. I was ready to object to it, despite being a member of the Procedure Committee, because I think that it affects intimately the life of many Members of Parliament.
I want to get your advice, Mr Speaker, which is why I think this is a genuine point of order. If I had simply objected to the motion, presumably there would have been a deferred Division, but what I would really like is a debate, because I think that Members are very interested in time limits on speeches. How can we get a debate about this on the Floor of the House?
Mr Speaker
Repeated objection could secure the outcome that the hon. Gentleman seeks. I should just say, for the purposes of clarification, that the motion in question was not deferrable. If memory serves me correctly, motions 3 to 8 were potentially deferrable, but motion 9, which excited the hon. Gentleman to the point that he wished to argue against it and which was not moved by the Government, was not a motion subject to a deferred Division. It was what is known in the trade—not least by our previously bewigged friends who advise the Chair—as a “nod or nothing”, which means that it proceeds on the basis that nobody objects to it, but if somebody objects to it, it does not proceed. If it comes forward on the same basis again and the hon. Gentleman objects—and possibly even without it coming forward on that basis again—time could well be found for a debate. At that point, he would be able to explain, doubtless eloquently and possibly at length, why he was opposed to it. I hope that that is helpful to him, and when he repairs home, he can tell Lady Leigh all about it.
Petitions
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
I rise to present this petition on the green deal scheme on behalf of the residents of North Ayrshire and Arran. It involves the Government-backed scheme called Home Energy and Lifestyle Management Systems, or HELMS.
The petition states:
The petition of the residents of North Ayrshire and Arran,
Declares that the Government backed Green Deal Scheme has affected petitioners as we have suffered a detriment both to our finances, our private and family lives; further that many vulnerable residents have invested their life savings in good faith, and others have accrued up to £17,000 in debt to pay for the work that was carried out; and further that in many cases the installer did not apply for building warrants and as a result we are unable to sell our properties or have the assurance that they are safe to live in, or can be insured.
The petitioners therefore urge the House of Commons to ensure that the Government will compensate and protect people who have found themselves suffering a detriment because of the Government backed Scheme, and take steps to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P002272]
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
I rise to present this petition on behalf of my constituents in Kilmarnock and Loudoun who have been affected by a combination of green deal mis-selling with the company HELMS and the lack of intervention by and the general failed policy of the UK Government. These constituents have been left paying more in their bills than they would otherwise have had to pay. Some have had feed-in tariffs fraudulently transferred. They have been left without building warrants and left to pay increased statutory fees. They have been left with loans of up to 25 years for photovoltaic panels that actually have a shorter lifespan than the 25-year loan, and they have been left with debt accrued against their properties, which in some cases they cannot sell or even insure.
The petition states:
The petitioners therefore urge the House of Commons to ensure that the Government will compensate and protect people who have found themselves suffering a detriment because of the Government backed Scheme, and take steps to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of residents of Kilmarnock and Loudoun,
Declares that the Government backed Green Deal Scheme has affected petitioners as we have suffered a detriment both to our finances, our private and family lives; further that many vulnerable residents have invested their life savings in good faith, and others have accrued up to £17,000 in debt to pay for the work that was carried out; and further that in many cases the installer did not apply for building warrants and as a result we are unable to sell our properties or have the assurance that they are safe to live in, or can be insured.
The petitioners therefore urge the House of Commons to ensure that the Government will compensate and protect people who have found themselves suffering a detriment because of the Government backed Scheme, and take steps to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P002271]
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I did not want to throw you, Mr Deputy Speaker, by being in my old place, but it is nice to be back up here on the Back Benches for a temporary period.
I rise to present a petition on behalf of my constituents opposing proposals to extend the Bredbury Parkway industrial estate in the Tame valley, Greater Manchester. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) for being in the Chamber to present the same petition from his constituents. This shows the value of this green space to both our constituencies. I thank the residents of Denton and Reddish—a total of 1,440 residents in all—who have signed this petition online and in writing.
The petition declares:
The petition of residents of the United Kingdom,
Declares that proposals to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate deep into the Tame Valley would involve large-scale developments on the Green Belt land, which is a valuable barrier to urban sprawl and is hugely valued by local people, particularly in the areas of Bredbury, Woodley, Denton and Tameside; further declares that this development would destroy the openness of this section of the Tame Valley and damage the visual amenity from the Haughton Dale and Hulme’s Wood Local Nature Reserves; further declare concerns over HGV traffic in the area and the impact that the proposals would have on an already congested Stockport Road and Ashton Road, and the associated effects on the environment.
The petitioners oppose plans to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Tameside Council and the Department for Communities and Local Government not to support the extension of the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate; and to further urge that the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF) must follow principles of a ‘Brownfield First’ strategy, so that previously developed land, including derelict or unused sites, must be fully considered before Green Belt is released for development.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P002273]
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
I rise to present a petition in similar terms to that presented by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne). It has been a pleasure to work with him—he and I are equally committed to the green belt in Stockport and Tameside respectively and wish to encourage a brownfield-first policy. This petition, to protect green-belt land near the Bredbury industrial estate, is added to the similar petitions signed by thousands of my constituents demanding that the Greater Manchester spatial framework is radically redrawn. It is a pleasure for me to present it on behalf of my constituents.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of residents of the United Kingdom,
Declares that proposals to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate deep into the Tame Valley would involve large-scale developments on the Green Belt land, which is a valuable barrier to urban sprawl and is hugely valued by local people, particularly in the areas of Bredbury, Woodley, Denton and Tameside; further declares that this development would destroy the openness of this section of the Tame Valley and damage the visual amenity from the Haughton Dale and Hulme’s Wood Local Nature Reserves; further declare concerns over HGV traffic in the area and the impact that the proposals would have on an already congested Stockport Road and Ashton Road, and the associated effects on the environment.
The petitioners oppose plans to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Tameside Council and the Department for Communities and Local Government no to support the extension of the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate; and to further urge that the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF) must follow principles of a ‘Brownfield First’ strategy, so that previously developed land, including derelict or unused sites, must be fully considered before Green Belt is released for development.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P002274]
Elder Abuse
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair for my first Adjournment debate, Mr Deputy Speaker, as you were for my maiden speech. Long may this tradition continue.
I want to raise the increasingly important issue of elder abuse, a terrible and perhaps poorly understood crime. At its heart is the trust that an older person may rightly expect to establish with another person for reasons of care, but sadly that trust is frequently violated, leading to physical, financial, psychological and even sexual abuse and to some deeply troubling outcomes for victims.
I want to express my disappointment that, to my mind at least, the issue is too often overlooked at national level. Here in Parliament there have been only a handful of mentions of elder abuse in recent years, even though it is a real and growing problem that can occur in an institutional care setting or a private home. Despite elder abuse being such a widespread concern, it does not dominate our discourse in the way that such a despicable act should. That is disappointing, and perhaps some newspapers are right when they accuse us here in Parliament of marginalising a forgotten generation.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I am sure he is aware as I am that families have often had to hide cameras in care homes to film the abuse going on there—we have seen documentaries about that. I agree with him that something should be done about the problem, because elderly people have made a major contribution to this country. Does he agree that there should be better training and better pay for carers, and that the law should be tightened up?
Giles Watling
I agree that there should be financial support, and I also agree about CCTV—I shall come on to those points a little later.
We clearly have a lot to make up for in Parliament, and I hope that today’s debate will prompt some constructive action and, at the very least, go some way towards raising awareness at national level.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the need to raise the issue. I, too, have had constituents who have experienced elder abuse. As people grow older they become more isolated, so the risk of abuse increases. Does he agree that safeguarding adults boards should have a specific focus on older people, and should assess the risk to them and come up with prevention plans?
Giles Watling
I could not agree more. Those boards should have a key role in ensuring that our older people are safe and secure—that is what this is all about.
I am the MP for a constituency where more than 32% of residents are aged over 65—including me, incidentally. That is the highest percentage of any constituency in the country, so it is hardly surprising that I am leading this debate.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend kindly for giving way; he is being very generous. He is portraying this as a British problem, but does he agree that it is not just a British problem? The World Health Organisation has published material that shows that this is happening all around the world. It is a generational problem that we have to deal with, as he rightly points out.
Giles Watling
I absolutely take my hon. Friend’s point that this happens all over the world, but we must clean up our own act first and make sure that we are far ahead of the game, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Where we lead, others follow.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Each of us in the House tonight has experience of this issue from our constituencies and it is very important. We are absolutely disgusted by the abuse of elderly people in homes across the UK. Is he aware of the recent poll by the charity Action on Elder Abuse, which found that nearly one in 10 older people had experienced serious physical, mental or financial abuse in homes? That would indicate that 23,000 older people have been affected in Northern Ireland and nearly 1 million across the UK. Does he agree that one way of tackling this is to ensure that adequate safeguarding is in place, for example, in care homes, to ensure that older people do not suffer at the hands of those who are there to care for and not abuse them?
Giles Watling
I could not agree more, and I have seen those statistics. We have to remember that this happens not only in care homes, but in private homes where carers come to look after elderly people.
I must admit that since my election last year, elder abuse has not been as prominent in my mind as perhaps it should have been. In fact, it was a meeting with some of our local pensioners who formed the very good group TenPAG—the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group—in August this year that made me fully appreciate the need to tackle this problem. Having gone away from that meeting and investigated the matter further, I was deeply disturbed by what I found. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, the statistics are truly shocking. There are 1 million victims of elder abuse every year in the UK, but here is another statistic: only 0.3% of the reported incidents result in a successful criminal conviction. That is not good enough. Convicted abusers often escape with flimsy sentences and trivial fines.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech and being generous with his time, which I appreciate is limited. I have also had experience of constituents raising such matters, and particularly financial abuse of the elderly. To declare an interest, I also used to prosecute for Oxfordshire trading standards and came across many people who had been abused in that sense.
There is one category that my hon. Friend has not mentioned: sometimes in their own homes, people can be befriended by strangers for the precise purpose of exploiting and abusing them. Does he condemn that as much as I do—I am sure he does—and will he commend and encourage the volunteer support groups who do so much to ensure that people are not isolated and that such problems are uncovered?
Giles Watling
Absolutely, and I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I could not agree more that elder abuse in people’s homes is, in some way, even more chilling, and I will come to that shortly.
This is not just an appalling failure of justice; the lax approach to punishment fails to deter would-be abusers, who see older people as a soft target, as my hon. Friend pointed out. We must do more to protect older people. We would not fail the victims of child, domestic or sexual abuse in this way, so why are we seemingly happy to fail the victims of elder abuse? Why are we happy for there to be a lower conviction rate for the abuse of older people than for racially motivated crimes, homophobic or transphobic crimes, domestic abuse and disability hate crime? It is simply unacceptable, and I propose that we put elder abuse in its own category in line with these other appalling crimes to improve the justice outcome for victims.
As we have said, elder abuse can take place in a care setting or in a private home, and chillingly the abuser is often well known to the person being abused. They may be a partner, a child or relative, a friend or neighbour, a care worker, a health or social worker or another professional. Older people may even be abused by the person who cares for them—that sounds like an oxymoron, but there it is—and this abuse is potentially very easy to carry out. I remember being put in charge of my late mother’s affairs following the death of my father. I was astonished at the sweeping powers that the enduring power of attorney gave me—powers that could so easily be abused. Fortunately, my mother had a devoted son who saw her live out her days in comfort and security, but sadly that is not always the case, and when that trust is abused the penalties should be severe.
Abuse can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone, and that has led to some truly awful situations. In Sussex recently, £10 million was stolen from vulnerable fraud victims in just one year. Some 89% of the victims were aged over 60 and 63% were living alone. In Cheshire, as we all may recall, care home workers were filmed abusing an elderly, blind dementia victim. Those abusers were spared jail, despite the public outcry. In Cambridgeshire, a pensioner aged 105 was assaulted—the oldest known victim of elder abuse so far. These incidents, all of which have taken place within the last 18 months, should never have occurred, and I feel for those people who have had to live through these harrowing experiences in what are supposed to be the golden years of their lives. These are people who have done so much to make our country what it is today.
I wish it were not so, but in Clacton we are not immune to these crimes either. In 2016, a resident in my constituency was defrauded out of £57,000 by his carer, who was sentenced to just 15 months in prison, and in 2013, 16 people were arrested for financially abusing 39 people. All the victims were from the Clacton area and were aged between 65 and 99. I have no doubt that many colleagues will have similar stories in their own constituencies.
I also have no doubt that colleagues will have heard about abusive situations in care homes. Unfortunately, these incidents are becoming more common. In fact, researchers at University College London found that 99% of carers across 92 care homes had witnessed or taken part in troubling behaviour. That is an appalling statistic. It is absolutely shocking and a good enough reason, I think, to install CCTV cameras in communal areas. I know that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) is pushing for that outcome, and I give him my full support.
We would be naive to think, however, that elder abuse only occurs in the care home. As we have said, it can be just as common when care is taking place in the home, where standards can slip, corners can be cut and monitoring can become a side issue, thanks to pressures that mean keeping the system going becomes more important than safeguarding. Domiciliary care, or care in the home, is our most common and important form of care, and we need urgently to address long-term social care funding issues in this sector before we see quality suffer.
One way to do that is to secure the future of the adult social care precept, which has been temporarily lifted over the past three years to allow councils to raise additional funds. In my view, that is a good thing. I hope, then, to see the adult social care precept become a permanent resource for local councils, not just to give a funding boost, but to provide a clear long-term funding model outside of general council tax. However, although I am pleased that the Government have also announced a £240 million increase in this sector, I would also point out that it is not just about money.
To make that point further, I should mentioned Guide at Broomfield, a nursing home in Braintree. It decided to close earlier this year and attributed that closure to financial difficulty. If one consults the Care Quality Commission report, however, one will see that the home’s basic failings had nothing to do with funding. Residents were being left in soiled clothing, and that is a basic standard failing, not a financial one. We could compare that with Beaumont House in Walton-on-the-Naze, in my constituency, which I had the pleasure of visiting recently. It is like a five-star hotel, with all the comforts of a house, where guests are treated like human beings, not just clients. It is not a bad place. I thought I would go there once the good people of Clacton were done with me.
I have no doubt that funding is important, but no amount of money will make up for poor standards, and if we are really to really elder abuse, we need to talk about, and rigorously maintain, standards within the adult social care sector. I was interested to read the suggestion from Age UK about how national guidance should be developed on how conversations about abuse can be started and effectively supported by family members, professionals and the older people themselves. I would certainly back this proposal, and I hope the Minister will meet with Age UK to discuss it. I would also like a statutory definition of a crime against an older person and specific elder-protecting legislation to be introduced, as neither currently exists.
What I really want, however, is to see elder abuse become an aggravated offence, although in calling for that change I recognise the steps that the Government have taken to tackle it. For instance, in 2015 domestic abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour became specific offences under the Serious Crime Act. In the same year, a wilful neglect offence was introduced under the Criminal Justice and Courts Act, so there is now criminal liability when a person has been placed under the care of a medical professional. According to the Government’s impact assessment, the new offence was designed to
“ensure that those responsible for the worst failures in care can be held accountable”,
and to
“act as a deterrent, moderating the conduct of individuals who might otherwise be disposed to behave in ways that would constitute an offence.”
Those are laudable aims, but that has not happened. Perpetrators are not being held to account with firm punishments, and the new offence has failed to prevent any further abuses in care. The example from Cheshire that I gave earlier, and the research carried out by UCL, both took place after its introduction. What is more, the new wilful neglect offence, by its very nature, fails to prevent the abuse of older people who are living in their own homes outside a traditional care setting. They are the forgotten victims of elder abuse, and we must not forget them as we seek to address this issue. To protect those who are still living in their own homes, as well as older people in care who may be vulnerable, we must introduce a new offence that punishes elder abuse properly, regardless of its location. Making elder abuse an aggravated offence will do that, which means that there will be harsher sentences for perpetrators.
A mandatory sentencing uplift is already in place for hate crimes motivated by prejudice based on someone’s race, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. I ask, quite simply, why not age? An anomaly in the law needs to be addressed, and that is a change that we can deliver now. As part of the Government’s efforts to update the hate crime action plan, the Law Commission is currently undertaking a review of hate crime legislation, and I am sending it a letter today. The Government have committed themselves to acting on the commission’s specific proposals, and during the review it will consider whether to make elder abuse an aggravated offence. I hope that it, and the Government, will agree with me that this change is needed now.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
Thank you for calling me, Sir Deputy Speaker! I did not have a chance to say that the other day.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling) on securing a debate on a matter that is of immense importance to all of us. He has done a great deal to represent his constituents in relation to policing and community safety issues. I understand that a further 12 officers will be sworn in soon in Tendring district, and I thank him for the important contribution that he is making to the House in this regard.
No older person in the United Kingdom should have to suffer abuse or exploitation at the hands of those who prey on the vulnerable. Criminals should not have the opportunity to target the elderly, but those who do should know that they will not get away with it. Older people should not have to fear being targeted, but those who are should receive the right support. It is a fundamental Government responsibility to keep people safe, and never does that responsibility carry greater weight than when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable in our society. That is why the Government take a multi-pronged approach to tackling this issue, working with local government, the police, and the private and voluntary sectors.
First, we need to ensure that we have the right legislative powers to deter and tackle criminals who target the elderly. Secondly, we need to ensure that all older people are connected to the fabric of society. While society as a whole becomes ever more interconnected, older people across the country still suffer loneliness and social isolation—themes that my hon. Friend drew out so cogently. Thirdly, when older people do suffer abuse, we need to ensure that the justice system treats them appropriately, and that they have ready access to the right support.
Rachael Maskell
The all-party parliamentary group for ageing and older people carried out an inquiry recently with a view to establishing a commission for the rights of older people, so that they can have a voice and an agency in society. Would the Minister support such a proposal?
Victoria Atkins
I am most interested to hear of that work by the all-party group. If plans are drawn up, I will of course look at them with great care, as will other Ministers across Government who have responsibility for helping to look after older people, because although I am answering as Home Office Minister, clearly this issue has huge impact across the Department of Health and Social Care, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and other Departments.
Under current hate crime legislation, targeting an elderly person because they are vulnerable is already an aggravating factor in sentencing. The sentencing guidelines make it clear that these offences should result in a more severe sentence, but we want to look at whether this goes far enough. Last week, we launched the Government’s refreshed hate crime action plan, and as part of that have asked the Law Commission to carry out an independent and wide-ranging review of hate crime legislation. The review will explore whether current legislation is effective and if new hate crime strands should be introduced, such as crimes against the elderly. While we would not wish to prejudge the outcomes of the review, we will study the findings with great interest and will not hesitate to act if there are ways to improve our response. While these are complex issues that deserve proper consideration, all crimes against the elderly are utterly unacceptable, and we will always treat them as such.
But there is more to tackling abuse against older people than making sure we have appropriate legislation in place. Last week the Prime Minister announced the Government’s new loneliness strategy—with cross-party support, I hasten to add. Some 200,000 older people have not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month. Loneliness is linked to a range of damaging health impacts such as heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s, and lonely people are more likely to visit a GP or A&E.
Loneliness can cause people to feel detached from their neighbours and neighbourhoods, which may increase their vulnerability to becoming victims of crime, and then being even further isolated if they fall victim to crime. As part of the Home Office’s contribution to the loneliness strategy, we are working with Royal Mail, local authorities and other partners to trial a scheme called “safe and connected”. This involves post workers checking on vulnerable older people twice a week, and reporting any problems to local authorities and voluntary sector organisations. We are investing over £450,000 in this scheme this year, and we are delighted that it has already been rolled out in New Malden, Liverpool and Whitby.
We know, however, that those who are isolated might be more likely to be victims of fraud, and, likewise, being a victim of fraud itself can be an isolating experience. We have therefore also provided support to National Trading Standards for the expansion of its scam marshals scheme. Scam marshals share their own experiences, help others to report and recognise scams, and send any scam mail to the National Trading Standards scam team so it can be used in future investigations and trials.
It is also important to ensure that when older people are victims of abuse and exploitation, the justice system treats them appropriately and they have ready access to the right support services. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton mentioned the ability of older people, perhaps those suffering from dementia, to give evidence in trials. I used to prosecute fraud, and some cases involved fraud committed against the NHS or social care. One of our greatest difficulties was in getting statements from elderly people who perhaps lacked legal capacity because of their conditions; without their evidence it is difficult to prove cases. We have asked Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services to lead a joint thematic inspection into older people’s experience of the justice system. We will be looking closely at the findings and what we might do to make improvements.
Understandably, Members raised the issue of care, and one Member asked whether the care of elderly people could be included in the safeguarding adults boards. I am told that their purpose is to help and safeguard adults with care and support needs, which includes older people as well.
Through the skills for care programme, which is a piece of work by the Department of Health and Social Care, we are looking to provide services with help and guidance on recruiting people with the right values and skills, and implementing a care certificate for frontline staff to ensure that older and vulnerable people receive the high quality care that they need. In addition, the Government have introduced a fit and proper person test to hold directors to account for care, and brought in new criminal offences of ill treatment and wilful neglect by care workers.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton mentioned domestic abuse, and he will know that the Government are hoping to introduce a landmark piece of draft legislation on that by the end of this year. Through my work on that Bill, I have learned, sadly, that domestic abuse can be committed against older people in the home, sometimes by carers, sometimes by members of their own family and, on occasion, by their own children. It is particularly difficult for parents to admit to people outside the family circle that they are victims of abuse at the hands of their children.
We have funded specific services to provide targeted support to hard-to-reach groups, and this is something that we will be looking at carefully across the House during the passage of the Bill. For example, we have provided funding to a charity called Jacksons Lane in north London to engage older people in community-based activities in order to increase their understanding of wellbeing, harassment and domestic abuse and of the support services available to tackle these issues. When it comes to the most heinous crimes against older people, such as domestic and sexual violence, we are determined to ensure that victims get the right support. We know that elderly people can face particular challenges in disclosing abuse, and we are looking at options to provide them with more support, through the draft domestic abuse Bill and through a package of non-legislative measures.
In whatever form abuse takes place, we are working to ensure that we have the right levers in place to protect older people, and that they have access to the right support when they need it. I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the important issue of how we can better protect older people from abuse, and of course we are always open to new ideas and suggestions, and to new circumstances of abuse being brought to our attention. We will continue to look for innovative ways for national and local government, agencies and charities to support the services that help older people to protect themselves from, and recover from, all forms of abuse.
Question put and agreed to.
DRAFT HIGHER EDUCATION (TRANSPARENCY CONDITION AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT) (ENGLAND) REGULATIONS 2018
(5 years, 5 months ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Mr Sam Gyimah)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Higher Education (Transparency Condition and Financial Support) (England) Regulations 2018.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank the noble Lords on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for their scrutiny of regulations under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, which were laid in the other place in June and detailed in the Committee’s 35th report. I aim to speak today to draft regulations encompassing two elements of the Act that require approval.
Section 9 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 relates to the transparency condition. We have made much progress in widening access and success for students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups in higher education. Following the latest data from UCAS, as of the end of clearing, university application acceptance rates for English 18-year-olds to full-time study are at record levels. The proportion of disadvantaged 18-year-olds entering full-time higher education increased from 13.6% in 2009 to 24.4% in 2017—also a record rate for English applicants.
However, we want to go further and strive to ensure that anyone, no matter what their background, who has the talent and potential to benefit from higher education, is able to do so. I particularly want further improvements in the rates of progress for students from disadvantaged backgrounds going to the most selective institutions, and commensurate progress in the outcomes they achieve. For example, I want such students to experience rates of completion and attainment similar to those of other groups of students.
We have charged the new regulator, the Office for Students, to urge higher education providers—particularly the most selective ones—to make greater progress in such matters. The introduction of the transparency duty through section 9 of HERA is a vital measure that will support the OfS in making the further progress that we all want. The duty requires certain higher education providers to publish information on application, offer, acceptance, completion and attainment rates of students, by ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic background.
The duty will apply to all providers registered with the OfS—in both the “approved” and the “approved (fee cap)” parts of the register. It will ensure that data on admissions similar to that released by the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in recent months, in anticipation of the duty, will be available from August 2019. That greater transparency will clearly identify which higher education providers need to do more to widen the access and success of students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups.
The duty also requires the information to be given to the OfS. Crucially, that will help to inform the OfS’s assessment of providers’ performance on access, student success and progression. To ensure that there is progress, the OfS will have the power to take action if the provider does not comply with its obligations, including those on access for and participation of students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups.
The OfS has a range of interventions and sanctions that it can use to push providers to make improvements. Its powers, should it find it necessary to use them, include putting additional registration conditions on providers, suspending them from the OfS register and imposing monetary penalties. That duty was broadly welcomed by Members in debates on the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.
During the passage of HERA the Government made a commitment to ask the OfS to undertake a consultation in respect of additional information on protected characteristics such as age and disability that should be made available by providers in the future to help to drive equality of opportunity for all students. I am pleased to be able to report that the OfS has undertaken a formal consultation on the matter and held a series of supporting events. The consultation was part of a wider consultation on the OfS’s work on access and participation. Its findings will be published later this year. Implementation of the duty through these regulations will be a crucial and effective step in helping to ensure that we make further progress on the access for, and success of, disadvantaged students as well as more broadly supporting informed choice for all.
The second part of these regulations, section 39 of HERA, allows the OfS to provide financial support for higher education. These funding powers broadly replicate the funding powers conferred on the Higher Education Funding Council for England by section 65 of the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, but have been expanded to enable the OfS to fund any eligible higher education provider.
In the new system, eligible providers are those that are subject to a cap on the fees they can charge, and thus are registered in the approved “fee cap” part of the OfS register. These powers ensure that the OfS can continue to provide funding for those important subjects which cost more to teach than can be met solely from tuition fees, such as the science and medicine courses that are so crucial to the economic and social future of the country.
These powers also make it possible for the OfS to provide funding to incentivise and support providers’ work on widening participation, allow indirect funding of qualified schools, colleges or other institutions that are connected to an eligible higher education provider, and meet the unavoidable costs of small and specialist provision, such as performing arts courses. In those aspects, they are the same as the previous HEFCE powers. The new element is that under the new Act, the OfS has the power to financially support a wider range of bodies and delivery models.
In conclusion, the transparency condition and financial support regulations work together to enable the Office for Students to promote access and participation and student choice across all of higher education, and to support higher education teaching through financial support. Together, they are part of the vital foundations for the new regulatory framework, which will give the Office for Students the tools to deliver sector-wide reform and ensure that higher education delivers for every student. I move that these regulations are approved.
Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. May I give my profuse apologies to you and the Minister for being slightly late this morning; I was stuck for 40 minutes on a Network Rail train.
We welcome the Minister’s introducing the regulations for discussion today. We largely agree with him on the importance of widening participation and access to our higher education institutions and providers and the part that these transparency conditions can and should play. The devil is in the detail, however, and though there may be consensus on their importance, we disagree about some aspects of what should be included in these conditions, which are not included now. I will therefore try to persuade the Minister to strengthen them as much as possible. Before I do that, I must revisit what I said in 2016, when we discussed this clause and amendments that we tabled for the Minister’s predecessor. We said that the transparency duty was to be welcomed, but that there was a serious oversight in restricting the categories that higher education institutions had to publish information on participation. In particular, we said that there was no valid reason why data on students with disabilities, and the age profile of students, should not be included. We then tabled amendments to insert data on students with disabilities and care leavers and on students’ age profile.
It is absolutely essential that more work is done to reduce unequal access and success in higher education. Supporting people at all ages, not just at 18, is key. Overall social mobility is down, not up. The total number of English undergraduate entrants from low participation areas fell by 17% between 2011-12 and 2016-17. As a result, 12,600 fewer English undergraduate students from low participation areas started university courses each year than in 2011/12. So adding age and disability, as the Open University, Ruskin, the WEA, Birkbeck and a host of other adult education providers have said, is a way in which we can drive forward social mobility. Including age will encourage HEIs to promote the participation of older students as well as provide a further spotlight on the number of adults participating in HE.
Making it compulsory to publish data about the access, participation and attainment of disabled students will not only improve transparency but encourage HEIs to take greater responsibility to work towards eliminating the disabled student attainment gap. Is that not an important aspect of what the Government are trying to do by addressing the disability employment gap? They need not only to act on the recommendations on learning disability in the Maynard report, which was convened by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who is also a member of the Government, but to look at the format and implications of the gap.
I know that the OfS has just closed its consultation window on access and participation plans, which included asking whether respondents agreed or disagreed that it should explore requiring providers to submit and publish transparency data by age and disability. To what extent does the Minister agree or disagree that the OfS should do that? His colleague, Viscount Younger, said from the Front Bench in the House of Lords that “a good case” had been made,
“for the inclusion of age as a characteristic and I am sympathetic to his aims. Although I cannot pre-empt the consultation, I am prepared to say from the Dispatch Box that we fully anticipate that age will be part of the information the OfS will ask institutions to publish.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 April 2017; Vol. 782, c. 1001.]
What is the Minister’s reflection on that?
The third issue that we raised was that of care leavers, which has come up as a consistent theme across Government policy over the past few years. Ministers in the Department have been strong on supporting care leavers, and we think that it is important to add that category to the list, even though it is a relatively small and modest group. We also believe that, if the transparency duty is to have any impact, it needs to include as many different dimensions of participation as possible by social background. That view was echoed strongly by the Sutton Trust, which did not believe that the Bill and the regulations went far enough in that area. It said,
“evidence suggests many universities are favouring more privileged candidates even when levels of attainment are taken into account…The Bill should be amended to require universities to publish their contextual admission policies clearly on their websites”.
What recent discussions did the Minister have with the Sutton Trust and with the National Education Opportunities Network before the regulations before Parliament today were published on the need to strengthen them further?
The trade union for academics and other university workers, the University and College Union, has also said that mandatory reporting requirements should be extended to cover key workforce data that has the potential to impact on the quality of students’ education, such as the use of insecure contracts and student-staff ratios. Will the Minister consider including those in further regulations that might come before the House in relation to transparency and fair access? How often will the conditions be reviewed?
Having read through the explanatory memorandum, I have a few specific observations and questions for the Minister on the regulations we are discussing today. Paragraph 2.1 confirms that the OfS,
“must ensure that the ongoing registration conditions of each registered higher education provider...includes a transparency condition.”
Although we too think it is important that all approved institutions are required to have transparency commitments, could the Minister expand on the timeframe for those to be put in place? This is not only relevant to new institutions, but to all of our existing higher education institutions, and therefore the logistics are bound to be challenging. Can the Minister tell us within what timeframe all institutions should meet those expectations, and does he agree with the University and College Union and others that all providers should be required to produce an access and participation plan, not just a statement, as is currently the case for the approved category?
I do not wish to be unkind, but paragraphs 3.3 and 3.7 of the explanatory memorandum make me think that the Minister may have in the Department a budding Lewis Carroll. The opening sentence of paragraph 3.3 says:
“The Department notes that this instrument contains reference to a document that does not exist yet but is of the view that it is necessary to refer to it for the following reasons.”
That is not exactly the famous phrase from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, “Sentence first—verdict afterwards”, but clearly there is an issue in relation to how that will be taken forward. Can the Minister update us on the progress on producing that regime?
Paragraph 3.7 states that
“an institution can only be registered on the OfS register…if it is, or intends to become, an English higher education provider.”
Paragraph 3.9 explains the place of education in the devolved legislation competence of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. That is true in terms of the specifics of the regulation, but the Minister will be aware that tens of thousands of students from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will be at English universities and therefore subject to the provisions. Can the Minister tell us what discussions have been had with his counterparts in the devolved Administrations on that?
Paragraphs 7.1 and 7.2 of the explanatory memorandum state that
“although as of 2017 there are record numbers of 18 year olds entering higher education and the entry rate for the most disadvantaged English 18 year olds (measured by POLAR) has increased to 20.4%, it is considered that there is still more work to be done to reduce unequal access and success in higher education…In this context, the Department is of the view that greater transparency is one of the best tools available to drive social mobility.”
Indeed it is, but it also essential that a broad range of measures on socioeconomic background are looked at. Commenting on today’s statutory instrument, the Sutton Trust said to me:
“It is important that the OfS don’t just consider POLAR, as socio-economic disadvantage is complex and multi-dimensional. We think that the OfS should use a number of different measures, including POLAR, MEM”—
I am awfully sorry, but I have not got my head around that particular acronym—
“and free-school meal eligibility, FSM, so that there isn’t an overreliance on one specific measure.”
I hope that the Minister and his officials will muse upon that.
As I say, financial support is essential for widening participation. With that in mind, and given the clear priority to drive social mobility, do the Government still intend, as was outlined in the 2015 spending review, to cut the widening participation funding of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, as it then was, by up to 50% by the end of the spending review period?
The OfS is set to review all its funding allocations next year after the post-18 review has reported. The Open University has said that the part-time student premium, as part of its widening participation funding, is essential to those higher education institutions that do the heavy lifting in relation to social mobility, so as to deliver on access and student support for widening participation students. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will protect that?
On the consultation outcome, the explanatory memorandum to the regulations says:
“Sufficient input from the sector was received during the above consultations to inform policy development.”
I understand that the consultation took place under a previous Government, and indeed a previous Department—the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills—but, in relation to these regulations and others that will come as a consequence of the 2017 Act, does the Minister consider that the Government have consulted widely enough with the people who use the system? I believe, as many in the sector do, that it is inadequate to consult simply the HEIs. There should also be some input from student organisations, qualification providers and employers.
On access and participation, we should all be concerned about not just the input but the output—how many disadvantaged students complete the course—and the outcome: the jobs and futures they move to. I appreciate that it is difficult for the Government to do any major longitudinal studies at this stage of proceedings, but I would like the Minister to give attention to that in relation to both these regulations and what will come out as a result.
Finally, I turn to the issues touched on in paragraph 12 of the explanatory memorandum on monitoring and review. We are told that the Department will ask the OfS
“to monitor the effectiveness of the condition in delivering the policy aims to widen participation in higher education and identify whether changes should be considered.”
Again, we agree. It is important to monitor the impact of conditions placed on providers, but the big question is what capacity the OfS will have to do that effectively. I say that deliberately, without straying from the narrow terms of the regulations, because at the Higher Education and Research Bill Committee we expressed concerns about the stand-alone nature of the new director for fair access and participation. The Minister will know that previously that director had his own establishment outwith the OfS, whereas now he is essentially in it. I am not commenting on whether he has enough people working for him; essentially he is not in charge of his department and it is up to the OfS to give him the tools to finish the job.
While we are talking about tools, Universities UK has raised concerns with me about the regulations. I do not know whether it made this request directly to the Minister or indirectly through his officials, but from the note I have had it is clear that it wants to see more information on the level of detail that institutions will have to submit for access reports and action plans. We know that the OfS has been given a risk-based approach to intervening on institutions, so can more information be provided on what the methodology for that will be? UUK also asks whether the Government will ensure that the OfS engages with the sector on defining the roles and the self-assessment tool, which will have to cope with a broad range of potential providers, including small and specialist institutions.
In connection with that, I have to say that the Government’s job, the Minister’s job and particularly the OfS’s job would have been greatly strengthened if the previous Government had not taken the inexplicable decision to get rid of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, which was of major assistance in providing longitudinal and attitudinal advice. The Government now find themselves having to commission bespoke assessments, which we and many people in the sector believe are an inadequate way of examining the issues. I accept that we are where we are, but that point lends weight to the concerns of UUK and individual HE providers.
With those observations, I will draw my remarks to a conclusion. I repeat that we strongly support the principle of the draft regulations and their direction of travel, but that as they are implemented—I accept that registration is a rolling process—we would like to hear more from the Minister and the Department to satisfy our concerns.
Mr Gyimah
I thank the Opposition spokesperson for his comments. We have had several debates since I was appointed to this job; he always has a fistful of pertinent questions for the Government, and I welcome his contributions to our debate on the draft regulations. Before I make my concluding remarks, let me address some of his questions, in no particular order.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the rates of progression by area. The proportion of 18-year-olds entering higher education from disadvantaged backgrounds is at record levels. We use 18-year-old full-time rates in our calculations because they are the most up-to-date information that we have; we acknowledge that there has been a decline in part-time entrants, but it has been no more pronounced for disadvantaged entrants than for advantaged entrants.
On the subject of part-time students, it is worth mentioning one of the general duties set out in HERA:
“In performing its functions, the OfS must have regard to…the need to promote…greater choice…in the provision of higher education”.
That includes choice over means of provision, including via part-time study or distance learning. The OfS also targets an element of its teaching grant at part-time study, recognising its additional cost; £72 million was made available for that purpose in 2017-18, and the same amount was allocated in 2018-19.
Quite rightly, the hon. Gentleman brought up the subject of care leavers. Our guidance to the OfS asks it to monitor care leavers as a key target group, which it has done. We expect to see providers focusing on that in their access and participation plans. Whether to add age and disability is a decision for the OfS, but I am pleased that it has included that in its consultation, as we asked.
The point about outcomes for students is important. The transparency duty covers not only offers made, but the number of disadvantaged students who complete their courses and attain a particular degree.
Finally, on staff data, HE providers are autonomous, as the hon. Gentleman is aware. Data on HE staff is published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
I know that hon. Members have a keen and understandable interest in the implementation of HERA. There is no doubt that today’s scrutiny has played a vital role in ensuring that the reform promised by that Act is achieved. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft West of England Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018
Draft Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authorthy (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills (Anne Milton)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft West of England Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to consider the draft Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018.
I call the Minister to speak to both instruments. At the end of the debate, I will ask her to move the second motion formally.
Anne Milton
It is a pleasure to serve with you on the Committee, Mr Stringer.
The orders, if approved and made, will provide for the transfer of certain adult education functions and associated adult education budgets to the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England combined authorities, and provide an opportunity for them to help their residents fulfil their potential. In 2015 and 2016, through a series of devolution deals agreed between the Government and the combined authorities, we made the commitment to fully devolve the adult education budget—AEB—and the orders will deliver on that commitment.
The orders are made under the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 and will transfer certain adult education functions set out in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 from the Secretary of State to the combined authorities in relation to the area of each specified authority for the academic year 2019-20 and thereafter. The transfer does not include the functions in so far as they relate to apprenticeships or those subject to adult detention.
In the 2015 spending review, the Government made available £1.5 billion annually until 2020 for the AEB. Across England, that support to help adults with the skills and learning they need is vital in equipping them for work, an apprenticeship or further learning, and it acts as an integral stepping stone, particularly for those who have suffered a disadvantage. In 2016-17, the AEB supported adults to study courses in English, maths and English for speakers of other languages—ESOL—for level 2 or 3 qualifications and a wide range of community learning provision.
Combined authorities and, indeed, all local authorities have a role to play in supporting the introduction of T-levels, including working with employers to provide high-quality industry placements. Each combined authority has its own needs and circumstances. In my view, local authorities, including combined authorities, are fantastic enablers and facilitators. We are working with combined authorities, businesses and learning providers to establish how skills provision and reforms can be best shaped to fit the needs of local areas.
The orders will transfer certain adult education functions in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 from the Secretary of State to the combined authorities in relation to their area, and enable the transfer to them of the relevant part of the AEB. In particular, the following functions will be exercisable by the combined authority in relation to its area instead of by the Secretary of State: section 86, which relates to the education and training of persons aged 19 or over; section 87, which relates to the learning aims of such persons and the provision of facilities; and section 88, which relates to the payment of tuition fees for such persons.
Conditions are set out in relation to the transferred functions, in particular that the combined authority must have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State and adopt eligibility rules in accordance with any direction of the Secretary of State. The Department for Education will transfer the relevant part of the AEB to the combined authority to undertake the functions. It will be the responsibility of each area to manage its overall AEB allocation efficiently and effectively to meet the needs of its population.
Before the introduction of the orders, the Department considered business cases from the combined authorities for implementation funding, in preparation for the transfer of functions. After evaluating the cases, the Department agreed to provide appropriate implementation funding to support the combined authorities’ preparations and ensure that each area was able to prepare effectively for taking on the functions.
From the 2019-20 academic year, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England combined authorities will be responsible for providing funding for statutory entitlements for eligible learners in maths and English up to and including level 2, the first full level 2 qualifications for learners aged 19 to 23, the first full level 3 qualifications for learners aged 19 to 23, and the forthcoming digital skills entitlement.
It is stating the obvious to say that skills are an essential driver of economic growth. Devolution gives the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England combined authorities the opportunity to address the skills challenges that they face and improve economic growth in their areas. I have a number of examples of the good work going on in both areas. I will not detain the Committee unnecessarily by going through them now, but I would be happy to share that information with any hon. Members should they like me to do so.
Despite the social and economic strengths in these areas, a number of key challenges remain. Out of approximately 31,000 national lower super output areas, the West of England Combined Authority has one area that is ranked 65; a ranking of 1 denotes the most deprived area nationally. There are 43 LSOAs in the combined authority area that fall within the 10% most deprived LSOAs nationally. Both the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England combined authorities have skills shortages and hard-to-fill vacancies that are constraining local businesses.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority has five areas that it has identified as major growth sectors: aerospace and defence, clean technology, agri-tech, creative and digital, and life sciences. Additionally, seven sectors are important to growth in the area but face persistent and significant skills gaps: advanced manufacturing, food manufacturing, logistics and warehousing, health, information and communications technology, financial services and construction. That is quite a list.
The position is similar for the West of England Combined Authority. In 2016, 23% of respondents to the West of England local enterprise partnership’s employer skills survey reported that they faced some sort of skills gap—that compared with 14% nationally, according to the 2015 survey of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills—with the greatest skills gaps being technical in nature. Some 805 employers reported that they had a vacancy, with 46% stating that vacancies were hard to fill.
Through these orders, the combined authorities can deliver a step change to support their residents into good jobs, with opportunities for people to progress and develop; improve the earnings potential of their low-paid, low-skilled workers; deliver a thriving and productive economy; and, critically, harness the collaborative enthusiasm of business, local authorities, the third sector and the public sector.
Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to face again my colleague the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills across the room. We might be tempted to feel that this is groundhog day, because this is the third such set of statutory instruments, but all SIs have their particularities.
In her peroration, the Minister rightly touched on some of the paradoxes in relatively wealthy—I will not say “absolutely wealthy”—combined authorities, with skills gaps and other things. In the previous SIs, we have talked about some of the tensions—creative tensions, we hope—between the demands of place and sector in relation to moving much more quickly to the devolution of funding for non-adult apprenticeships and other skills, but we are not here today to talk about that in detail.
I want to pick up on some of the particular issues—indeed, the Minister touched on this in her comments—with these two combined authorities. Looking at the explanatory memorandum that we have been given, which must have been provided for all three of the Committees considering these sets of SIs, it is relatively heartening that, while they are varied, each of them refers to consultations that were undertaken by the proto-combined authorities. That is helpful and encouraging.
It is always difficult to get a broader response than from businesses that will be directly affected, but it is important to do so. You and I know, Mr Stringer—you know this only too well from your own personal experience in local government—how important it is to take people with us on a process. We also know what pitfalls can occur if we do not take people with us. The West of England Combined Authority undertook a major consultation in 2016; more than 2,000 individuals responded via survey and 14 organisations provided a response. Just less than half agreed that the WECA would ensure that skills and training provision would be better tailored to meet local needs.
The Minister alluded to the situation in the west of England. I am reliably informed, not least by WECA’s own website, that the west of England has one of the most skilled workforces in the country—42% of graduates choose to remain there and almost 48% of people are educated to degree level—but of course they have all sorts of needs, which the Minister has mentioned. The combined authority will assume responsibility for the apprenticeship grant. When describing how it proposes to handle that, it talks about how it will be used alongside mainstream apprenticeship participation funding to incentivise employers, but the authority has agreed to vary the criteria associated with the grant size to meet local needs. The ability to vary according to local circumstances will obviously be crucial in all the combined authority SIs that have come before us, but as I say, this combined authority has paid particular attention to it.
I was also pleased to see that, in its proposals and preparation for the devolution of adult education funding decisions, the combined authority talks quite strongly about the need to work with the Department for Work and Pensions to focus on those with a health condition or disability and the very long-term unemployed. The Minister, I know, given her own health background in Government, will understand the need for these devolved authorities to work collaboratively with other Departments, particularly in adult education. It is encouraging to see at this stage that that is what the West of England is keen to do.
The Minister also touched on the more difficult challenges in the West of England. She referred to one particular area that was very high on the disadvantaged scale. I was encouraged to see that, in its plans under the heading of apprenticeships and technical education, the West of England wants to develop new projects to support apprenticeships, working with the Careers & Enterprise Company.
Particularly—it does not say so specifically, but I will take a guess that it is Bristol—the area wants to work with the apprenticeship ambassador network, including the youth network and, indeed, the Bristol black and ethnic minority apprenticeships pilots. I am sure that the Minister will be aware of the keen interest that the Mayor of Bristol has taken in those projects; he has spoken on a number of occasions and he spoke very strongly about it at our party conference only a month ago. It is important, although overall we are dealing with a relatively well-off combined authority, that particular areas such as Bristol are looked at.
The orders in respect of Cambridge and Peterborough have also been the subject of the proper consultations and slightly more people responded. More than 4,000 people had their say, according to the Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority, or CPCA. This is interesting, because the question about adult education was not asked in quite the same way that the Government are dealing with it, but nevertheless I will give the figures. Asked for their views on giving the CPCA responsibility for adult education and skills training for people aged 19 and over, 74% of respondents to the online survey said they were supportive, and in the independent survey, which consulted a lot of businesses, 78% demonstrated their support. That might be something for the Minister to ponder.
The distinctive characteristic of Cambridge and Peterborough, which the combined authority rightly refers to, is its world-class higher education offering. There is the University of Cambridge, but also Anglia Ruskin University, which I had the privilege of visiting, wearing my other hat, and between them they represent the two thrusts in the area. When we talk about adult education, although we rightly think about the bread and butter things that can be done in skills and further education, we must not forget that such education needs to be—I will not stray beyond the statutory instrument we are considering—a key part of the mix in higher education, not least in view of the retraining and reskilling that we will require in the future, whatever the future may bring.
I had a quick look at the combined authority’s website today and I am glad to see that it has already hosted—last Wednesday—a market engagement workshop, with 33 attendees from 29 providers, some from within and some from outside the county. That makes the point that, although the Government are devolving the support to discrete areas, it is not as if there were a Berlin wall around the area, and the ripples from that part of the country to other areas are important. That is one reason why the CPCA and, I think, the Government, have recognised the importance of the Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes corridor. The CPCA is very ambitious with its strategic spatial framework, which is entitled, “Towards a Sustainable Growth Strategy to 2050”, by which time, if the good Lord spares us, the skills Minister and I may yet be in an emeritus and distinguished third age adviser role on such things—I will not trespass any further on our personal chronologies.
Again, the combined authority makes the point that Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s surrounding districts have strong functional links with the authority area. As the Minister and I said in a previous Statutory Instrument Committee, both the areas that we are discussing have a mix of areas—small towns, rural areas and cities—and it is important that in the devolution process they work hard on all those aspects.
On skills, not just for younger people but for older people, it is interesting that in its strategic document the CPCA gives an outline of participation in higher education and training across the combined authority area. Although it is perfectly true to say—looking at the hatchings on the map—that the vast majority of the area is doing well, certainly regarding the participation of young people in the so-called POLAR quintile, a number of areas in the north score very low on participation. The paradox is that we will have shortages of certain skills because people are very well trained, and those shortages could be exacerbated after Brexit, whatever its outcome. That is an additional reason for us to press forward with the devolution of skills in these areas.
I conclude by picking up on the implications of the process across the areas covered by all six statutory instruments, including Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the West of England. The Minister will recall that, when we started on this odyssey with the Greater Manchester and West Midlands combined authorities, I raised the issue of the transitional funding and arrangements, and drew her attention to the particular problems of the Workers’ Educational Association. It is a national body that has worked for many decades—in some cases more than 100 years—in all of the six areas. It finds itself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in the process of transition and is finding it hard to know where to get funding.
The Minister and I had a brief exchange on that, and I understand the Government’s current position. Since we had that exchange, it has come to my attention that, regrettably, at least one of the existing city regions has said that the WEA will not be prioritised for grant funding because the primary focus will be on residents. I do not want to comment further on that matter and I imagine that the WEA will makes its own representations to the Minister, but it brings us back to the following point. If the Minister and her Department cannot offer transitional funding from their budget, given the rosier news that the Chancellor had this morning about the PSBR and other things, it would be helpful if the Chancellor could recognise this matter in his forthcoming Budget.
With those observations, I will conclude, Mr Stringer. As I have said on previous occasions, we thoroughly support the objectives of this process, including for the two local areas that we are discussing today, and we will not oppose the motions.
Anne Milton
The hon. Gentleman and I agree on many things—maybe not all—and this is one. I acknowledge his points on the issue of transition. Not everybody was here last time, so I will repeat that transition is always difficult and I know there are particular issues for the WEA. I want to mention a few of the important points that the hon. Gentleman made. Wealthy areas may have significant pockets of deprivation that get overlooked among the leafy suburbs. That is a shame and this is an opportunity for the combined authorities to address that.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the world-class university at Cambridge and the ripples that need to go out from it. I think that is right. When there is a very high graduate population there is always a tendency, in this place and elsewhere, to forget the 50% or so who do not go to university or have the benefit of a degree. Many of them have talents and skills, but they have somehow got lost on the educational train. I hope that Cambridgeshire and the West of England use this opportunity to pick that up.
I would mention one other project that includes Bristol. It is a five cities project that focuses on increasing diversity and inclusion, especially in apprenticeships. The figures in an area like Bristol are truly shocking. In some wards 90% of young people go to university and in other wards the figure is down at 2%. No self-respecting local authority should be happy with such figures.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned Anglia Ruskin university, and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough offer one example I will pull out. They are involved as the skills specialist in the feasibility study for bringing a new Cambridgeshire Academy of Transportation, Logistics and Sustainable Energies to the area. Maybe devolution is an opportunity for local authorities and combined authorities to pick slightly catchier titles for their initiatives and deliver more opportunities for people to take up skills and produce initiatives, projects and working groups that mean something to their local population, because some initiatives are slightly lost on even many of us in the Government.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018.—(Anne Milton.)
Exchanging Data with non-EU Countries
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Chair
Before we begin, it may assist the Committee and those in the Gallery if I briefly outline the procedures that we use in European Committees. First, a member of the European Scrutiny Committee, who I understand to be Darren Jones in this case, will make a statement of no more than five minutes on that Committee’s decision to refer the document for debate. The Minister—or in this case both Ministers—will make a statement for up to 10 minutes. Members of the Committee may not make interventions during either statement. Questions to the Ministers will follow. The total time for the Ministers’ statement and the subsequent question and answer session is up to one hour. A Minister will then move the motion and debate will take place.
Although we would ordinarily conclude our proceedings by 5 pm, those who know better than I suggest that we may have a Division at 3 o’clock, in which case I will suspend the Committee for 15 minutes. That time will be added on at the end. If everyone is happy, does a member of the European Scrutiny Committee wish to make a statement?
Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I declare my interest, which is in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a member of the European Scrutiny Committee and of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, which both have an interest in this area. I apologise on behalf of my many colleagues who were not able to join us today.
The exchange of personal data between the UK and the EU is vital for current business, the functioning of public services, security and policing, and future trade. Whether it is used by innovative, cutting-edge new businesses or modernising old industries, data is at the heart of revolutionising the way we work and the way we live our daily lives. Data is becoming so pervasive that this issue affects both our constituents and the organisations we often refer to in such debates. The General Data Protection Regulation has brought data protection to the minds of many people who may not previously have spent much time thinking about it, and data breaches by big-name companies, digital or otherwise, keep the issue in the headlines. That is why we are having this important debate.
Although the European Scrutiny Committee thanks the Government for agreeing to schedule the debate, we are disappointed that it is not on the Floor of the House as we requested, particularly as a wide range of Select Committee Members, who unfortunately could not be here, have an interest in the topic. I hope the debate sheds light on the Government’s position on personal data flows in three different Brexit scenarios and in the post-Brexit world—if, as I keep saying, Brexit actually happens.
First, how will personal data transferred from the EU to the UK during a transition period be treated after that period? I understand that is one of the so-called separation issues to be dealt with under the withdrawal agreement—specifically article 67 of that agreement, which states that personal data needs to be processed in accordance with European Union law during any transition period, and thereafter in respect of what happens in the agreement. Will the Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries update us on the negotiations with the European Union about how safeguards will be put in place during a transition period and, in respect of data flows within such a period, under a new regime when it comes to an end? We were reassured by the Brexit Secretary both on the Floor of the House and in the Select Committee that there has been real progress in that area, so a general update would be welcome.
Secondly, what happens if a withdrawal agreement is not ratified before the UK’s exit on 29 March 2019? The Government recognise in their no deal guidance that there is not yet an agreed timetable for putting an adequacy decision in place in the event of no deal. Leaving with no deal would mean leaving with no data-sharing agreement. Without an adequacy decision, data could continue to be transferred only on the basis of alternative safeguards set out under GDPR—namely, standard contractual clauses for businesses and organisations. Will the Minister therefore set out what assessment her Department has made of the feasibility and cost to business of having to comply with such alternative safeguards in the case of a no deal Brexit? What is her view of the pending European Court of Justice case on the validity of standard contractual clauses, Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd and others—the Schrems II case—in respect of the Government’s no deal advice?
Thirdly, for the post-Brexit world, the Government have repeatedly said on the Floor of the House that they seek to achieve a data-sharing agreement that goes beyond adequacy. There was some debate about whether that might be the basis of an agreement between the UK and the EU or reliant on the adequacy decision, which is of course unilaterally made by the European Commission. While we have debated that on a few occasions, I am still not clear about the Government’s preferred method, although I note that in the motion the adequacy unilateral decision is the “starting point”. Will the Minister set out today whether any enhanced arrangement beyond adequacy is realistic given the state of the Brexit negotiations, and what the position is on the UK’s proposal for a beyond adequacy agreement? Will she comment on the Government’s response to the Exiting the European Union Committee’s report on data, which suggests that enhanced adequacy involves some form of participation of the UK in EU data bodies and/or in a one-stop shop, which would involve an agreement to allow the relevant European Court jurisdiction and/or jurisprudence?
Finally, on future trade, does the Minister for Trade Policy envisage future trade deals including constituent or adjacent horizontal clauses on data sharing, to align with European standards in third-country trade deals? Will he confirm whether the clauses try simply to tackle data-sharing non-tariff barriers, or if they are envisaged to have an additional effect that could assist the UK in maintaining data-sharing safeguards with the European Union? Lastly, if possible, will he update the Committee as to the status of any proposed EU-UK agreement at treaty level, and what if any lessons have been learned from, for example, the EU-Japan free trade agreement?
I add on behalf of the European Scrutiny Committee that we still await a response to the questions posed on this topic in our report of 12 September. I am sure that the Ministers will take the opportunity today to answer any more general questions but, if not, I look forward to a commitment that we will receive that response in due course.
The Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries (Margot James)
I thank the hon. Member for Bristol North West for running through the European Scrutiny Committee’s proposals for this afternoon’s debate. My colleague the Minister for Trade Policy and I welcome the opportunity to debate this important subject. The cross-cutting nature of data in trade agreements and its significance for our Departments mean that we will both make an opening statement and participate in the question-and-answer session. We have agreed to be brief and to stay within the conventional 10 minutes.
The free flow of data, with citizens who are rightly confident that their data, particularly their personal data, will be protected, is integral to our economy and vital for law enforcement co-operation before, during and post Brexit. The amount of data that we generate as citizens and businesses is increasing rapidly. Data flows help to ensure not only that people get paid and that health services can co-operate, but that people can live their lives. They affect all consumers and businesses. As we leave the EU, the UK will continue to be at the forefront of driving up standards and protecting individual citizens’ privacy, while ensuring that data continues to grow and be processed legally.
Many of the issues that we will touch on came up during the passage of our Data Protection Act 2018, and we welcomed the debates in the House on citizens’ privacy rights. I am proud of the Act, of our world-class regulator and that the UK has high standards of data protection, in line with the GDPR and the law enforcement directive. The Government have solidified the UK’s presence as a global leader in data protection. As such, we laid the foundations to forge trade agreements and take up a leadership role in promoting the free flow of data with high data protection standards. We believe that the provisions of trade agreements on the free flow of data and robust data protection frameworks are not in conflict. In fact, they should be mutually reinforcing. The Government have worked with the European Commission and member states to push for ambitious data clauses in trade deals to reduce protectionist barriers. We continue to engage with the Commission on their proposals.
The Government are looking forward to striking trade deals with provisions that lower barriers to cross-border data flow and, in particular, to deal with data localisation requirements, which can act as a protectionist force, locking companies out of overseas markets. We want to see data flow freely across national boundaries to allow enterprise, new ideas and economies to flourish within the close confines of data protection. That approach will align us with the growing digital economy in the European Union while opening up new opportunities in other fast-growing regions of the world.
I look forward to our debate. Negotiations with the European Union are live, so my hon. Friend the Minister for Trade Policy and I are somewhat constrained in what we can say, but I hope we can give the Committee enough detail during questions as we set out with clarity the advantages of our data and trade policy.
The Minister for Trade Policy (George Hollingbery)
The free flow of data, including personal data, is crucial to international co-operation and trade in the modern world, but it must be underpinned by high data protection standards. Because so much digital data involved in business and trade today includes at least some personal data, it is vital that the UK pursues trade rules in this area that provide clarity and certainty to industry and individuals so that personal data may continue to flow securely and freely while remaining protected.
I want to emphasise how the Government are committed to facilitating data flows as a key driver of global trade and the lifeblood of today’s digitalised economies while ensuring that rights to data protection and privacy are safeguarded. Data flows are vital not only to high-tech industries but to traditional sectors, goods and services. A trade framework for the UK and its international trading partners that includes robust commitments enabling cross-border data transfers and prohibiting data localisation is therefore critical for the UK’s future prosperity and economic growth. Even with the vast and numerous benefits to companies, consumers and economies that arise from the ability of organisations to share data easily across borders, dozens of countries are erecting unjustified barriers to cross-border data flows, such as data localisation requirements that seek to confine data within borders. Such a strategy can have a detrimental effect on the free flow of data. Trade agreements that include substantive provisions designed to enable data flow do not undermine data protection or privacy; on the contrary, such provisions tend to reinforce and safeguard protections for personal data and privacy.
Trade provisions often make clear that they do not prevent data from being subjected to data protection regimes and are therefore complementary to data protection and privacy. Countries should therefore be able to apply legitimate measures to protect data travelling to third countries. However, such international transfer regimes can facilitate or hinder the ability of countries to take advantage of trade measures on the grounds of privacy and the right to data protection.
After a period of some years and intense internal debate, we welcome the European Commission’s initiative in tabling proposals on cross-border data flows in trade agreements. That has been a sticking point in the Commission and the EU for a number of years. In particular, we welcome provisions designed to tackle unjustified data localisation requirements, which often serve to reduce trade with and new investment in trading partners, thereby depressing economic development. Although the UK Government see the provisions as a good starting point, we will look to be a world leader in setting clear and ambitious provisions in future trade agreements in this area as well as to shape the new global standards for modern free trade agreements.
Finally, I will have a crack at answering some of the questions from the hon. Member for Bristol North West. We very much welcome the EU’s position, as it has crystallised some of its thoughts and published a substantive text for the first time for use within the EU-Indonesia free trade agreement. We are looking for ambitious provisions to facilitate data flow and ensure that the playing field is level in areas such as data localisation. Any agreement will have to ensure that the high levels of personal data protection are not put at risk. As I am sure the hon. Gentleman knows well, the GDPR will be directly applicable in UK law straight after Brexit; it will be adopted as our standard. Trade provisions will therefore not form a legal basis for transfers of personal data. In short, we will lay the pipework and allow the playing field to be laid so that data can flow fairly across borders, but it is for others—the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, other authorities and other third-party countries—to turn the taps on or off.
The Chair
We now move on to questions to the Ministers. As we have two Ministers, perhaps Members could indicate which one they are directing their question at. This will go on until 3.37 pm, unless we get a Division, in which case injury time will be added.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
May I preface a couple of questions with some initial thoughts, Mr Evans? I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West on bringing this matter to the Committee.
The Chair
I advise the shadow Minister to be brief, because there will be further opportunities to speak when the debate starts.
Liam Byrne
Of course; I appreciate that, Mr Evans.
Like me, my hon. Friend will have been alarmed by the catena of platitudes from both Ministers this afternoon about the importance of data, the importance of trade and the importance of data to trade. We heard absolutely nothing about whether the Ministers are confident of securing an adequacy agreement, especially in the event of a no deal Brexit. As is eloquently set out in the paperwork for today’s hearing, the Ministers know as well as we do that this has to be signed off not only by the European Commission, but by the European Parliament, the article 29 working group and the European data protection supervisor.
Given the imminence of Brexit, I am extremely concerned that we have heard nothing about a timetable or a level of confidence. My question is blunt: in the event of a no deal Brexit, are the Ministers prepared to guarantee to the House this afternoon that a data adequacy agreement will be secured and that free data flows will continue?
Margot James
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. I cannot give him a categorical assurance that an adequacy agreement will be in place at any particular point during the negotiations. I can tell him that the UK Government have made it clear to the Commission that we are ready to commence discussions on a future adequacy agreement, even though the Commission has not indicated that it is yet ready to start such discussions. If we are successful in securing the transition and implementation period, we will stand ready to begin those preliminary discussions on an adequacy assessment during that period. Indeed, we stand ready now, but the Commission has indicated that it is not yet ready.
We agree that our primary goal is to secure an adequacy agreement. Through the recent publication of a technical notice, we have various provisions in place that should allow for the free transfer of data during the period in which we are discussing adequacy but have not yet secured it.
Liam Byrne
I do not know whether you prefer me to ask these questions standing up or sitting down, Mr Evans.
Liam Byrne
Thank you, Mr Evans. I am grateful for the Minister’s answer, but perhaps she could go further and tell us the precise timetable her officials have given her for what needs to be agreed when. Ultimately, we need to know when an adequacy agreement needs to be in place to ensure the free flow of data after we have left the European Union, which the Prime Minister assures us will happen at the end of March. Given that long stop date, as it were, what is the timetable for securing the necessary agreements from the European Parliament, the article 29 working party and the European data protection supervisor?
Margot James
As I said, the UK is ready to begin preliminary discussions on an adequacy assessment now. I cannot give a cast-iron timetable, because I cannot speak for the European Commission, which is the vital party to such discussions. The ball is in its court. We have indicated that we are ready and willing to start adequacy discussions. We anticipate that those discussions will take place during the transition and implementation period. Through the technical notice, we have established the arrangements that we would put in place if there were to be a gap between our departure from the European Union and the timing of the future framework. We all know what is going on—on both sides—on many fronts, not just data protection.
Liam Byrne
My last question is to press the Minister on a single point: by what date must an adequacy agreement be reached and in place to ensure that the free flow of data continues?
Margot James
The Government will ensure the free flow of data, even if there is a gap between the time at which the United Kingdom obtains an adequacy decision and the time at which we leave the European Union. We are scheduled to leave the European Union at the end of March next year. We anticipate that there will be an implementation period that takes us a further 20 months. During that implementation period, we anticipate discussions with the Commission on an adequacy decision.
We cannot guarantee exactly when that adequacy decision will be made. I reassure all members of the Committee that on our departure from the European Union we will be 100% aligned with European data protection law, particularly the provisions of the GDPR. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill and I shared many discussions during proceedings on the Bill. When it received Royal Assent in May this year, it put us in 100% alignment with EU data protection law. We can be optimistic that an adequacy decision will not require the usual length of time that it takes the Commission to bestow such decisions on other third countries. However, the right hon. Gentleman will understand that I cannot give a guarantee on that, because to do so is not in the UK Government’s gift. The decision will be forthcoming from the European Union.
If the right hon. Gentleman wants me to tell members of the Committee what will happen if we do not have an adequacy decision, either as we leave the European Union next March or even after the implementation period, I am happy to do so, but he looks as though he wants to intervene.
Liam Byrne
I am much less sanguine than the Minister about the possibility of an adequacy agreement. As she knows, we will not have article 8 to rest on after we leave the European Union. We have also sketched into the Data Protection Act 2018 sweeping exemptions from the GDPR for anyone who happens to be an immigrant, so I think the European Parliament will have some serious questions for the Minister about the adequacy agreement. Do we need an adequacy agreement in place to cover the implementation period, or not?
Margot James
I am not sanguine about anything to do with this; it is a serious matter. I may be optimistic, but there is a lot of work to be done, and I cannot guarantee when an adequacy decision will be made. I can only state categorically that it is the Government’s intention to prioritise discussions in relation to adequacy with the European Union, such that we get an adequacy decision as soon as it is practically possible for the European Commission to grant us one.
We have put in place some exemptions to the GDPR, as have other member states, but we have done so in a framework that permits member states to apply such derogations and exemptions. Other member states will have put in place similar or different exemptions. I contest the right hon. Gentleman’s statement that the exemptions are “sweeping” in respect of immigration. I remember the debates well. The powers are extremely contained, and they were amended on Report to constrain them even further.
I can answer questions about the measures that we will put in place if there is a gap between the granting of an adequacy decision and our departure from the European Union—and, indeed, after the implementation period, assuming the implementation period is agreed.
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That the Committee takes note of European Union Document No. 5191/17, a Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and Council on Exchanging and Protecting Data in a Globalised World, and an Unnumbered European Union proposal for provisions on Cross-border data flows and protection of personal data and privacy; welcomes the adequacy framework as an effective means of ensuring a free flow of data from the EU to third countries; and further notes that in the context of the UK leaving the EU it provides the right starting point.—(Margot James.)
Margot James
I have made my opening statement and I have answered questions. I have indicated my willingness to answer further questions, should they arise during the debate, but I have nothing further to say at this stage.
Liam Byrne
I am slightly alarmed by the content of this afternoon’s debate. Perhaps it might be easier for everyone if I tabled several parliamentary questions to follow up on the debate.
I am not clear whether adequacy discussions have begun in detail; I am not clear whether an adequacy agreement is needed for the implementation period; and I am not sure about the Minister’s level of confidence that an adequacy agreement will crystallise and be in place by the time the implementation period finishes. I have heard nothing about the Government’s assessment of the attitude in the European Parliament and the other organisations that have to sign off the decision. I am afraid that today’s debate has opened rather more questions than it has closed.
Question put and agreed to.
Agriculture Bill (First sitting)
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
Before we begin, I have a few preliminary points to make. Please switch electronic devices to silent. Tea and coffee are not allowed during the sittings.
We will first consider the programme motion on the amendment paper. We will then consider a motion to enable the reporting of written evidence for publication and then a motion to allow us to deliberate in private about our questions before the oral evidence sessions. In view of the limited time available, I hope that we can take those matters without too much debate. I call the Minister to move the programme motion, which the programming sub-committee agreed yesterday.
The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
I beg to move, Date Time Witness Tuesday 23 October Until no later than 10.55 am Nature Friendly Farming Network; National Trust; RSPB; Gilles Deprez Tuesday 23 October Until no later than 11.25 am Farmwel; RSPCA; British Veterinary Association Tuesday 23 October Until no later than 2.30 pm NFU; National Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs Tuesday 23 October Until no later than 3.00 pm Country Land and Business Association; Tenant Farmers Association Tuesday 23 October Until no later than 3.30 pm Food Standards Agency; Food and Drink Federation; Groceries Code Adjudicator Tuesday 23 October Until no later than 5.00 pm National Farmers’ Union Cymru; Farmers’ Union of Wales Thursday 25 October Until no later than 12.15 pm Traceability Design User Group; Environment Agency; Rural Payments Agency Thursday 25 October Until no later than 1.00 pm British Growers Association; Soil Association Thursday 25 October Until no later than 2.45 pm Professor Erik Millstone, Professor of Science Policy, University of Sussex; David Baldick, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of European Environmental Policy; Vicky Hird, Sustain; Professor Terry Marsden, Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning, University of Cardiff Thursday 25 October Until no later than 3.15 pm Unite; The Landworkers’ Alliance
That—
(1) the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 23 October) meet—
(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 23 October;
(b) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 25 October;
(c) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 30 October;
(d) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 1 November;
(e) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 13 November;
(f) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 15 November; and
(g) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 20 November;
(2) the Committee shall hear oral evidence in accordance with the following Table:
TABLE
(3) proceedings on consideration of the Bill in Committee shall be taken in the following order: Clauses 1 to 22; Schedule 1; Clause 23; Schedule 2; Clause 24 to 27; Schedule 3; Clause 28; Schedule 4; Clauses 29 to 31; Schedule 5; Clauses 32 to 36; new Clauses; new Schedules; and remaining proceedings on the Bill; and
(4) the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 5.00 pm on Tuesday 20 November.
First, may I record our thanks to the Clerk who has attempted, at very short notice, to add some witnesses at the request of the Opposition? I should add that the National Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs, the Food and Drink Federation and the Groceries Code Adjudicator have said that they are unable to make it.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
I would like to make a point to the Minister about this. Regarding the witnesses, I was very disappointed to see that the National Farmers Union, Scotland had not been called in to give evidence. Given that the Bill is the subject of some dispute between the UK and Scottish Governments, it would have been appropriate at least to have Scottish Government officials down to explain some of the finer points of that.
George Eustice
The Scottish Government have not yet signalled that they wish to be part of the Bill. Indeed, our understanding is that they intend to pass their own Bill, which is why it was decided at the time that this Bill would not apply to Scotland. We now have a list of witnesses and a programme motion for the evidence sessions.
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
It would perhaps have been a good idea to have representatives from the devolved Administrations, given that the Bill will inevitably have an effect on each of the industries in turn.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Does that mean, Chair, that when Scotland produces its Bill it will ask for evidence from English farming organisations? Is that the logic of what is proposed?
Deidre Brock
The point is that elements of the Bill affect devolved legislation and competencies, so it is appropriate that at least Scottish Government officials should be allowed to put those points across to us. As MPs, surely we want to get the full picture. The Bill is the subject of some dispute between the two Governments, so surely it is appropriate that we hear about that.
George Eustice
I do not really have anything further to add. The Bill is predominantly for English farmers and there is a schedule for Welsh farmers as well. There is a more limited schedule for Northern Irish farmers because the Northern Ireland Administration asked for a minimalist addition to enable them to continue to make payments.
As the Scottish Government have been clear that they do not intend, as things stand, to invite or ask us to add a schedule on their behalf, we have agreed the set of witnesses that we have. I have nothing further to add.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That at this and any subsequent meeting at which oral evidence is to be heard, the Committee shall sit in private until the witnesses are admitted.—(George Eustice.)
Resolved,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(George Eustice.)
The Chair
Copies of written evidence that the Committee receives will be made available in the Committee Room.
The Chair
I welcome witnesses to the first public sitting of the Bill. Before we start, do any Members want to make declarations of interest for the record?
Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)
I draw the Committee’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. In addition, I am a member and tenant of the National Trust and a member of the Country Land and Business Association, the National Farmers Union, the Countryside Alliance and the Woodland Trust, as well as of the Shropshire Wildlife Trust and the Small Woods Association. The Forestry Commission has a long-term tenancy of some woodland for which I have beneficial ownership.
Mr Goodwill
Similarly, I draw the Committee’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, particularly my membership of the Country Land and Business Association and the National Farmers Union. I have a family farm in North Yorkshire of 250 acres, which we have farmed since 1850. We are currently engaged in a high-level environmental scheme on that farm.
Colin Clark (Gordon) (Con)
Can I declare my interests? I am a farmer in receipt of the single farm payment. I am a member of NFU Scotland and an organic producer.
The Chair
I now ask the witnesses to state their names and the organisations they represent for the record.
Gilles Deprez: I am Gilles Deprez, the managing director of Greenyard Flowers. We are a farming operation in Cornwall specialising in the production of daffodils.
Thomas Lancaster: I am Tom Lancaster, principal policy officer at the RSPB. I lead a lot of our work on current and future agriculture policy.
Patrick Begg: I am Patrick Begg, outdoors and natural resources director at the National Trust.
Martin Lines: I am Martin Lines, UK chair of the Nature Friendly Farming Network and an arable farmer in Cambridgeshire.
The Chair
Before I call the first Member to ask a question, I remind all Members that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill and that we must stick to the timings in the programme motion that the Committee has agreed. We have until 10.55 am for this session.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
The Chair
I ask the witnesses to speak up, because the acoustics are not the best.
Patrick Begg: There is a lot to like in the Bill. There is a clear sense of purpose and a clear list of the kind of public goods that public money will pay for. There is plenty of intent and powers, but it is perhaps slightly light on duties—we might come back to that—such as the kind of things that we might want to see to nail some of the intent for the longer term. There is clear support for productivity during a transition, which farmers will need in spades as we make the adjustment to the new world of payment for public goods.
Generally, there is also a sense that we have a clear idea about what UK plc is contracting with our farming industry to provide for the long term, which is something that we have not had since about 1947 and the last Act. It feels like a positive step from my point of view.
Thomas Lancaster: I agree with a lot of that. We particularly welcome the intent to move towards a system of public money for public goods, for which we and others have been asking for a long time and which is integral in terms of meeting a lot of the challenges that we face—not just the environmental challenges, but the challenge of resilience in the face of environmental change, which will be essential for our long-term food security.
We also welcome a lot of the other clauses in the Bill, particularly around the powers to improve transparency in the supply chain. Better regulation of the supply chain and more transparency are essential to enable farmers to get a better return for the food that they produce. That is as important to this reform as the public money for the things that the market does not produce.
Similarly, we welcome the clear time-limited and defined transition. Again, that is really important in sending a signal to farmers about the change coming down the track so they have time to adapt to that. We would not want to see any extension to that transition because that would create further confusion as to what the future will hold.
Martin Lines: The overall direction of the Bill is very positive—public money for public goods is a great approach. Environmental goals and food production are not mutually exclusive but go hand in hand, and making farmers connect with the landscape and their food production joins the two together. We need a strong and transparent marketplace to reward us for the goods that we can produce, and we want strong direction from the Government and society about how they want to support farming and the landscape they want to deliver.
We have concerns about the details of the aspirations and how they will be delivered, and how we can ensure that farmers are rewarded for the environmental benefits and the practices that many have already been doing on their land and in their landscape. It is about setting the direction, with public support, of how that goes forward.
It is also about delivering basic environmental standards, and not just for those who want to receive what will possibly become the environmental land management schemes. How do we keep all farmland in good heart? That will deliver food security for the nation in the long term, so it is about having all our assets—our landscape—in good heart. Having higher environmental levels will give us food security for generations to come.
Gilles Deprez: I am not as knowledgeable as the other people here, but it is interesting to look at the focus on soil in the Bill. I am passionate about that, and it is crucial for us as farmers. I would not call myself a daffodil farmer; I would call myself an energy farmer who tries to capture as much energy from around us as possible and store it in the soil. The soil is a type of battery for us, so I very much encourage and like the focus on soil in the Bill.
What is also important for us—I am talking from my own experience as a farmer, which is limited compared with a lot of people—is that farming is a competitive industry. It is important to highlight that we are in a highly competitive industry. We are competing with a lot of people—not only in Britain, but in the rest of the world. There are very thin margins, and it is very important that we look at that.
One of the other things that I also saw in the Bill is innovation, which is maybe not highlighted enough. Innovation is crucial for the future: without it, we cannot go further. I have always been told at home that the knowledge that we have today is a culmination of experience from the past, but we need to look at what we will have tomorrow. We need to work on innovation in all different areas: in understanding the biology and chemistry of the soil—I am not an organic farmer, but chemistry is very important—and in automation, mechanisation and other things. IT is also crucial for farmers. Innovation is very important.
We also need to ask how the Bill will work. It is very difficult for me to understand the Bill—it is the first time that I have done this—and the detail of it is not clear. I assume that that is normal for a Bill. In the Netherlands, we have certain systems where Government, research institutions and the industry are working together to find creative solutions, which is very interesting. If you look at the system where a small farmer or small holding company needs to make money to survive at the end of the day, it is very difficult to apply for certain schemes or to access all those things.
I think a way of working together with research centres, universities, Government and industry is quite interesting for the farmer. There are a lot of promising things about what the future could bring for trying to protect and regenerate our soils and building our natural capital. Without our soils, farming cannot flourish.
Dr Drew
Q
Thomas Lancaster: The Bill does not necessarily set out clearly how it works in practice as a framework Bill. We would like to see, for example, a clause that sets out much more clearly how public money will be provided for public goods in the long term. We think that the Bill needs to provide much more certainty about the funding cycle, how the quantum is arrived at, and how the funding is allocated between the four countries of the UK—that is a key area where we will look to improve the Bill.
In terms of how a public goods scheme could operate, we have in the UK 30 years’ experience with agri-environment schemes. The first schemes were developed in Norfolk and then rolled out throughout Europe through the common agricultural policy. We are world leaders at developing agri-environment schemes, which are the blueprint for the public goods scheme that the Bill proposes. There is a huge amount of debate to be had over the next two or three years about how best to design the scheme in a way that works for farmers, the environment and the taxpayer.
Martin Lines: We understand it to be a framework Bill: much of the detail about how it will be delivered to farmers will come later. We in entry level stewardship and higher level stewardship know that we can deliver great stewardship. Some of the reward for that is not great. There are a whole load of assets on our landscape that many farmers can actually get better rewarded for—it is not just about how we manage the food production side, but how we manage our landscapes. Some farmers can get rewarded more for the landscape side and then get the food production from that, because they have limited capacity within that landscape to get financial rewards. It is about having a joined-up approach.
Patrick Begg: Tom makes a good point about the mechanisms that need to underpin this, which are around multi-annual payments. It is about being able to see something that goes beyond the political cycle. That is one thing that the common agricultural policy has actually delivered—some certainty and confidence in the farming industry in what they need to invest in. That is one of the things that we really need.
If we think about duties rather than powers, duties to create those multi-annual systems seem to me critical. There is also another obvious question, because a lot of this does come back to money, in terms of the quantum. We have done research that has demonstrated that just to deliver the kind of public goods that we have listed here would take at least £3 billion a year across the UK, and that was just updating what the Land Use Policy Group did about 10 years ago. There is a strong evidence base for the quantum, so it would be very useful if the Bill gave a duty to produce an independently assessed sense of resources needed, and if those were linked into multi-annual contracts.
There is also something about targets. It is a truism across loads of corporates, and non-governmental organisations—anyone—that you manage what you measure. If we can see some way in which these can be quantified, and some really stretching targets that could tie resources to those, that would be incredibly helpful. That sends a very strong signal to farmers about the confidence that Governments have in the things that we are asking them to do. It is all about setting that sense of confidence and clarity about purpose.
Gilles Deprez: For me, the Bill and the law are not very clear, so my honest answer to your question is probably, no, I don’t know how it will work. I also do not have enough experience of the previous way of working with the common agricultural policy. What I do see from my limited experience is that we have different types of environment in the UK. For example, in west Cornwall, where I am, my average field site is about four acres. If I need to put, for example, buffer strips in my field around my hedges, I will not have any productive land left.
You cannot compare, for example, Cornwall with Lincolnshire or Scotland. It is very difficult to understand how it will work in practice. You are asking a lot more from a system than what it is used to in a certain way, to become more targeted and specific, so I think it will be a very big challenge to see how it will work in practice. That is my honest opinion.
George Eustice
Q
I would like to know your views on whether you believe that is deliverable, if we rewarded the environmental outcomes properly to ensure that we had a viable model. What would that look like? What is your view on natural capital principles, in terms of pricing those options? Are there other things that you would like to do? Or do you believe that income forgone should be the basis on which we operate payments in future?
Martin Lines: It is a positive move forward. We know most farms have been doing some kind of stewardship and have had frustrations with the system, and that puts a lot of people off. What we have got to think about with this scheme is can we deliver it in nine or 10 years’ time, when it is fully rolled out, and add the focus of what we want in 10 years’ time, and how we have got time to adjust to it.
Payments at the moment are attached to land. As someone who rents land, I give payments straight to my landlord; it is included on top of my rent, so it stresses my business. I often pay it out 12 months before I receive it from Government, so giving it to the farmer for the work he does, such as my stewardship work, rewards the farmer for his best practice, and keeps it within the farming industry, which can then use it in local communities, with contractors and various other parts. It cycles it round the local community in a better way.
Patrick Begg: I am definitely a fan of moving it towards a more outcomes-based system. In fact, we have been working for a couple of years with a group of our farm tenants in Wharfedale in Yorkshire to understand exactly how we might establish an outcomes-type measure. It comes with a bit more risk, because some things are lag rather than lead, so it takes a while to mature your outcomes. We have to relax into that and understand that if people are doing the right thing, good things will flow at the end of it. That requires us to have a really good system of land management planning locally, but the critical thing we learned from our outcomes project in Wharfedale was about the quality of conversations and the sense of shared endeavour. If you set a destination, allow a farmer really to have agency over the route for getting there, and give them flexibility to do things differently, try things, and work with the skills and rhythms of their farming business, you get a much better sense of engagement.
It takes time and requires individuals who have trusted adviser status. For example, if ecologists talk to farmers, they learn about each other’s world and then they come up with a good answer, which makes a massive difference. That relationship has a huge gearing effect on the quality of the stuff you get at the end of it.
There are technical, mechanistic things that we have learned about what kind of measures work for pollinators, soil, etc. It is now perfectly possible to measure them and account for them. The trick, without this becoming massively bureaucratic, is for the people managing the land to have a sense of delegated agency. We use the farm tenants as our eyes, ears and monitors, and get them to report back. It really turns them on. We have had enthusiasm and a sense of joy creating the kind of things that we as a conservation organisation were looking for. It really worked within the framework of their developing businesses with extensive livestock in some quite sensitive upland areas. I am a great fan. I think it is perfectly possible, and we have got lots of evidence about how it can be done.
Thomas Lancaster: On the point about income forgone and payments, we regard income forgone and costs as a good starting point, but it is flawed in that it does not adequately incentivise the most profitable businesses, and it does not adequately reward the least profitable businesses, particularly in terms of farmers farming in places such as the uplands, which are inherently economically marginal. We encourage Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to start there, then look at where we need to go in terms of building in that reward—that adequate incentive or fair return, which is how some officials talk about it.
On Wharfedale, the uplands and the public goods that those non-economic farming systems can provide, rather than just look at the cost of an individual intervention, such as managing a hay meadow or some other species-rich grassland, do you look at the whole- farm system as a cost? Rationally speaking, it is a loss-making business, and it would not necessarily be rational to run it without some form of public support. If we want to keep that sort of marginal farming going to secure outcomes for curlew, black grouse and other species that depend on it, we will need to look beyond income forgone, in terms of building an adequate and fair return for those environmental outcomes.
Like Patrick, we are big supporters of results-based and outcomes-based payment schemes where they can be shown to work and be proportionate. We think there is scope for continuing action-based payment schemes, where you pay based on the action. Similarly, we are big supporters of natural capital, particularly in assessing the benefits that a future policy based on public goods can provide. We know from previous economic studies—one looked at sites of special scientific interest—that for every pound spend on investing in SSSIs, you get £8.56 back. There is huge benefit to investing in the natural environment not just for society but for farmers, in the benefits you can get from pollinators, crop pest predators, arable systems and more resilient grassland management in lowland and wet grasslands. The places that were managed more extensively in Somerset after the floods recovered much more quickly than other more intensive systems. We are really evangelical about the benefits of a public goods approach, not just for society but for farmers, and a payment system that builds in a fair return will be a key part of that.
Gilles Deprez: The practicality will not be easy. It will be a long journey. It will depend on the people; every farmer, or land manager, has a different mentality on implementing it. To give an example of one of the things that we are trying to work on as an operation, because we are also a tenant, we are fortunate to have the Tregothnan estate, where we are working, as one of our landlords. One of the questions was, do you think that you should value natural capital? We are working on that. We are working on a tenant agreement, which is in place at the moment, where natural capital has a financial value.
It is a bit difficult to define it, because what is natural capital? You need to take a very holistic approach. At the same time, it needs to be very simple. We brought it back to soil, because it all starts with soil. We tried to value the difference between good and bad soil. We are still working on the exact parameters of what it means, but the moment that something has a financial value, people respect it. That was the idea that we had. We are still in a very early stage, but it is quite promising to see what is possible.
If something has a financial value you can create an asset with it. At the same time, you can create a liability for whoever is doing it. The whole principle is that the landowner has the asset of the land, but everything that we are trying to do in terms of increasing the natural capital on that farm is our property, because I, as the farmer, did it—I tried to increase it, or decreased it. It is a very difficult concept because of the competitiveness of farming. We need to ensure that that model is not breaking farmers, because farming is very competitive. You have to find a fine balance. With the Tregothnan estate, we tried to develop it further, but in a very down-to-earth way, so that we are not breaking the idea or the system. It is probably too early to implement it today, but there is potential.
It will require a lot of effort, and many farmers will need to be part of that transition. It is not something that you do overnight. If you take on a farm that is depleted, or where the soil has gone, it takes years, and a massive amount of capital, to rebuild it. That is very hard in a very competitive environment where you need to have a good crop again next year, and a margin to reinvest in your farming operation. It needs to be built over a longer period, and you need to have that long-term strategy as a farmer to do that, which is not always easy—far from it.
George Eustice
Q
I wondered what your thoughts were about the design of that. Mr Begg, obviously at the National Trust you are a big landlord. I know, Mr Lines, that you run schemes now on tenanted land. Mr Deprez, you are a very large agri business that rents lots of land. I wondered whether you had thoughts on how the schemes should be constructed to ensure that tenant farmers can access them.
Martin Lines: They have to be done in a way that works with the landlord. The landlord’s best asset is his soil and his fields. I entered into countryside stewardship, with my landlord’s permission, and explained to them the best ways of using the landscape. There are bits of the land that are unproductive in certain fields—awkward corners where machines do not fit. How can we get the best resource out of the land, by putting it into trust stewardship and using the landscape and those farmed fields in the best way possible? It is about working with landlords and tenants and having that vision forward, rather than having landlords just renting the land for the highest price. They have got to understand that it has got to come back to soil.
How to be rewarded has to come down to soil, so that when you are finished being a tenant you pass on your asset in better health. It is the same as a farm owner: when I hand it over to my children, if they want it, I want to hand it over in a better state than when we got it. Unfortunately, I have inherited it in a poor state, because past policy has encouraged environmental issues: hedges and things have been taken out and our soil has not been great because it has been overworked. Once you start realising what is happening, it is about having a strong, true asset that we can keep as a society for future generations.
Patrick Begg: I would make a couple of observations. First, it has always been the case with the National Trust—and we would support this more generally—that at least 10 years for a tenancy agreement is the right place to start, and possibly longer if we can do that. In fact, once you are in, it is like a good marriage; why would you break that up? These relationships need to endure. Our best relationships are the longest-term ones, for sure.
I am not sure that the Bill is the place where we can deliver a lot of that stuff. Clarity of purpose, and knowing what payments are available, is really vital. That would align closely with what we would wish to have from our agreements. We are very keen that our tenant farmers enter into agri-environment schemes, as now, and we would be very keen for them to enter into future ones. Certainly, for business viability and a thriving long-term tenancy relationship, that opportunity for tenants to get into the scheme is vital, so that is where we should be training our sights.
As to mechanisms in the Bill, I am not sure that there are any that could necessarily be put in. I suppose we ape things that might come out of the mechanics, around the design of things such as environmental land management schemes. We have whole-farm plans and produce documents—particularly when we let a farm, for example—about where exactly we think the outcomes might sit. Then we have a really good discussion with prospective or new tenants about exactly how they can deliver that. We are also very flexible about working with them and their business, to help them to be profitable within it. Tom has made the point a number of times that profitable farm businesses are critical for being able to deliver great environmental outcomes as well.
Gilles Deprez: I definitely agree with that last point. Where is the balance? That will depend from area to area and farmer to farmer; but having the right balance is very important in the short term, because at the end of the day we need to go through the seasons and be profitable. For example, what we have seen over the last year was incredibly tough for a lot of farmers, ourselves included.
You are confronted with weather events that are unreal. That is something very strange; I am a big believer that farmers are already paying the bill today of climate change. If we have a very bad season, a farmer needs to pay for that. Farmers already have a lot of pressure on them and climate change is part of that. Having a balance is very important, but difficult to define. We need to make sure that farmers are profitable in the short term but also work on the long-term goals. That balance is not always easy to find. I see it myself as a farmer. Sometimes I think, “I wish I could have done it like that,” but you know it is impossible. Step by step, you are building and trying to do things a little bit better than you did them yesterday.
The Chair
I have a long list of Members who want to ask questions. Could I ask that both questions and replies are pithy, so we can get as many people in as possible?
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Q
Martin Lines: There are a number of farms with productive land, especially with the silts in the fens. They may concentrate and be more productive in the middle and just have the stewardship round the outside, but that is fine. There are other areas where it is more about the whole of the landscape. If each farmer has to do an ELM scheme to receive some money, it is about a whole-farm approach—all your soils and all your assets—not just the non-productive and productive bits.
Kerry McCarthy
At the moment, it is individual public goods. There is nothing that deals with whole- farm systems, such as organic, pasture-led livestock. Do you think that should be in the Bill?
Martin Lines: It should be a whole-farm approach and a whole-farm plan and it should connect soils, environment, health and everything else with where we get food production. It is not joined up. We have stewardship and production. They have been two separate payments—two separate deals. We need that linked back together and we need to say that from a good environment and from good soils, we will have food security for the lifetimes of generations to come.
Patrick Begg: On that point from Martin about integration, you are right. Dovetailing production and environment is what we are all after; it is at the heart of this. It is encouraging to see the mechanisms for this emerging around land management plans, as the underpinning for delivering finance through the environmental land management scheme. Integrating it feels like the right way to go, as long as the land management plan is not just about the public goods but also about the productivity. They need to sit within that one mechanism in order for them to gear properly against each other. On whether it will be more intensive in the middle of some farms or fields, it might be but that is okay.
This brings to mind my recent visit to the Raveningham estate in Suffolk, which is doing some extraordinarily good stuff delivering the public goods in this Bill brilliantly, with huge dripping hedgerows weeping into the fields, and right in the middle, 12 tonnes a hectare of high quality wheat being produced. They have reconfigured the whole farm to make the movement of machinery more sensible, so that fuel costs are massively down. In that way, they reduce input costs in order to be able to do that kind of farming.
Kerry McCarthy
What was the name of the farm?
Patrick Begg: The Raveningham estate, which is the Bacon family. There is a fantastic estate manager there called Jake Fiennes, who has been doing this for 15 years and has produced amazing results. If you want to see an example of what productive farming plus public goods looks like in the lowlands, that is a great example.
Thomas Lancaster: That example points to the idea that you can improve your profitability in some respects by going down the direction of travel the Bill has set out: by removing or reducing spray and drill overlaps, by taking out awkward and unprofitable corners, and receiving public payments on those areas for delivering public goods by creating habitats such as wildflower margins. In turn, the evidence increasingly tells us that they can improve yield and further improve profitability by creating habitats for pollinators and crop pest predators.
A study in 2015 by Pywell et al from the Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology highlighted that even when you took 8% of land out of production in an arable system, there was no net loss of yield for cereals such as barley and wheat because you had a lot of crop pest predators in the system, and there was a 25% increase in yield for field beans—a flowering crop—because of the sheer abundance of pollinators.
Martin Lines: We have done the same. We have seen the benefit. We took 12% out of production into environmental measures and squared fields off where the pollinating margins are to see a 20% yield increase. There is a system there but we have not been able to use it. It can be done.
Thomas Lancaster: Even in the uplands, we have been doing some work recently to look at the economics of those systems, and similar work has been done by others. What that is increasingly showing us is that in an inherently uneconomic farming system, where you are losing money per head of livestock, often what you would do through a stewardship scheme is to reduce the number of livestock. You would not remove them—it is still noticeably and obviously a farm—but if you reduce the number of livestock, and maybe look at adding value and supplying into local markets and short supply chains, the profitability of that underlying agricultural operation can be transformed.
What we are increasingly seeing from the top of the hill right down to the bottom of the valley is that it is not either/or. The economics of a farm operation can be massively improved by engaging in and going down the route of focusing on public goods, as well as on good quality food production.
Gilles Deprez: It is not that farmers are cherry-picking just to take the best advantage out of it. In certain areas, it is just not possible. To use the example again of Cornwall, field margins do not make sense for our operation if we are talking about fields of one acre or less. We have a lot of hedges, so we already have a very strong natural environment. Sometimes it does not make sense for a certain environment or a certain type of business to do certain things. That is why you get cherry-picking in certain areas, I assume.
What is important is that productivity needs to go up. We need to be more productive. We need to do a lot more with a lot less, but we need innovation for that. For me as a farmer, that is very important. I might be a little scared about it as well. If there is no innovation and we are not going forward and there is no balance in the short and long term, you will lose out on a lot of things. Innovation should be central in everything we are doing to increase yields. Building fertility and soil fertility will help with certain things. Innovation is very important.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
Thomas Lancaster: For us, that is absolutely essential. At the moment, the Bill is a bit silent on that. We are told by civil servants that that is because there is this ongoing review by Dame Glenys Stacey looking at the future of farm regulation and inspections and that they will look to another Bill in the future to provide the powers necessary to secure that regulatory floor or foundation. We will be looking for assurances from Ministers and the Government about that regulatory baseline, because without that foundation, you do not have anything to build from in terms of your public goods policy.
For the progressive farmers, such as Martin and Gilles, who want to go out and restore natural capital and provide those public goods for society, it is absolutely critical that they are not then undercut by those looking effectively to go for maximum profit, regardless of the societal and environmental cost. We think that there is a really important case to be made for the importance of fair, proportionate, but effective regulation. That is not just about having the right rules in place, but having skilled and knowledgeable staff who then go out and enforce those regulations.
There is a lot of talk about advice-led regulation. That is about not just going out with a stick and applying penalties straight away, but going out and advising farmers and working with them to help them be more compliant in future. We would support that, but that needs investment from Government in the necessary resources. A recent report from World Wide Fund for Nature highlighted the fact that the Environment Agency only has enough capacity to inspect 0.5% of farms in any given year. It has about 40 inspectors who go out and look at how farms are performing on water quality and soils, and that is not enough to secure that regulatory foundation. It is also not enough to ensure a fair and proportionate inspection process for farmers, because those inspectors only ever have enough time to apply a penalty and go, rather than work with the farmer to help them comply with regulation in future.
Gilles Deprez: Knowledge is also very important. My crop is completely different from his crop, so the way we work with land, or the way we prepare our land, is completely different. For example, with my daffodils, the bulb is underneath the ground. I need to make sure that I do proper land preparation, which means soil disturbance. In a certain way, that is not ideal, but it would be a lot worse if I did not do it. Why? Because then I leave your daffodils in, and the moment I harvest the bulbs, I take all the soil out and all the stones away. The preparation for how I do certain things is completely different from what someone else is doing.
Crop rotation is crucial, but every crop has different demands, so knowledge, innovation and looking at new ideas are crucial. There is not one solution. We need to have an holistic view and look at all the different parameters to make sure that it can work, because a potato farmer has completely different demands from those of a daffodil farmer, a vegetable farmer, or a wheat farmer. They use completely different practical elements. The ideas and the principles are probably the same—working with the soil and trying to minimise the damage—but again, that balance of short-term and long-term profitability is important. If we focus too much on the long term in a certain way—and I know it sounds ridiculous—we might become bankrupt tomorrow, and then there is nothing.
Martin Lines: On environmental standard supervision, I cannot see that enforcement. There are base standards already out there, but how are they going to be enforced, and in which Bill? We want some clarity now, not an environment Bill coming later, so we as farmers have a clear understanding of where it lies. We want to keep the land in good heart. Previous Bills have been about keeping our natural assets in good heart for future generations. Where is that?
This goes back to short-term planning. There are a number of farms with short-term tenancies and short-term views: taking as much out of the land as possible today, with consequences for future generations. We need that bigger, long-term planning and a long-term view. It comes back to the landscape plan again: understanding what we have, with local variations of management systems for different parts of the country and the different crops we grow. As our consumers change their buying habits and as the climate changes, we may need to adapt our farming systems to produce different products. We need a land management plan that we can adjust to fit that change of cropping.
Patrick Begg: One thing to add, which we should not forget, is the stimulus that good regulation—and I mean good regulation—means for private sector investment and innovation. There are plenty of examples where regulation provokes quite a lot of clever thinking about what could be done. Someone said to me the other day, “Remember when the car industry was faced with having to put catalytic converters into everything?” There was a huge outcry: “We cannot possibly do that. It is going to put thousands on the cost of cars.” Within five or 10 years, it cost about £20 to put a catalytic converter into a car, and there was an industry around it, so jobs and growth came on the back of it.
There is a comparator with what can be done in agriculture. I see firms such as Nestlé investing premiums in their dairy farmers in Cumbria to meet regulatory baselines around water. There are already upstream supply chain businesses that recognise long-term resilience, but need that nudge of the regulatory baseline for that investment to be freed up. It is good for the farmer, good for the people using the drinking water downstream, and certainly good for Nestlé.
The Chair
Before I bring in Simon Hoare, we have eight Members who still want to ask questions, so again, can we keep the questions short? I also respectfully ask the witnesses to keep their replies short and concise. That would be great.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
Q
Patrick Begg: It is to grow food long term and look after the natural assets that it stewards.
Simon Hoare
Q
Patrick Begg: I do not think they are divisible. You cannot have long-term food production without a healthy, thriving well-stewarded natural environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from last week is a wake-up call about the kind of challenges that we have around land-management resilience. Certainly people in Martin’s network and many other farmers I meet absolutely recognise that it is a long-term game, and for a long-term game you need long-term assets in good health.
Martin Lines: Food is important for all of us. We eat it every day and we farmers produce it. It is one of our key assets. The issue is how we produce it for the long term. If we talk only about more short-term production, that will not give us long-term food security. Also, we are wasting up to 40% already. Do we need to produce more or should we educate people to use more of what they produce? We need a change of system and a change in society to recognise the food that we produce and how to consume it well.
Thomas Lancaster: The principal purpose of agriculture is to produce food in a way that does not undermine the capacity of future generations to produce food, but I would differentiate between the principal purpose of agriculture and the principal purpose of agriculture policy, particularly payments. From our perspective, clause 1 is really important in terms of securing the things that the market does not provide, such as environmental land management, better water quality, and carbon storage and sequestration: the sort of natural capital that food production in future will depend on. The clauses around data collection, producer organisations, and regulation of the relationship between farmers and the first purchaser of agricultural products are all absolutely integral to the success of the Bill in enabling farmers to get a better return from the market. To me, that has been lost in some of the debates about there not being enough agriculture in the Bill, because that is a reading just of the first two or three clauses, which are about public money. Agriculture policy is about a lot more than public money. We need to have a much broader debate about what the purpose and structure of future policy is.
Gilles Deprez: I am not a food producer.
Simon Hoare
No—daffodil bulbs are poisonous if you eat them.
Gilles Deprez: I have never tried to eat them.
Simon Hoare
Don’t!
Gilles Deprez: With horticulture, I need to make money. I need to run a profitable organisation. Without being profitable, I cannot survive. I agree with the long-term views, building fertility and working in harmony with nature. I have never met a farmer who said, “Gilles, today I will spray and kill all the birds on my farm.” We do not need those farmers. I have never met that farmer. Farmers are custodians of the land and are working to the best of their ability to try to do that, but at the end of the day we need to make sure that we are profitable.
With flower production, perhaps I am not impacting on someone’s physical health, but I influence their mental health. Our ambition is to make sure that people live healthier lives and enjoy access every day. We need accessibility. It is a bit of a paradox sometimes because accessibility means in a certain way affordability, but within our slow margins, if I had to show my balance sheet or my profit and loss to a technical or IT company, they would laugh at us. They would say, “Why are you working seven days, 24 hours a day, for that small margin?”
Deidre Brock
Q
“The central purpose of the Agriculture Bill is to provide a framework that confers on Ministers extensive powers…with correspondingly few duties…exercisable indefinitely and without sunset clauses. They include…the ability to create criminal offences punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment”.
What areas of your organisation are you most concerned about, in view of the extensive powers that Ministers will have under the Bill and the lack of detail that the report criticises so heavily?
Thomas Lancaster: I am not sure that I have any particular concerns about our organisation as such, but we do have concerns about the lack of duties in the Bill. We think that that is a big gap.
Deidre Brock
Q
Thomas Lancaster: Yes. We want to see a duty in the Bill to have an environmental land management scheme in England. At the moment, it provides the powers for that, but there is no certainty about whether Ministers will choose to use them. That is one of the few backward steps from the common agricultural policy, which through its rural development programmes requires member states to have an agri-environment scheme. Because of that requirement, there are four agri-environment schemes across the UK.
A second duty that we have called for is an annual assessment of the funding required, particularly to meet the purposes in clause 1. A third is for current and future Ministers to use the powers in the Bill to improve transparency in the supply chain and strengthen the position of the farmer in it.
Patrick Begg: I back up what Tom says. I am not sure that our organisation is worried about the powers, but we will certainly be asking for duties to fill the gaps, such as a duty to create multi-annual payment settlements. That is not exceptional; the Highways Agency do it and the Environment Agency do it for flooding. It is a question of creating confidence and certainty within the farming industry that it will stick and that people can invest with confidence. We would also wish for a duty to get an independent assessment of the quantum of money required to deliver the aspirations set out in clause 1.
Martin Lines: There are lots of powers in the Bill, but the concerns for farmers in the network are about who can use them and how, and what triggers them. Some of those powers should be duties. It is about the long-term view of how we need to manage and be managed as farmers.
Gilles Deprez: My two main concerns are about points that I have highlighted. The first—I am not sure whether it is right or wrong—is about being competitive, not only with UK farmers but worldwide, because we are a very fragmented market.
My second concern is that innovation is not really highlighted in the Bill. In chemistry, for example, there is a kind of mutual recognition: if one country recognises something as an innovation, it goes through the system a lot more quickly. I do not see that in the Bill. We must not block innovation; it needs to be key in business, in order to look at the future and be competitive.
Colin Clark
Q
“‘Public Money for Public Goods’ approach…would be a radical change and one that would certainly need to be tested for efficacy before adoption.”
Do you agree that the seven-year transition will be adequate for testing? We have heard from Mr Lines that people already have good practices. Is seven years enough time to activate a policy, considering how long it takes to grow hedges, trees and cover? Or will we have to come up with policies like those that you are already using, Mr Lines, on your farm? Patrick Begg, you mentioned the public good.
Patrick Begg: Yes. Seven years is actually a little bit longer than we have called for, but I can see why that was done; the last thing we need is a cliff edge. If you think about it, it is in fact 10 years from now—a seven-year transition is effectively 10 years from today, give or take a month or two. If you consider change programmes—this might be one—generally speaking, you need to get going with stuff, and the sense of urgency is a good stimulus for things to happen well. I think the balance of seven years is probably about right in the end.
DEFRA has a programme of tests and trials work that starts next year. That will start to land on the ground, and we will be able to test mechanisms. On seeing outcomes, we have plenty of evidence of the things that work; I do not think we necessarily need to test the outcomes. We know how to deliver the things that have been set out in the Bill; the issue is just the mechanisms by which the farmer is adequately supported to make the change and to deliver those in an effective way.
Colin Clark
Q
Martin Lines: I am only satisfied if we are going to engage as farmers and have input into how this will be managed. We want practical farmers engaging in what will be the land management plan, and in what we can achieve. Through stewardship in the last 20 years, we know what can be done, what cannot and what does not work in different areas. The network has a whole number of farmers—me included—who want to get out of the current system as quickly as possible and move on to the new system, because it just does not work for my farming business. It is over-bureaucratic. It measured down to 10 cm around the edges of my fields. Let us have a holistic, balanced approach to how we produce stuff; let us have the environmental measures around the outsides or in different parts of the field that fit my farming system, and let us be flexible on how I want to deliver that farming system—and let us, hopefully, be rewarded well for that by the marketplace for the food I produce, and by the public payments for the other areas. Ten years is plenty long enough for me to get on with that.
Thomas Lancaster: I would agree that the timeframe in the Bill is enough from our perspective. It is welcome that that timeframe is in the Bill. Once it is set, we just need to stick to it, because if we do not, we will get this sort of Brexit drift—there is so much other stuff going on that the temptation will be to kick the can down the road, which will not serve anyone’s interests.
We would like to see a bit more policy richness and detail around the transition, not just on the time and the piloting of land management schemes and how the public good element is going to be provided, but also on how we can transition to a sector that is more market-facing, more profitable and more resilient to market fluctuations. Importantly for us, there are sectors where there is no real culture of thinking about profitability first. The evidence pack that came with “Health and Harmony” showed that there were whole sectors where business planning was down at 17% or 18%. We think there is a role for the Government and for the sort of active state that the Prime Minister has talked about, in terms of investing in business and skills advice, knowledge exchange, research and development and those sorts of areas through the transition, to enable farmers to get to the point where they get a market return for the food they produce, and also a return from public payments for the non-marketable services and goods that they provide.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
Q
Patrick Begg: I would say it is a very significant risk. You would find cross-sectoral agreement that more needs to be done—probably in the Trade Bill—around ensuring that imports do not undercut the environmental standards we already have and are talking about cementing for the future. Without that, it is a huge risk.
Martin Lines: Trade deals are going to be massive. We do not just want to have high standards here and export our environmental footprint; we want to be leading here, exporting those high standards, and buying produce from abroad that matches those high standards. There is a lot of concern around that.
Thomas Lancaster: I would agree, certainly on international trade, standards and imports. As Patrick says, we are speaking with one voice with the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association and other farming and food organisations on that point. In terms of UK co-operation, agriculture is a devolved policy, and it is right that individual devolved Administrations should have the flexibility to develop policies that are right for their country. We would like co-operation on issues such as how those policies are designed and how we can prevent market distortion. From our perspective, environmental challenges are transboundary—there are shared catchments that span borders within the UK—so how will we secure environmental outcomes across boundaries through future agriculture policy? That is a huge unanswered question.
Martin Lines: I would like to see the Government leading the way in procurement of their own food. Governments throughout the UK buy huge amounts of food. Where are you setting the higher standards in trying to procure that food locally and sustainably, and leading the way? That sets the direction for the rest of the public to follow.
Mr Goodwill
Q
Patrick Begg: We live and breathe this every day. This is at the heart of what the National Trust does. It is always a balance, and there will always be trade-offs. There is no blanket policy that you can apply here, but I think we would all agree that more public access that allows people to get the spiritual and physical refreshment that our countryside offers is absolutely critical.
The Bill is incredibly welcome, in that one legitimate area for public investment in future will be increased public access. I could not agree more strongly with what has been done in the Bill on that. Sometimes we can find small examples of disturbance where people and wildlife do not match up very well, and think that it is a universal problem. I think it is not universal. Our experience is that there is a large amount of open countryside in which people can happily co-exist with wildlife. There will have to be some careful thought put into how we make sure that the interface between people and livestock works. Dogs and livestock can be problematic—let us be honest. Again, we have methods for dealing with that. There is public education. It is interesting that the countryside code has gone off the agenda and no longer gets talked about. That can be revitalised, and people can be made to feel engaged in their countryside and feel that they have a shared responsibility for what happens out there, not just as users, but as people invested in it.
Martin Lines: On public access, it is good for people’s health to get out into the countryside, but it needs to be managed because of dogs and the health and safety aspects of people walking around on farms. This is also about access to information. Hopefully, we can deliver environmental land management plans to let the community have that knowledge and make it publicly accessible. The community around me can access what we are delivering as farmers, and put it on their community pages, so when they use the countryside and the footpaths, they understand what we are delivering.
As an industry, we can communicate positive messages, and talk about some of the trouble and hassle we get from public access, how people can use the landscape, and the food and public goods that we produce. That should connect back to society, because much of society is disconnected from what the landscape is used for, the food and animals that are used, and the threats that can come from wandering around nesting habitats or letting your dog run free.
Thomas Lancaster: Access is a good one to talk about, in terms of thinking about how you can have a holistic approach to securing public goods and food, with a solid regulatory foundation. We would not want farmers and landowners to be paid to keep rights of way open. That is a legal requirement, so you would not pay for that through public payments. What you might do is to pay for permissive access where it makes sense to join up rights of way, and where there is a real desire to connect one part of the local community to another part, but currently there is no path to do so. The farmers we work with are almost always passionate about educational access. They really love the support for it that they get through current schemes and agreements.
There will be instances where access is not suitable for biodiversity reasons, or on a Ministry of Defence firing range or whatever. That points to the need to have really good advice and guidance when we develop future schemes, to enable whoever is putting together the land management contracts to do so in a way that balances all the public goods and secures the best net outcome from any given farm or area of land.
Gilles Deprez: My knowledge is not good enough for this question. It is important to have public access. From what I have seen, we have a lot of public footpaths in Cornwall, for example. It is not always easy, to be honest. If you have a public footpath that goes across the middle of your most productive area of land, it is not easy, but we are already doing it today.
Ben Lake
Q
Thomas Lancaster: Generally speaking, we are of the view that the World Trade Organisation agreement on agriculture provides pretty much all the flexibility that you would want to develop pretty much any public payment system that you would want. Some of the concerns that have been expressed are about whether paragraph 12 in annexe 2 of the agreement, which limits payments for environmental programmes to costs incurred and income forgone, limits the ability to provide a fair return, but even within the common agricultural policy, there are examples of other member states that have gone much further and have paid more for those environmental benefits. That is within the CAP, in which the Commission sets some stringent guidance about how member states’ managing authorities can calculate those payments. When we move away from the CAP, there is nothing in the agreement on agriculture that stipulates how you should interpret costs incurred.
In hill farming operations, the income is very low. Some people have expressed the concern that that would mean that payments for environmental benefits would be low. Actually, if a whole hill farming operation is loss-making and a cost to an individual, you can interpret that as a cost incurred, and you can effectively pay to secure that ongoing management, and then tweak that management to secure specific environmental benefits for curlews, water quality, flood risk management or other public goods that you might secure from an upland farm. We are of the view that there is huge flexibility in that.
Even if you were to declare your public payment scheme as green box, and you have done some pretty imaginative interpreting of the rules, you would still have the aggregate measure of support—the amber box—sat there as a sort of hedge against any challenge that might come from another member of the WTO. It has been blown up into an issue, but is a bit of a red herring, really, in terms of how we might go about developing future payments and providing an adequate incentive for the public goods that the Bill lists.
The Chair
We have 10 minutes left, and three more Members want to ask questions. Unless anybody really wants to say something, we will move on.
Martin Lines: WTO rules are for DEFRA and the Government to deal with, not farmers. It is your problem. If you are going to design a scheme that will not work because of the WTO, do not do it.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
Q
Thomas Lancaster: I mentioned it recognising its importance, as opposed to being an expert on it, given that I am from a conservation organisation. This is not just about the data collection; from our perspective, if anything, some of the other clauses about first purchases and producer organisations may be more important. I can see that there would be concern about some of the data collection. The Government might get a bit carried away in terms of what data they collect, so there should absolutely be a principle underpinning that. The Government should ask only for data that they will actually use, and data that will further their aim of improving transparency. They should have to be really clear about why they are asking for that data.
On how the powers in the middle of the Bill can improve transparency and the position of farmers, if you take producer organisations as an example, in the Netherlands there is a huge culture of co-operation in farming. That is really lacking in farming in the UK. The powers in the Bill create producer organisations in which farmers can work together to manage supply, market their produce, add value and, effectively, cannibalise some of the roles in the supply chain where a lot of the profit sits. That is how you can return more of the profit back to the primary producer.
Similarly, on the first purchaser of agricultural products clause, we know anecdotally and through reports of the Groceries Code Adjudicator that there are many instances where farmers are not treated well by the first purchaser. At the moment, the GCA extends only to retailers, whereas that clause would effectively extend that regulation of the supply chain—of that commercial relationship—to all famers who sell their products. In better regulating that relationship, you can do things such as ensure that farmers are paid within an acceptable timeframe, which effectively strengthens their position in negotiating a price for their product with whoever buys it first.
Mr Dunne
Q
Patrick Begg: Will it be attractive to some of our tenants? I suspect that it will. There may be lots of reasons for that, which we do not have time to go into. There is the risk that you have just identified: will there be a vacuum, in which case nothing could be done, or it is not an attractive place for someone to come and farm? We need to tease that out. I can also foresee a bigger risk. We do not want long-term naked acres where the money is effectively retired out of the resourcing system. We really need to safeguard against that as the Bill progresses and as we design the scheme, because I think it does have the potential to unlock quite a lot of enthusiasm.
We turn over tenancies relatively regularly. The signals out there, both from us and with regard to where the debate has been going, is that we are probably creating a queue of people who are enthusiastically waiting to get tenancies to deliver the kind of things that the Bill sets out. I have confidence that plenty of people are waiting to do this and to make great farming businesses out of vacant tenancies, but it would be a worry if that support was retired out of the scheme. We need to attend to that risk, as the Bill goes through. Is that right Martin? You have plenty of our members in the Nature Friendly Farming Network.
Martin Lines: Yes. The question is, if one goes, what support is left for the new one coming in? There are a whole load of new entrants to whom this will hopefully give a kick-start, so that they get the opportunity to get on the renting ladder.
Chris Davies (Brecon and Radnorshire) (Con)
Q
Patrick Begg: I think we would all love a crystal ball, so that we could anticipate all that; I am not sure that we can. There will definitely be change. For some of the large livestock businesses that we see, quantum has been the only way to keep their nose above water. This scheme, as I think Tom mentioned, allows people to breathe a little more—perhaps to de-intensify in some places, and change the mix of livestock. We might see a change in the balance between sheep and cattle in some areas.
There are lots of ways that this can go. I see that this has a load of benefits at the back end for individual farmers. If I think about some of the farmers we have worked with in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Wales, rebalancing towards a more mixed livestock system that has less onerous duties for them to manage seven days a week, 24 hours a day—they were looking after huge numbers of livestock—has produced huge benefits for family life. Farmers do not have to spend all their time constantly working, and still get a higher margin by adding value to their produce.
The big thing we need to get right is the support that we give farmers in making that transition, as we start to change to that slightly different balance of livestock. The advice available and the measures in place during the transition for investing in different things to make the livestock system work better are absolutely critical; otherwise, 10 years from now, we will find that people are being asked to do something that they are culturally and practically ill equipped to do.
Thomas Lancaster: Upland sheep farmers are a good example of where you might look to the whole of the Bill. Long-term demand for lamb is in decline, as the age profile of lamb consumers is quite old. Young people do not eat it; they eat chicken and pork. In the long term, demand for lamb is likely to reduce. We export 40% of our lamb to the EU, and to north Africa under its free trade agreements with the EU, so what happens if there is friction there? We already hear about sheep farmers in Belgium and France gearing up effectively to pick up some of the demand currently met by UK farmers.
Where you have a chronically loss-making industry, in terms of the profit it makes from the core agricultural operation, direct payments have effectively masked that. We have done some economic analysis of our agricultural operations in the uplands, and direct payments are transformative, in terms of the economic performance of those businesses. You are talking about some of the most incredible, iconic landscapes and places in the country, and at the moment they are just being used for commodity land production, with no added value at all. Can we look to the provisions of the Bill on producer organisations to enable us to work with farmers in south or north Wales to create brands around Brecon lamb or Snowdonia lamb, or whatever? Those farmers could then work together to regulate supply, add value, process and brand the product, and develop markets, and they could focus much more on profit and provenance than on the total production that goes into a commodity market—
The Chair
Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allotted to the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I would like to thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
ffinlo Costain, David Bowles and Simon Doherty gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear evidence from Farmwel, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the British Veterinary Association. The Committee is most grateful to you all, particularly the BVA, which has agreed to offer a witness at very short notice. For this session we have until 11.25 am. Will the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?
Simon Doherty: Good morning, I am Simon Doherty, president of the British Veterinary Association. For clarity, I will declare that I have just completed three years’ consultancy as the animal health and agriculture specialist of the Department for International Trade.
David Bowles: Hi! I am David Bowles, assistant director at the RSPCA, and I have been working on CAP and WTO issues for about 20 years.
ffinlo Costain: Hello there. My name is ffinlo Costain and I run Farmwel. We work very closely with FAI Farms, which is a sustainability consultancy working with big retailers at national and global level.
Dr Drew
Q
David Bowles: It is a very good start. You have to put it in context. The CAP has allowed payments for animal welfare since 2003, so we have had two seven-year cycles. If you look at how many schemes there have been in the UK for animal welfare during that time, there has been one, in Scotland. That is not due to lack of enthusiasm from the devolved Administrations; that is due to lack of money, because pillar 2 has not given that money to open up those particular financial streams.
The RSPCA was delighted when the Bill came forward and acknowledged that animal welfare is a public good. Of course, we would like to see, as the previous presenters said, more clarity that there are duties to give money to animal welfare, because animal welfare has been squeezed out in the last 15 years under CAP and we do not want to see it squeezed out in future.
Yes, it is a good start. We would like to see some ring-fenced funding. We also crucially welcome the fact that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has linked in animal health and animal welfare. Those two are crucial. If you are looking at things such as lameness and mastitis, if you are trying to improve one, you are improving the other. I think there is a huge opportunity for win-wins here on animal health and animal welfare.
ffinlo Costain: I agree entirely with what David just said but I think there is a real challenge. We would like to see a whole-farm approach to environmental land management schemes, so that you do not have progress on one public good on one part of the farm, but degradation of that same public good on a different part of the farm. Part of the challenge is around understanding the role that farm animal welfare plays, not only in and of itself to improve the lives of animals, but as an indicator of progress on environmental improvements as well. From that perspective—sorry, I am not sure what the second thing was that I was going to say, but that will do for now.
Simon Doherty: By way of an opening remark, I fully concur with what David and ffinlo have just said by way of introduction. Certainly, the BVA position would be that we feel that this is a really good start. It is a nice piece of legislation. There are sufficient powers contained within it, we feel, to give the Secretary of State the ability to make appropriate changes where necessary within the realm of animal health and animal welfare.
Our overall position is that health and welfare are inextricably linked, but although we feel that there is a lot to be gained by maintaining that link, there are times when we need to separate welfare and look at particular aspects that relate to welfare outcomes—good welfare on the farm is not just absence of disease. There are times when we appreciate that there is a very close link between health and welfare, but there are also times when we need to be able to measure each separately. For both to be public goods, there need to be appropriate measures across the board.
ffinlo Costain: I have remembered my final point. Our view is that climate change and biodiversity must be addressed together. You can get some quite perverse outcomes, particularly on farm animal welfare, if you simply focus hard on greenhouse gas emissions; you displace some of the environmental impact of the feed production, nitrous oxide production and carbon dioxide production that is associated with those more intensive systems. It is really important that farmers should not deliver some public goods at the expense of other public goods that are part of that. Improvements in climate change and biodiversity must be delivered together, and farm animal welfare is a great indicator of progress in both those areas.
George Eustice
Q
Simon Doherty: It is probably all of the above—it is the whole piece across the board. In measuring the outcomes, it is important that we do not just reward farmers for doing the minimum legal standard. It is actually about going above and beyond. The overall purpose has to be to raise the bar right across the board. It should not just be about rewarding the farmers who choose to do things above and beyond; it should be about bringing people who are a little bit behind the game on welfare to a point where they improve their end game. That will not just be through a purely financial reward—quite a bit of thought needs to be put into the individual schemes to make sure that we are bringing everybody along. It certainly needs to be right across the board.
David Bowles: I mentioned at the beginning that the UK has only ever had one animal welfare scheme, but in the EU there have been 50 different rural development programmes on animal welfare over the last two cycles since 2007. They provide a huge amount of rich experience that shows that you can get good welfare outcomes from inputs from financial incentives. The RSPCA would like to see a two-tier system that has both the incentives that the Minister mentioned. For instance, you would have capital costs for rewarding people who build larger lunging spaces for dairy cattle. You would have outcome-based measures—for instance, the number of tails on pigs going through abattoirs that show a lack of mutilation. As Simon said, you should aim for people to go to a higher welfare scheme, such as RSPCA Assured. We believe that if you do so, you will get the incentive to improve animal welfare and animal health, and you will get farmers using a much better farming system than they use at the moment. This gives us a real opportunity to break the mould on animal welfare and get much better animal welfare farming happening in the next 10 years or so.
ffinlo Costain: I agree with both the previous comments. It is essential to increase standards across the board. We should not only improve those standards as and when we leave the EU, but put in place a mechanism—and metrics are a really important part of this—to enable us to continually review the standards, based on what is being achieved by farmers, not just in the UK but around the world, to ensure that our standards continue improving. I think that at the moment, DEFRA want to provide financial assistance for farmers who are genuinely trying to improve their systems. We support that, and we think that sometimes, that assistance may need to be quite substantial. I think that DEFRA also want to reward particular excellence, and again, metrics are critical to measuring that progress. The best way for Government to achieve this is to work with existing—and possibly new-entrant—higher welfare schemes, schemes like RSPCA Assured, Soil Association and others, and then provide rewards based on particular metrics that the Government agree are critical.
In terms of metrics, we should not just be focusing on inputs. There is often a lot of focus on the inputs—the type of housing, the space allowance, the genetics of the animals, and that sort of thing—but we should also be looking at the outcomes: what is achieved. The inputs give us the key determinants in our ability to deliver improved farm animal welfare, but the outcomes tell us whether that improvement in welfare has been delivered. We need to see on-farm metrics that help farmers improve their day-to-day efficiency, the productivity of their businesses, and their ability to deliver better welfare and better sustainability in the round. There is also a huge opportunity across the nation at the moment that is underplayed, which is in the area of slaughter. That is where most livestock end up. There is potential to gather an enormous amount of helpful data that will help farmers, policy makers, and retailers’ assurance schemes deliver better welfare, and have a much more forensic understanding of where welfare sits across the board and whether attempts to improve welfare are being successful.
Simon Doherty: Minister, there is also a real opportunity to engage new technologies that are being validated to measure some of these objective welfare outcomes. A huge amount of work is going on, and the UK is very much ahead of the game on this. We have some fantastic research centres across all four regions of the UK that are doing brilliant work on things like thermography, video imaging, wearable devices and so on, which are helping to measure health outcomes, but are also being validated to measure welfare outcomes. We do not necessarily need to cover all of our farms in that technology, but incentivising the uptake of some of these new technologies that can be used to benchmark animal welfare will be increasingly important as we go forward.
We have had a huge amount of engagement recently. BVA produces an infographic on welfare related to farm quality assurance schemes, and there has been a huge amount of uptake right across the board on that, including—as was previously mentioned—RSPCA and Soil Association schemes. As I say, that is going to be really important to building public engagement about this being a public good.
George Eustice
Q
David Bowles: Absolutely. The uptake of the RSPCA Assured scheme, which the RSPCA sets standards for, is patchy. It covers about 55% of egg production in the UK, about 23% of pig production and about 30% of turkey production, but for the sheep, beef and dairy sectors, uptake is under 1%. However, as part of the scheme, the RSPCA has been doing welfare outcome assessments for the past 10 years or so, which started off with laying hens, dairy and pigs and is also now moving into chickens. We have got a lot more skilled in working out what the animal is thinking and what its welfare outcomes are. The RSPCA knows from its schemes—this is a commercial scheme—that those systems are easy to put in, that they are fairly easy to measure and inspect as part of the audit trail, and that they work. The farmers appreciate them because they need feedback in terms of how their animals are feeling as well.
We already have a lot of the science there to enable us to look at this. We would certainly welcome using those measures as part of any scheme going forward and, of course, welcome anybody coming to any of our farms to see how those welfare outcome assessments work in practice.
ffinlo Costain: A sustainable farm is, in our view, a happy and healthy farm. It is one where the animals and farmers are making progress and are both having a life worth living. It is not just about the animals; it is about the farmers as well.
I used to run a regional branch of the National Farmers Union. For many of the members that I represented, the main time that they came across metrics was when they sent an animal to the abattoir and were told that it did not quite achieve the grade that they expected it to. That was the feedback they got, and they got less money. That is really negative. We need to change that so that there is a much more positive relationship with metrics.
I take the example of my neighbour’s farm. He has big challenges with his lamb production. We would like to see an assurance scheme that measures his farm in the round—that there are what we might call iceberg metrics that are measured by the Government, partly on a farm and partly at slaughter, where we are looking at low levels of lameness, low levels of ailments such as liver fluke and low levels of antibiotic use, and measuring those things together.
My neighbour is putting in place some really interesting measures around hedgerow management, carbon sequestration and water management, which will improve sustainability at the same time as improving the health and the welfare of the sheep on that farm. If he was achieving against those three measurements together and improving year on year, he would be happier with the farming system that he has, would be earning more money and would have increasing yield at the same time as feeling good about his farm, being able to communicate that with his community and also earning additional money in relation to those public goods. That is the sort of progress that we would like to see, which is very much along the lines that the Minister is thinking of at the moment.
David Bowles: Of course it is a balance. You have to make sure that you do not make any scheme too complicated. You have to have measurements that are easy to measure and quick to measure as part of the audit scheme. It is a balance between getting that data out and making sure that the audit scheme works properly.
Deidre Brock
Q
David Bowles: The RSPCA, like the previous witnesses, has huge anxiety about future trade deals. Let us look at the number of countries that we are looking to do trade deals with. At the moment we are obviously looking to do a trade deal with the EU. We have broadly a level playing field with the EU, because we have had animal welfare standards since 1974 and they cover most of the species in the EU. Of course we would like to see them higher, but they are pretty good. The EU and the UK have probably some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world, so that means that anybody else that we are trying to do trade deals with has lower standards—the only exception is New Zealand. The USA has hugely lower standards. Not only is it still using methods that are illegal in the UK, such as beef hormones or ractopamine, but it is also using standards that are illegal in the UK, such as the conventional battery cage and sow stalls.
The RSPCA would like to see an amendment to the Bill that was rejected by the House of Commons on the Trade Bill—that any trade deals would allow in only products that are produced at least to the standards in the UK. If we do not have that, we have a race to the bottom; we are just exporting our good animal welfare standards to somewhere else and we do not want to see that. We want to see a vibrant, healthy farming community in the UK, producing at higher welfare standards and giving the consumers what they want, not the bringing in of products and food that are produced to illegal or worse standards than here.
ffinlo Costain: I echo what David said, but I would also say that, in my meetings with Ministers and officials at DEFRA, I think there was a genuine commitment to improving farm animal welfare. I have been really heartened by that as we have been going forward. At the same time, there are some really challenging balances, exactly as David said. However, at the heart of this is what is the market in the UK, not only for our farmers at home, but abroad, and it is about quality. If we have lower standards coming in, it undermines our marketplace and our rural economy. It is essential that we recognise that we are never going to win a race to the bottom; we cannot. We can win a race to the top. We already have good quality products that could be much better quality in terms of welfare and the environment that we can sell as a story, as a whole product, whether that is branding, as Tom was talking about before—Cumbrian lamb or whatever—or whether it is selling branding at home; whether it is building the business case through public goods to our local communities and to the taxpayer for additional assistance in terms of land management and public goods; or whether it is underpinning the British brand and selling and promoting that quality around the world.
In addition, if we are building a market based on quality and reviving our rural economy, whether it is small, medium or large farm businesses, we will be developing new technologies and new machinery that we can also export. We want to see not only a growth in improved welfare and environmental standards, but a revival in the countryside. The Bill is a fantastic step in the right direction, but it is just framework legislation. We need to see more work in the future—for example, the gold standard work that DEFRA is engaged in.
Simon Doherty: I agree with the two previous correspondents entirely. I will not repeat everything that they have said. We have had some very encouraging, strong lines from DEFRA. The disappointment has been that there have been weaker lines from the Department for International Trade. We need to make sure that there is a join-up across Government to make sure that we are all singing off the same hymn sheet in relation to welfare, so that we do not have one part of Government saying one thing and another part doing another. Obviously, I will say this as the president of the British Veterinary Association. We feel that we are absolutely at the juxtaposition of animal health and welfare. We are here today because the role of the BVA is to represent the veterinary profession to Government. We hope that one of the outcomes across the board will be a recognition of the role of vets in veterinary public health, in animal welfare, in animal health, and ultimately in food security for the country.
David Bowles: Of course, the other way to stop this, apart from in trade deals, is to give the consumer information. At the moment we only have one mandatory method of production label, which is on eggs, and we know that that has worked. It has driven the market up to 55% now for free range eggs, because the consumers wanted that. We hope that in the Bill we get some mandatory method of production labelling going into other areas. There is a chance of getting that. I know the Government share some of that enthusiasm, and that would be really good. The consumers always say they want higher animal welfare, but some of the time they are confused because the label does not show that.
ffinlo Costain: The evidence shows that, where method of production labelling exists, at least 50% of consumers choose the higher welfare option, which is often a little more expensive. Method of production labelling is not only important in terms of helping to drive that market, but is really about improving communication. There is a big disparity between, particularly, people who live in the city, but also often people who live in the countryside as well, and the way that food is produced; I do not know whether that is driven by CBeebies. I have a four and a six-year-old and they constantly see one model of farming that does not necessarily reflect the way that farming is. Labelling and communication in general builds the case for improved prices and for commitment to local farmers, or farmers at a British level, and across the board. I think it is really important.
Jenny Chapman
Q
David Bowles: One of the most exciting things about trade deals at the moment—if I can use the words “exciting” and “trade deals” in the same sentence—is that we are starting to see language in them about equivalence on animal welfare standards. The EU has been a driver for this. It started with South Korea and has now got it with Chile, and it is looking at getting it with Mexico as well. That is a real incentive. We want to see similar language on equivalence with the EU, as well as with others. RSPCA Assured has shown that raising animal welfare standards can be done on a commercial basis—consumers will vote with their purses if they are given the right information and if there is enough transparency on the retailer market shelf—but some specific language on equivalence needs to be put into trade deals.
ffinlo Costain: Being in the lead is not something that continues unless you keep working at it. There are areas in which other countries are catching up with the UK, and possibly one or two in which they are starting to move ahead. It is therefore critical that we have metrics to measure the inputs and outcomes, and to understand at a national level where we want to be and how successful policy is at making that progress. We should be leaders—this is our opportunity. We will not win the race to the bottom, but we can win on quality by selling at home and selling abroad.
Look at Origin Green in Ireland. It is a unique national brand, although its climate outcomes are nowhere near as strong as what I would like to see. If we had a national brand based on metrics for climate change and biodiversity, with farm animal welfare used as a critical indicator of progress in both areas, it could be part of our gold standard work. It would underpin our progress and ensure it continues, and be a national brand that we could sell abroad. Origin Green is a really good place to look for an opportunity that we could quickly overtake and surpass in export and home production.
Simon Doherty: There is a huge commercial advantage from other parts of the world opening up to exploring improved animal welfare. We have consultancy firms such as FAI Farms that are working globally to help other jurisdictions to raise their standards towards those that we work at in Europe and in the UK.
I mentioned the underpinning research and development that is going on in the field of animal welfare. There are certainly other parts of northern Europe that are working on curly tails on pigs, for example, or improving health indicators such as mastitis or lameness in dairy cows. We have that world-class expertise across the board, and we need to continue to build on it. We also need to ensure that the funding is there to underpin that research.
Mr Dunne
Q
David Bowles: We have been working with Dame Glenys Stacey on her review. Slightly worryingly, she has said that its recommendations will not be published in time for the Bill. There is a mismatch in terms of how we ensure good enforcement, particularly now that cross-compliance is ending, so we would like to see a commitment in the Bill to implementing some of the Stacey review’s recommendations on enforcement. The Government’s own research has shown that those who farm under a welfare assurance scheme, particularly one such as RSPCA Assured, are much less likely to break the law. We would like to see payments given to higher welfare assurance schemes, not just because they produce animal welfare benefits, but because they improve enforcement.
ffinlo Costain: We would like to see a reduction in the paperwork that farmers need to do. Reducing that burden is important if farmers are to become more productive and efficient, but we also want to see an increase in what is measured. We can achieve that by promoting self-assessment on farms and farmers’ participation in assurance schemes, and by increasing the measurement of data collected on use of technology to assist farmers, so that they feel the benefit day to day. We also need to work with slaughterhouses on livestock to ensure that we are doing much more measurement and standardising it. By pinning all that work together—self-assessment, technology, use of data and use of slaughterhouses—we can measure more, measure more effectively and reduce the burden.
The Chair
Order. I am afraid that that brings us to the end of the time allocated for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Agriculture Bill (Second sitting)
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We will now hear oral evidence from the National Farmers Union. Will you identify yourself for the record?
Andrew Clark: I am Andrew Clark, director of policy at the National Farmers Union.
The Chair
Thank you for taking the trouble to join us. We have until 2.30 pm for this line of questioning. I am sorry we are running slightly late, but there were some domestic issues that had to be discussed. The first question is from the Minister.
The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
Q
Andrew Clark: We certainly agree with the central premise that we should move to a new state. We believe that the transition period of seven years is probably the right timescale at the moment. However, we are concerned that it is difficult to predict the circumstances we will find ourselves in during that seven years—or even next week. During those seven years, while moving to a situation where public goods are the primary reward for farm businesses, there should be an opportunity for Ministers to pause, reflect and review that transition, and to vary payments.
George Eustice
Q
Andrew Clark: We would like to widen that power slightly to allow Ministers and future Governments to vary the transition according to economic circumstances and the ability of farm businesses to deliver on the public goods that you want to achieve.
George Eustice
Q
Andrew Clark: It is a good question. For starters, we are very clear in our mind that food security is a public good. It is in the public interest to ensure that there is a sufficient level of food supply from domestic sources. One of the changes to the Bill that we would like is clarification that it is a particular objective of the Government to achieve food security. We believe this should be a direction of travel, rather than wanting a particular level. Clearly, for different crops, there are different levels of food security. In some crops, we could be 100% self-sufficient; in others, such as bananas and aubergines, we probably never will or should be. We believe food security should be an objective of the Bill and should be in there with public goods.
George Eustice
Q
Andrew Clark: Our objective would be to ensure that there was intervention to assist all businesses, in whatever sector, in contributing towards food security and sustainable management of the land. Every sector has a contribution to make to that. Pigs and poultry indirectly benefit from the fact that they take feedstocks from other parts of the farm economy—notably cereal farmers—that receive direct payments.
George Eustice
Q
Andrew Clark: That is a good question. One of the things we would like to see is a simplification of the approach. The objective of simplifying and improving is laudable. One of the concerns about the transition relates to untangling the bureaucracy we find currently with greening—the detail of measurement and that type of thing. In terms of outcomes, however, some of those greening measures potentially have good benefits for farm businesses and the sustainable management of land and soils, and we would be disappointed if the existing benefits from agriculture production were lost during the transition period.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
Andrew Clark: There are a number of worries. The Bill is fairly silent on three crucial areas that we think need to be addressed. Ministers have rightly made a lot of points about farmers’ proud record on caring for the environment and, in particular, animal welfare and health. It seems to us that the Bill should give greater provision to protecting and retaining farming standards, environmental standards and animal health and welfare standards, in the face of the new trading environment. We would like to see some measures, and perhaps some amendment, relating to that.
As the Minister has pointed out, the long-term commitment is for farming to continue to deliver a contract around environmental and land management. That is a multi-annual commitment, and we believe that there should be a multi-annual budget to go along with that, rather than just a year-to-year budget. We would like to see something that reflects the long-term nature of the farming community’s expectations in the Bill.
The final thing is that we feel that there is not quite enough agriculture in the Agriculture Bill. Although it sets out clearly what types of things can be done—perhaps not how they will be done—it does not say who will benefit from those payments. We think it is important that it is the active land manager, the farmer and the food producer. It should be seen through the prism of food production and the active management of land.
Dr Drew
Q
Andrew Clark: The economic modelling that has been done suggests that it is the livestock sector—particularly beef and sheep, and especially in the lowlands. A lot of focus is given to upland farming—I have great interest in that myself, having worked on conservation and environmental schemes for most of my career at the NFU—but lowland livestock farms in marginal situations in the west of the country have few choices other than grazing land. They are particularly vulnerable communities. Very often, they are communities; they are not just isolated farms. They form a network and the backbone of both the landscape and the farming community.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Q
As we go forward, how can we manage to have a system that works for the farmers who have intensified their farms and are going to green them up while not being unfair to the ones who are already very green? How do we reward progress and, at the same time, reward the people who have always been doing the right thing?
Andrew Clark: This is one thing I wanted to pick up in evidence to the Committee. The legislation that we are looking at is only half of the formula that needs to be delivered in order for farms to be profitable, sustainable and productive in future. It is the policy that goes alongside that legislation that is important. That policy needs to be one of opportunity, that creates opportunities for farms to follow the approach, whether it is public good provision, or becoming more productive or, hopefully, doing both those things together.
Looking at that policy and the measures that are available, it is important that the Agriculture Bill ensures, in fact, almost places a duty on Ministers, to deliver schemes that help farms to be both more productive and more sustainable in future. Those two themes would apply both to the farmer in the west country and the farmer in East Anglia. There are great opportunities for both of them to manage soils better or protect waters and thereby manage their farms in a more profitable and productive way in future—for instance, by nutrient management and introducing some of the approaches in terms of minimum till agriculture. That would apply to both farming situations.
Martin Whitfield (East Lothian) (Lab)
Q
Andrew Clark: For fear of breaking into devolved discussions, I suspect that the Agriculture Bill is not the right place. I suspect that the reform of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 that set up the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board in the first place, might be the appropriate place. Whether legislation is the way to sort that out or having the parties sit round the table and come to agreement, it is part of a wider issue, which again is perhaps not covered in the Agriculture Bill as much as it should be.
Scotland is absent, as we know, from the schedules, which from a UK farming perspective is concerning. We would like to see a common framework in agreed areas across the whole country, because that benefits every farm business and allows the free flow of goods and services and agricultural activity across the whole UK economic area.
Colin Clark (Gordon) (Con)
Q
Andrew Clark: There is clearly an obligation on the UK to be a responsible party to the WTO. However, the measures that have taken place that can influence that compliance and participation are devolved to individual parts of the UK and the Governments there. I think that devolution should be respected, but the Governments in each part of the UK need to come together, compare and agree an approach that works for every part of the UK.
We are concerned that, although there might be no intention at the present moment for some of these powers that are granted under the Agriculture Bill to be used by Ministers, this Bill could last 40 years. It could be another decades-long power. Those powers could be used very differently by different Administrations in future. In terms of the WTO obligations and powers, we are not sure how those powers might be used in future.
It is clear that we need to get some more clarity about the powers. That applies not just to the WTO provisions but to many other powers. I think the House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee counted 26 new powers granted to Ministers across the Agriculture Bill. We need to have clarification about how those powers are going to be used, in order to have the full sight of Parliament and stakeholders such as the NFU on those detailed concerns.
Colin Clark
Q
Andrew Clark: At present, it is hypothetical, but the point I am trying to make is that there is delegated ability to take action in each part of the UK. There needs to be agreement about how that is played out in a mature and professional way. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it is impossible. Clearly, £3 billion spent on an amber box in one country is impossible. We do not know what the total budget would be either. There are a number of factors around there that are still uncertain. What we would like to see is agreement between the devolved parts of the UK and Westminster about how that is taken forward and how those powers are deployed.
Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)
Q
Andrew Clark: I am not sure I would go as far as a duty, but that is the sort of thing the NFU would like to include in the policy measures that are available and follow from that. Certainly, one of the objectives of food security could be strengthening and building local supply chains, both to private citizens and to the public sector as well.
Trudy Harrison (Copeland) (Con)
Q
Andrew Clark: At present, the Bill does not go into that detail. That is something that would fall into the policy measures that would follow from this. There is potential for agri-environment schemes to help deliver support to those type of farms. Equally, I would see measures on the productivity cornerstone the NFU has been advocating as being suitable for those types of farm business so they can, as I say, be better, more sustainable food producers, but also sustainable in the environmental sense.
Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)
Q
Andrew Clark: You make an important point. We are very pleased to see provision for measures to be taken in exceptional market circumstances. The concern we have around that comes down to a couple of things: first, the power is a power and not a duty. In the circumstances that exceptional market conditions exist and are recognised, Ministers may choose to take action rather than have any expectation or duty to do so. We would expect that would be more likely a duty that should reside with Ministers. Secondly, that it is qualified; there are a number of circumstances that have to be in place for that to be taken into account. We would like to see, for example, a consultation with the industry and consideration given to the marketplace and market returns to understand whether an exceptional market situation exists or could exist in the near future. There is more work to be done on that.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
Q
Andrew Clark: It is the start of that. There is certainty through to the end of this Parliament. The reason I raised the issue about a multi-annual budget is because we are not certain about the future. There is a transition path which sees the movement of money away from the basic payment scheme. We are not clear, apart from policy statements, about what that looks like or about the certainty and security that provides for farm businesses to invest in the future. Farm businesses are long-term investments. The food sector relies on 60% of its inputs from the farm sector in the UK, so we would hope that, by the time it leaves Parliament, the Bill will create that certainty and security for farm businesses and the rest of the food sector to invest with confidence. At present, without that budget certainty, I am not sure that there is that absolute cast-iron certainty.
Simon Hoare
Q
Andrew Clark: That would certainly provide the certainty that we have been looking for. Whether a percentage of GDP or not, we would have to discuss—but that would be an ideal.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
Q
Andrew Clark: I did not hear the middle part of the question, sorry.
Deidre Brock
Q
Andrew Clark: I do not want the Committee to go away with a misunderstanding. I am not saying that there should be the same policy measures in every part of the UK. There are issues such as food labelling or the use of plant protection products, for example. There is a series and I could provide a minute or an extra piece of evidence about that. There are areas where we think there is an opportunity for agreed approaches across the UK land area that would not conflict with the absolutely correct divergence of policy practice and measures in each part of the UK.
Deidre Brock
I note you used the word “agreed”, not “impose”.
Andrew Clark: I emphasised the word “agreed”. We agreed an approach between the UK farming unions. Minette Batters, my president at the NFU, chairs a UK farming roundtable, and we agreed the type of approach that we would like to see for a common UK agricultural policy, and the topics that should be subject to that, around a table with 15 different organisations and all the UK farming unions.
The Chair
Thank you. I am afraid we must draw this session to a close. I apologise to those colleagues who did not get called. I have made a note and will try to give you priority next time round. [Interruption.] No, I am sorry.
Mr Clark, thank you very much indeed for taking the trouble to come. The Committee is indebted to you for answering the questions.
Simon Hoare
On a point of order, Sir Roger. This is an Agriculture Bill; we had 24 minutes with the National Farmers Union, and we had 90 minutes this morning from our first four witnesses. This is not a criticism of our earlier witnesses. As we are seeing additional witnesses from the devolved nations with regards to the NFU, is it possible for our previous witness to submit further written evidence to us, or would he come back? As it is the Agriculture Bill, it is a little out of kilter to have only 24 minutes from the senior policy man at the NFU.
The Chair
I am afraid, Mr Hoare, that these sessions are always a bit “beat the clock”, but it is open to Mr Clark to submit further written evidence, and he indicated that he might wish to do so. I am sure the Committee would welcome it if he chose to do so.
Examination of Witnesses
Christopher Price and George Dunn gave evidence.
The Chair
Good afternoon. We are slightly up against the clock, as we have half an hour and there are two of you, whereas there was only one of Mr Clark, and there may well be a Division at three o’clock. For the record, would you introduce yourselves?
Christopher Price: I am Christopher Price, and I am director of policy at the Country Land and Business Association.
George Dunn: I am George Dunn, and I am chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association of England and Wales.
George Eustice
Q
George Dunn: In relation to the eligibility for tenants to get into the schemes you are envisaging, we have already shared our personal concerns with you, which were that there was no section of this Bill bringing forward the Tenancy Reform Industry Group changes that were agreed last October, and have been extant for a year now. We are particularly concerned to ensure that tenants are not disenfranchised. Often there are provisions within a tenancy agreement that say that you must have agricultural use only of your land, and there may also be requirements to the effect that tenants must seek the consent of landlords for investment in fixed equipment on the holding, which may not always be forthcoming.
We would very much like to see an amendment to the Bill that provides assurance to tenant farmers that they can seek changes to tenancy agreements if they need to in order to get into new schemes. We also want a definition within the Bill that gives a clear view of what constitutes a potential beneficiary. That beneficiary has to be someone in active management of land of which they are in occupation, as well as taking on day-to-day management control of that land.
The Chair
Thank you, Mr Dunn. Do you wish to add to that, Mr Price?
Christopher Price: I would add to that and contradict some points. The Country Land and Business Association is very much behind the Bill. We have called for a shift to paying public money for public goods for the last 20 years or so. We fully support the core thrust of what the Government are trying to do. Our response to your question follows on from that.
Whoever is delivering the public goods should be the one that gets the money, and if that is the tenant, then so be it; if it is the landlord, then so be it. George Dunn mentioned including the Tenancy Reform Industry Group provisions. I would dispute that these provisions are agreed. They were not. There was still a lot to argue over, and we suggest that if the Government are minded to look at reforming agricultural tenancy legislation in further detail, they should do so through some other mechanism than this Bill. There is some important stuff that needs to be discussed in the context of this Bill, and we would not want time to be restricted, or the big picture to be lost, by talking about what we would regard as ancillary matters of tenancy reform.
Dr Drew
Q
George Dunn: The important thing is to see that this Bill is a scaffold, not a building, so until we see the shape that the Government decides upon for building the building around the scaffold, then it is difficult to tell exactly what will happen. But we are certainly encouraged by the facility within the general framework to have both de-linking and consolidation of payments, which we believe could speed up retirement and restructuring within the sector, to make holdings available to new entrants.
Many of our tenants who let land under farm business tenancies, unlike those who let under the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986 with secure tenancies, would say to us that the basic payment scheme is a cost on their business, because they have to pay that in rent to the owners of the land, whom they want to take the land from. So long as we have a strong arm on the productivity side of this Bill, which focuses on the new entrants and the progression point, we think there is great hope.
Christopher Price: I would agree with a lot of that. Inevitably, if we shift away from basic payments to a more market-facing world, it will create some churn within the sector. Older farmers are likely to decide to move on. That is why it is so important that there is sufficient investment in productivity, so that those who want to start on the farming ladder can get the necessary skills, not just farming skills, but business and marketing skills, which are so important in this sector now.
Dr Drew
Q
Christopher Price: I think that rents will go down in the short term. I suspect that, as the productivity improves, and farmers become more efficient and earn more themselves, with the passage of time rents will start to increase a little.
George Dunn: It is interesting which rents you are talking about, Dr Drew. The average level of rent paid on a farm business tenancy for arable land, quoted by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is currently £98 per acre. If you look at rents tendered in the marketplace for land which becomes available in a very lumpy and haphazard way, we could have double those rents being tendered in the marketplace. I suspect that we will see a lot of those very high rents coming down as people readjust to the new world. I think that an average of £98 to £100 per acre for arable land is about sensible.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
Q
George Dunn: I disagree with the premise of your question. I apologise that I am a white, middle-aged male. There is nothing I can do about that. I am here as I am. Regarding the statistics, the average age of a farmer has been 58 or 59 for as long as I can remember, which tells me that we are in somewhat of an equilibrium—that the people joining the industry equate with those who are leaving the industry— because the age is not increasing over time.
I would also say that those who are filling out the forms do not tend to be the ones who are doing the active farming. In the memberships that we both have, we see quite a lot that the younger members of the family do more of the farm work and the older members do the form filling.
We are inundated on show stands and events around the country with people who want to get a start in agriculture. Frankly, we will not be able to give everyone the opportunity to come in to be a principal in their own right. We are quite keen to encourage people to see farming as an employment opportunity, not just a business opportunity, and I think there is more work that we can do on that front.
The Chair
Thank you, Mr Dunn. I must remember that my job is form filling and not activity.
Christopher Price: I agree with a lot of what has been said. I think that the way the Bill operates will inevitably result in some churn. People will feel inclined to move on at a faster rate than they have. There is no shortage of people coming out of agricultural colleges at the moment. There is a definite desire among a bigger number of young people than has been the case for a while to go into the sector. As George Dunn said, not all of them will be able to become the traditional owner-occupying yeoman farmer of myth, but I think there will be a lot of other opportunities elsewhere in the sector. Again, a lot of this depends on there being sufficient investment for people to get the skills and to be able to do the jobs that will be required in the new sort of farming.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
George Dunn: No. In a landlord-tenant situation, it is the tenant who will apply for the basic payment scheme—
Kerry McCarthy
Q
George Dunn: In a number of cases, there is either a direct transfer of a direct payment, from the tenant to a landlord, or the way that the rent is calculated will take into consideration the fact that the tenant is getting direct payment.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
Christopher Price: It will be a combination of factors. As already said, we anticipate that rents will go down, at least in the short term, while the industry recalibrates itself. However, most landowners, if not all landowners, are already looking at what other opportunities there may be. Some of that will be to go and see what advantage they can take of the proposed new ELM scheme, see what natural capital they have got and see how they can better—it is a horrible word, but I will use it—exploit it under the new scheme. Others will look at how they can diversify—at whether, for example, the barn can be converted into offices, a wedding venue or what-have-you. People are starting to think in a much more market-facing way than was perhaps the case a few years ago.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
Christopher Price: I would suggest that, say, on every farm—this is talking in averages—there is 10% to 15% where the input costs are greater than the value that is got out of the process. There is a lot of land that need not be used for farming and that could be used for nature in particular, provided that there are sufficient incentives in place for people to do so.
George Dunn: I also think it is important to appreciate that, in the current economic circumstances, the return on capital that the landlord is getting from a rental payment, even if it is £200 per acre, will only be 2% of the capital value of the land that they are offering to let. The reasons for people owning land and letting it out are simply different to the economic uses they are getting from it. So, it might be because they are looking for development into the long term, or they might be interested in using the reserve rights for minerals, for sporting purposes or for other activities.
Also, the tax system within which land is owned is quite beneficial, in terms of agricultural property relief and the ability to claim other relief. So there are other reasons why landlords will still choose to let land, and we have seen the area of land let in this country remain pretty static for about the past 30 years, at about a third. So I do not suspect that we will see a massive shift from the let market simply because we see rents adjust downwards a little bit.
Chris Davies
Q
Christopher Price: The headings are there; the issue is very much how those headings are used in practice. There are provisions to reward farmers for many of the public goods they provide, but there could be more explicit commentary on rural vitality and on the importance of preserving rural communities, because often farmers are at the hub of rural communities, particularly in some of the more remote areas of the country.
There are significant powers in the Bill to invest in improving productivity and that sort of issue. The big frustration is that we have had very little from Government about how they intend to exercise those powers. It is all very well saying that farmers have got to adapt to the new world of delivering public goods, but they have also got to become more efficient at farming, and Government have not given any indication at all really as to how the powers they propose giving themselves in the Bill will be exercised. However, if those powers are exercised in the right way, there is the potential to improve things very much for farmers and the agricultural sector more generally.
George Dunn: It goes back to what I said previously about this Bill being a scaffold, not a building. The issue for us is that we still need to be convinced that we will see the Government use the powers they are making available for themselves in terms of things such as the supply chain issues. The Groceries Code Action Network has put in some evidence to the Bill Committee—we are a member of it—to say how we can beef up some of that section. We are not convinced that the Government are as serious as they say they are if the Rural Payments Agency is going to be the body responsible for overseeing this particular bit of the Bill. The RPA is perhaps not best skilled for this type of work in terms of the supply chain issues.
We also need to be convinced that the productivity measures are going to be used to the full effect. Actually, the measures reserved for Wales in the schedules of the Bill appear to be better than the ones reserved for England, so we would ask for the Welsh ones to be transposed into England.
On the marketing standards issue, it is absolutely correct that we want to protect our production standards, but if we do not protect our trading positions so that we reject stuff from abroad that is not produced to the same standards, we will undermine our production at home, too. There is an awful lot of hope in the Bill, but not yet too much trust.
Chris Davies
Q
Christopher Price: Perhaps this is one thing that the Bill lacks: the important thing is to have a UK-wide framework that allows four national agricultural policies underneath it, so that everyone is operating to a high-level set of common rules, but each country has the power to go and decide what it thinks best for its own circumstances.
George Dunn: Obviously, in a devolved world there is great scope for the four countries of the United Kingdom to take a different view of different aspects of this policy. But, fundamentally, we must remember that we are an economic union of four nations, and we need to preserve that for the benefit of the populations of all four countries of the United Kingdom. That will be the key issue—to ensure that we do not impact the ability to trade with one another in a free and open manner.
Mr Goodwill
Q
George Dunn: I am not sure there is a problem in what you suggest. It is not just the tenant’s ability to roll up the direct payment with the live and deadstock; the landlord themselves may be willing to give a payment for the early surrender of the tenancy, in order to get vacant possession or to offer the tenancy to a new entrant on a farm business tenancy basis, as opposed to an old-style agricultural holding tenancy. There may be some benefits for the landlord.
Mr Goodwill
We have already heard that a major element of the rent that is paid relates to the amount of direct payments that the tenant—
George Dunn: But we know within the landlord-tenant community that many landlords would like tenants who are operating under the old-style secure tenancies to go, so that they get vacant possession of the land back. If they offer it on the open market, plenty of people will queue up to take that land, even in the new environment, because to date, lots of those individuals have felt it appropriate to factor the direct payments into the rent that they pay. If they no longer have to do that, the rents will adjust in the new world. We think that the de-linking and consolidation element is a massive benefit to restructuring the industry.
Christopher Price: We were concerned about the proposal to de-link, on the basis that it could de-legitimise the payments. If we are saying that the reason why farmers are given quite large amounts of money is to provide public goods, this takes away that justification. If you are going to do it, it has to be for a very good reason. We suspect that, in many cases, the amount of money that will be freed up will not be sufficient to enable the tenant without more to move on—the amounts of money involved will not be sufficient for that. If the landlord is keen for the tenant to move on, the landlord will have to make a significant investment, too. George Dunn is quite correct on that.
At the moment, we know so little about what the Government are thinking behind the de-linking proposals. It is very difficult to predict how it could operate; on top of all the considerations that George Dunn raised, there is also how it will be taxed, for example. There is an awful lot to go and think through when deciding how it could work.
Mr Goodwill
Q
George Dunn: Again, I disagree with the premise of the question. This is not something to save people from bankruptcy; this is to allow people to make a rational economic decision about their future. At the moment, lots of tenant farmers cannot make a rational economic decision to retire because they do not have a house to go to or another opportunity to take up. We are not saying that this will be the be-all and end-all in that process, but if it adds to a payment that comes from the landlord, or to the live and deadstock at the end of the tenancy, it could be the thing that allows the tenant to make that change.
The Chair
Minister, this may have to be the final line of questioning, because the Minister is on his feet in the Chamber and we might find ourselves interrupted.
George Eustice
Q
George Dunn: The overarching position is that we already have the Groceries Code Adjudicator, which looks at the direct contracts between suppliers and retailers. Our concern is that it is not looking below that at the relationships between farmers and first purchasers. The Bill seeks to correct that. We are concerned about the fact that the weight of responsibility on the retailers is not fully shared, because there is nobody looking at the bottom end of the supply chain. We see processors that want to retain their contracts and are willing to take more and more restrictions from retailers or even from food service, and are not pressured enough to get better terms that they can then share with the farmers and those who are supplying them. We want the eyes to be right across the supply chain so everybody acts fairly.
We have seen all sorts of things. If you want a specific example, I was speaking to a lettuce grower who had a contract for a certain number of heads of lettuce at a certain price the day before. He went out to cut them the next day, and then received a call to say that those lettuces were no longer required at the same price and in the same quantity, and yet he had already made the decision to cut.
We want to ensure that there are better and fairer contracts in the supply chain, but this needs to be looked at from farm to table, not in the piecemeal way in which the Bill seeks to do it. It leaves the Groceries Code Adjudicator looking at direct supply chain issues, and it provides another body—it suggests the RPA, which we disagree with—for the other stuff. We think that the adjudicator should have a role over the whole gamut.
George Eustice
Q
George Dunn: You are right that the RPA runs certain supplier schemes, so we are not saying that it is completely unsighted on this stuff, but it has got no history or skill, in terms of contracts, so how do we see it playing a role within the contract environment? It has got no skill or expertise in looking at how supply chains operate from field to plate. Although it might have had a glimpse of certain aspects of it, we do not think it has got the expertise across the piece.
Christopher Price: In addition, the powers that the Secretary of State proposes to give himself under the Bill are really quite strong. I cannot think of many other areas in which a Minister has such powers as the Secretary of State will gain under the Bill. We were pleasantly surprised that the Government proposed taking them. It seems to us that the powers are so significant that it is unreasonable to say that they should be exercised by a non-departmental public body. I would have thought that they are so significant that they are the sort of thing that a Minister ought to be deciding, not someone further down the hierarchy.
Deidre Brock
Q
George Dunn: No.
Christopher Price: No. A couple of per cent.
George Dunn: For the reasons that I stated earlier, the return on capital is only 2% from agriculture anyway, so there are other things driving the capital value of land.
Christopher Price: If you compare changes in the CAP with changes in land values over the last 30-odd years, there is very little correlation, which you would expect there to be. Also, the European Commission has done two reports on this topic in the last 15 years and both said it was impossible to show any direct link between the two.
The Chair
Thank you, Mr Price and Mr Dunn. I am sorry to bring this to a slightly early conclusion, but I am reliably informed that the Division Bell will ring fairly shortly. We will bring in the next witness and at least get him installed.
Examination of Witness
Jason Feeney gave evidence.
The Chair
Good afternoon. For the benefit of the record, I would be grateful if you would introduce yourself.
Jason Feeney: My name is Jason Feeney and I am chief executive of the Food Standards Agency.
The Chair
Mr Feeney, let us ring the changes and ask the Front-Bench spokesman for the Opposition if he would like to set the ball rolling.
Dr Drew
Q
Jason Feeney: It is not a Bill that strays into our remit significantly. We have not been closely involved in its formulation, but clearly there are areas, for example, such as capturing some of the information at slaughter houses, which we would need to be aware of and we will be working alongside.
Dr Drew
Should you be more involved in it? If we are going to improve British farming, it is all going to be about quality. You measure quality in the abattoirs and in some of the other things you do. You are there as the guardians of the public duty. Should you have been more involved as an agency in this Bill?
Jason Feeney: We focus our attention not so much on the quality argument but on the hygiene and safety perspective. If we take the example that you mentioned about slaughterhouses and abattoirs, our primary purpose through the work of the meat hygiene inspectors and the official veterinarians is two-fold. One is the hygiene and safety of the production and the welfare of animals up to and including the point of slaughter. The quality focus tends to be more of a business arrangement, in that example, between the slaughterhouses and the customers that they are supplying.
George Eustice
Q
Jason Feeney: There is nothing in the Bill that we feel impinges on our independence. Committee members may not be aware we are an independent Government Department, non-ministerial and directly accountable to Parliament. We do our parliamentary work either directly, like this, or through Health Ministers. There is nothing in the Bill that causes us to have any concerns. There are elements that we think are positive and helpful. As you know, Minister, we are very strong around the openness and transparency with which we conduct our business. Our board meetings are held in public. All the papers are published and they are transmitted live on the internet. The collection and more open aspects of data, and the sharing of data, to help to improve standards, quality and safety are things that we are very supportive of.
On the other part of your question, we were set up in the late ’90s in response to the BSE crisis. The Food Safety Act 1990 gives us our primary remit, role and authority.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
Q
Jason Feeney: In a post-exit world, it is helpful to think about food imports in three different categories. First, there is the food that we import from third countries—non-EU countries. For those high-risk products, which are mostly products of animal origin, but are also certain defined products not of animal origin, we are pre-notified of their arrival and an inspection regime applies. That is EU-driven, and post-exit we will continue, at the point at which we leave—
The Chair
Order. I am sorry Mr Feeney, but I have to suspend the sitting. The expectation is that there will be two votes. If there are, we will resume at 3.25 pm. If there is only one, we will resume at 3.15 pm.
The Chair
We were sort of in the middle of a response to Ms Antoniazzi. I am not sure whether you got the answer you required or whether you would like to pick the question up again.
The Chair
You cannot remember—that is a good start.
Jason Feeney: In terms of timing, I can give a shorter answer or a medium-length answer. Which would you prefer?
The Chair
I think the answer is: answer.
Jason Feeney: If we have a transition period when we leave, our expectation is that the same standards will continue to apply and we will mirror those arrangements with the European Union for the length of the transition period. If we leave the European Union without a deal, the withdrawal Act in essence rolls existing EU regulations into UK legislation, so the standards will be the same on day one whether we leave the European Union with a transition period or with no deal. If there were any changes to those standards, clearly those would be made on the basis of science and evidence, and we would put our recommendations and advice to Ministers accordingly.
Tonia Antoniazzi
Q
Jason Feeney: I cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland—the Food Standards Agency covers three of the four countries, and obviously we have a close working relationship with colleagues in Food Standards Scotland. Indeed, we spent two days up there last week working with colleagues from Food Standards Scotland. Food safety is a devolved issue. We are developing arrangements whereby the science and evidence is considered by what we call a regulatory forum, in which all four countries are represented and, as far as possible, we come to a four-country conclusion. All the evidence shows that that is what consumers would prefer, and that is what industry would prefer as well, obviously.
Simon Hoare
Q
Jason Feeney: The agency’s charging regime operates a sliding scale of discount. That is the area where we have most impact on small abattoirs. The charges are based on hourly usage of meat hygiene inspectors or official veterinarians. We have a sliding scale of discount where the smaller abattoirs are discounted by up to 80%. I do not think there is anything specific in the Bill that would impact on that particular area, but that is our main interaction with small abattoirs and that is the area that we are continuing to work on with stakeholders.
Simon Hoare
Q
Jason Feeney: Certainly. We know from our research that consumers are particularly interested in that area, so there is a market opportunity there and we are there to ensure the safety and the provenance. When we use our strapline of “Food We Can Trust”, it is not just a safety issue; it is about authenticity as well.
The Chair
Thank you both for coming to give evidence and for bearing with us during the Division. I apologise for having to detain you. The Committee is very grateful to you indeed.
Examination of Witnesses
Dr Nick Fenwick, John Davies and Huw Thomas gave evidence.
The Chair
We shall now hear oral evidence from the National Farmers Union Cymru and the Farmers’ Union of Wales. We have until 5 o’clock, although we might not take that long. Gentlemen, starting with Dr Fenwick, will you introduce yourselves for the record?
Dr Fenwick: I work for the Farmers’ Union of Wales. I am head of agricultural policy.
John Davies: I am president of NFU Cymru and a beef and sheep farmer.
Huw Thomas: I am NFU Cymru political adviser based in Builth Wells.
Dr Drew
Q
Dr Fenwick: First, I apologise for the fact that I have not spent days reading the Bill. We have our own pertinent issues going on in Wales, so we are very much catching up with the Bill. There are obvious areas where there are differences such as WTO, which might give rise to some concerns. It is certainly a concern for Scotland, and an understandable one. When it comes to what is going on in Wales at the moment, one of our key concerns relates to the similarities between the area in relation to farm support and the transition to public goods payments, which is effectively a cut-and-paste of what is in the same relevant English section. That cut-and-paste from the Bill has happened while Wales is still in the middle of a consultation process about the future of our own payments system, and yet it has been published in the Bill with the approval of the Welsh Government. I apologise for not being completely fluent as far as the detailed parts of the Bill are concerned.
John Davies: There are some key changes and key differences in the English part of the Bill. We are part of a supply chain that employs nearly 20% of people in Wales. Food and farming is a £7 billion industry. It is absolutely vital that those supply chains are efficient and work well, so we support this part and are pleased to have it. Far be it from me to try to influence or advise you on English policy, but we are pleased to see this part in the Welsh part.
Huw Thomas: Dr Drew asked how the Welsh Government achieved this. We have been told that they worked closely with DEFRA throughout the summer on the provisions with respect to Wales. I think the differences between England and Wales are fairly modest. The biggest or perhaps the most apparent is the one on page 30 of the Bill, which gives Welsh Ministers financial assistance in connection with some designated purposes such as supporting businesses or communities in rural areas. That is one that some of my colleagues in England have looked at with a little envy, perhaps, but the differences are fairly modest. Because the powers are broadly drafted, it will fall to how the Welsh Government choose to utilise those powers following the consultation that is currently taking place.
Dr Drew
Q
Dr Fenwick: It certainly appears to be the case that there will be great similarities in what happens in England and Wales under current proposals. They will stand in stark contrast to what is going on regarding our main competitors in other countries and Scotland.
Dr Drew
Q
Dr Fenwick: Hugely. They are untried, untested and un-modelled. We have not had an impact assessment. From a legal point of view, I have grave concerns that they may contravene WTO rules. It was concerning to hear our own Cabinet Secretary—last week, I believe—read her response to a written question from the shadow agricultural spokesman for the Conservatives, Andrew R. T. Davies, in which she said that it was not appropriate to inquire whether what was being proposed is legal or not for the World Trade Organisation. That is a grave concern and we are well aware of the sort of problems that can crop up when it comes to the WTO. It is going on with regards to the USA, China and Europe at the moment, including with regard to agricultural goods.
George Eustice
Q
I want to probe this point about the WTO. What is it in particular that concerns you? We obviously have an amber box allocation in which we could do market-distorting support if we wanted to, and it is largely accepted that the proposals would be green box. Just explain your concern about the WTO.
Dr Fenwick: Specifically, annex 2 of the agreement on agriculture sets out strict rules in relation to “Payments under environmental programmes”, which prohibit payments that are over and above costs incurred and income forgone. That is an explicit disallowance of such payments, superficially at least. I am not a barrister or a lawyer, but it certainly seems fairly black and white. That is a grave concern given that we have asked for clarification and have not received it as explicitly as we might have liked.
I do not want to imply that it is not legal, but there is an ambiguity around it— payment for public goods is effectively environmental payments, which is what annex 2, paragraph 12 of the agreement on agriculture deals with. It raises concerns that, even if it was legal, it could be used as a vehicle for other countries spuriously to raise barriers to trade and so on. That could trigger a lengthy dispute that goes on for years and has adverse impacts on us. We know from experience that countries tend to use such tools where they become available.
John Davies: A major part of the support for public goods is dependent on moving in that direction in terms of the boxes. That has never been done by any other country before and we are obviously concerned. We need to see some proof that that has been properly researched and is achievable.
Huw Thomas: I do not have anything to add to that.
George Eustice
Q
John Davies: Obviously we are very keen to see a functioning marketplace. We are keen to see it moved in an orderly fashion. Dr Fenwick referred to our main competitors. Obviously, Europe is a fairly major competitor. It will reserve at least 70% of its budget into direct payments. We are keen to maintain some form of direct payments in Wales because that will allow us to invest in the environment and give us the confidence to invest in productivity and resilience schemes.
We need a balance and to have the opportunity in what is a very changeable marketplace at the present time. We have a great deal of uncertainty and believe there is a need for stability. When we have a functioning marketplace that pays a fair price for what we produce, we are very keen to take advantage of it but, at present, we are some distance from that.
Dr Fenwick: Anything that improves the supply chain has to be welcomed and there are certainly elements of the Bill, from that point of view, that we absolutely welcome, including issues such as farmers working in co-operation. That is a separate issue to the issue of support, which is a grave concern given that a shift even over what superficially appears to be a lengthy period of seven years could effectively just slow down something that has a huge adverse impact, not just for farmers but for those who rely on farms.
Average incomes over the last five or six years for Welsh farms would be maybe £24,000, and yet those farms have turnovers of around £80,000 or £90,000. That money is effectively going out to local businesses that are not themselves farmers but which are reliant on the agriculture supply chain. We have said for the past two years that any such radical changes to agricultural policy should be investigated thoroughly in terms of their impact on the wider, broader and longer supply chains. We live in areas where up to 28% of the working population is employed in agriculture. That is not the number of people who are farmers; that is the number of people employed in agriculture. Any disruption could have a catastrophic impact, which is why we have argued for that impact assessment to take place.
Huw Thomas: I do not have much to add to that other than to offer the comment that it is suggested that the Rural Payments Agency could be the agency overseeing the fairness in the supply chain issue. I am not sure whether NFU Cymru are sure that the RPA might be the best placed agency to do that. I also make the point that the existing principles around exempting producer organisations from competition law need to be rolled forward as well.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
John Davies: It is very important that we recognise the impact on our community, culture and language, because that is something that is very special to upland Wales and all of Wales. That is something that is particularly precious and one of the benefits of a thriving agriculture that can sometimes feel overlooked.
Dr Fenwick: We are concerned that what is proposed would have an adverse impact on all communities depending on their nature and the sector where they are primarily operating. Also, it is a great concern that most upland farms are not the big expansive areas of heathland and common land and moorland that people imagine them to be. Most Welsh upland farms—that is probably about 60% or 70% of Welsh farms—are self-contained units of simply fields. There is a grave concern that a movement to the public goods-type payment would have a huge adverse impact on the farms that cannot cash in on the carbon and the easy wins that you see for some farms that are right up in the mountains. Most hill farms and mountain farms are not the stereotypical type of farm. They are family farms of maybe 100 hectares or so, comprising mainly fields.
John Davies: We have some concerns around the tenanted sector too. Roughly 30% of Wales is in the tenanted sector. Would they be bypassed by the opportunity of public goods? That was highlighted in an earlier answer. We would be deeply concerned about that because young people need support and we would not like to see that taken away from our communities and possibly to other parts of the country or to trust funds or whatever.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
John Davies: I think it is broader than lamb, to be honest. It is about not allowing products that have been produced to completely different standards to those that are allowable here. We respect those standards. Obviously, we do not want to start producing hormone treated beef or chlorinated chicken or any of those things. It is really important that the Bill is robust in that way and does not allow that opportunity to be changed.
Huw Thomas: In that regard, the Bill may have missed something. This could have been the vehicle for making a statement about those standards and insisting that imports are produced to the same standards as our domestic products going forward.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
Dr Fenwick: With trade, you have the potential of a double whammy in terms of losing access to EU markets due to the height of the barriers that may come into place plus the potential for more imports of cheap produce. Given such uncertainty—there are dangers for the sheep industry in particular, but also for other industries—we firmly believe that now is absolutely the wrong time to add uncertainty by implementing the biggest changes to the underlying principles of rural payments since the Agriculture Act 1947.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
John Davies: Honestly, I am not the best person to answer that, but I think that consumers take safety as a given. Obviously, we have a great deal of confidence in the Food Standards Agency. Many changes have been made over the last 20 years. I started farming in 1986, which was a major period of change. We are subject to some of the most strict rules and regulations.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
Dr Fenwick: No, but the detection, containment and restrictions on most farms are testament to the fact that we have a very good system of detecting problems and clamping down on them when they do occur. Going back to your initial question, the concern would be if we opened the floodgates to places where their standards fall well below those that are a legal requirement here, then we open the floodgates to far worse problems than we would ever see in the UK.
Colin Clark
Q
Dr Fenwick: I referred earlier to the biggest changes since the Agriculture Act 1947. Those changes are the fact that we are moving away from what we currently have, which is an active farmer rule. Notwithstanding all the different changes that have happened since we went into the EU and moved away from the Agriculture Act and had various different CAP reforms, we have still ended up with an active farmer rule that is underpinned by the principles that were originally in the 1947 Act, were later incorporated into the treaty of Rome and are now in the Lisbon treaty. Those principles are about ensuring that active farmers receive the bulk of payments, which can then be distributed through rural supply chains and more widely.
We are moving from that system to what the Welsh consultation calls an “open to all” approach, under which someone who lives in London and fancies buying a bit of land in Wales to plant trees can claim money for doing so, while making no contribution to the local economy, the local schools or the local community. We saw the same thing happen in a different way, which we hope will not be repeated, when vast areas of Wales were bought up by private forestry back in the ’70s. We also saw it when entire communities, including schools, chapels and hundreds of farms, had their land planted up by the Forestry Commission. That is an acute concern.
Europe is tightening up its active farmer criteria to prevent people outside the industry from accessing money, because it recognises the key part that farms play in distributing money in rural economies. I am afraid to say that it looks as if we are moving in exactly the opposite direction.
John Davies: It is a very fair question. A simple, one-dimensional answer is that, yes, planting trees can mitigate the carbon challenges, but I think we need to be seen as part of the solution. There are many things we can do to improve our carbon footprint, and we are up for engaging with that challenge. In the past year or so, at home we have planted 10,000 trees in corridors for protecting hedges and the like, and it has worked really well.
I farm in partnership with the environment. It is an indivisible part of my business, so it is not a binary choice. My wish, my desire and my raison d’être is to hand on my business in a healthier state than I received it. That is no criticism of past generations; it is just the challenge that we face. We have the opportunity to be carbon free by 2050. We need to ensure that all of those mitigation choices are utilised, rather than taking simple, one-dimensional options.
Colin Clark
Q
John Davies: We need more balance. We need more recognition of the challenges we face, and we need carbon mitigation to be given more of an opportunity.
Dr Drew
Q
Huw Thomas: I do not think that those problems have to be insurmountably difficult. We have different regimes for TB cattle controls, which can sometimes cause problems. There are cross-border holdings, but the England-Wales border is pretty well integrated in terms of farms, especially compared with the Scotland-England border. We have had different arrangements, which does cause problems from time to time—farmers on the border often face a delay in receiving their payments—but if the Governments of England and Wales work together more closely, I think a solution can be found. It does not have to be a problem; it just requires the political will to work closely together.
Dr Fenwick: As Huw pointed out, we already have different systems—very different, in many respects. That has been the case since 2005. What we see as the prime problem is not the difference between the systems, but—I am afraid to say—the implementation of the system on the English side. Our members who have land in England invariably face delayed payments because of delays in the Rural Payments Agency sending data to the Welsh payment agency.
Deidre Brock
Q
John Davies: Obviously, we need a long-term, multi-annual framework to deliver support, because farming is not a short-term business. For instance, sheep that are going to the tup now will be sold in a post-Brexit marketplace. That is very short-term. We plan in generations, not years, so the longer it can be and the more robust model we can have to allow that would be useful. We are not entirely clear on any solution, because we recognise that future Governments are not bound by the previous Government, but that is a real issue for farm support going forward, because it is a long-term business.
Dr Fenwick: I agree. We have been dealing with multi-annual EU budgets for a very long time and they tally far better with farming calendars. The risks that having fluctuations on an annual basis would bring would be huge.
Chris Davies
Q
If I may, Mr Thomas and Dr Fenwick, I will just pick you up by saying that there are not that many cross-border issues. Given that Brecon and Radnorshire share 65 miles of Offa’s Dyke, there is a lot of cross-border and I hear of great difficulties that arise on both sides of the border, with both systems, so I would not necessarily say that it is all one way.
Dr Fenwick: I am afraid to say that, on an annual basis, in terms of the payments, it is routinely the RPA that fails to provide data to the Welsh payment agency and that causes delay. Wales has an exemplary record when it comes to payments. It releases about 95% of payments on 1 December annually. I think we are the best in the UK, maybe apart from Northern Ireland, so I am afraid to say that that is not our experience. Many of those 600 cross-border farmers are members of ours and they are the ones who phone me when they do not receive payment, and they are struggling.
Chris Davies
We will agree to differ on that one.
Huw Thomas: There is an issue with cross-border farms but what I was saying was that such issues are not insurmountable with a political will to get over them. Yes, there are farmers—hundreds of farmers—on the border who suffer every year from delayed payments, simply because they have one foot in England and one foot in Wales, but given the political will, I think these problems could be solved. As Nick has said, the Welsh Government have a good record when it comes to paying promptly and on time. Often the problems will lie with transferring the data from the English side.
Chris Davies
Q
Huw Thomas: The Welsh consultation came out in early July and then the Bill came out in mid-September, so their publication was not synchronised. However, it is quite obvious that they are different sides of the same coin. Obviously, a consultation is predicated on a piece of legislation that has been put through the UK Parliament, as can be done. The Welsh Government have expressed a desire to provide specifically Welsh legislation in due course for a Welsh agricultural Bill, so they may well revisit some of these provisions.
What we were anxious to see was some certainty and continuity at quite a volatile and unstable time. In that regard, at least we have a starting point for a discussion around what shape future agricultural policy should take in Wales, and we are starting from the fact that we have a lot of concerns about some of the content.
Chris Davies
Q
Huw Thomas: I do not think we took a view. I do not think we had a member discussion about how people felt about that. There was a lot of anticipation—this consultation was long anticipated. We have done an extensive member engagement exercise over the last few months. We are coming to the end of that process and we will be putting in a comprehensive response to the consultation.
The Chair
Mr Davies, feel free to respond to your constituency MP.
John Davies: Thank you, Sir Roger. Perhaps I can have slightly more freedom, being president. I regularly sit round a table with the presidents of Ulster, Scotland and England. In Wales we are very keen to see the best policy being copied or used, whichever country it comes from. We need to ensure that that fits the bill for the needs of Wales, which are unique and rather special. We need a bit of flex within a UK framework.
Dr Fenwick: It is important for me to say that we were extremely disappointed. As has been made clear, we are opposed to what is proposed in England and Wales. It is untried and untested, and there are big questions about its economic viability and impacts, so naturally, it was a grave concern. The Minister is aware of our concerns; we have discussed them on many occasions. We had hoped that Wales would do what it has done in the past, which is to undertake detailed modelling and work out what is best for our rural economies, rather than simply follow England’s lead.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
Q
Huw Thomas: That is the position that Scotland finds itself in. It is a difficult position, because it does not have anything to consult on, to discuss with its members or to try to formulate a policy from. It is a bit invidious, I suppose. It is quite aligned with DEFRA. We have our reservations about what is proposed, but we need to move forward somehow.
I hope that the consultation that the Welsh Government are undertaking is a genuine consultation where all options will be on the table and where they will be prepared to listen, because our members are concerned about several things contained in the document. We are working closely with our members and gathering a view on it.
Simon Hoare
Q
What opportunity, if any, do you think the Bill presents in terms of its ambition to support food production and to allow farmers to come together to better promote their produce in a more patriotic way, free of the EU guidelines that have often acted as a dampener on the patriotic promotion of provenance? What scope is there in the Bill and in the envisaged regime for supporting innovation and productivity?
John Davies: You are right to pick up on product innovation, which has been sadly lacking in the lamb sector, because they consider it easier to add cost than value in those things. That is something that we have to adapt to with the modern consumer, because we are seeing year-on-year reductions. We accept that challenge and we need to move forward with it. There are some good things in the Bill about producer organisations. Obviously, we would like to see a stronger focus on product development and innovation and how we can support that.
Dr Fenwick: I agree entirely. Those elements of the Bill have to be welcomed, and we certainly do welcome them. The trouble is that, while that is happening, there is a risk that another Department or another part of Government is opening the floodgates to cheap imports. Effectively, there are elements of the Bill that tighten up our own production standards and so on, but meanwhile we are opening the door to cheap imports. It is fine for the middle classes who decide to buy their organic burgers or whatever they buy, but I am afraid that most consumers shop in less salubrious supermarkets. They buy quality food because we are in the EU, but once we have trade deals with other countries, there is a big question mark in terms of the cost of production in other countries and the degree to which, for the bulk of food, it could undermine our market.
Simon Hoare
Q
Dr Fenwick: I was asking Mr Davies whether he farms in the national park—I could not remember.
John Davies: I am adjoined with the military base, so we are just outside it. I think there is a need for best practice, which is in place in some national parks, to be replicated throughout Wales, because they must be a support for the communities in which they are based rather than a hindrance. There is a real need to get policy aligned throughout Wales and considerable improvement could be made in some of the national parks. I will not comment much further than that.
George Eustice
Q
Dr Fenwick: If that is the case, that is welcome. Those pieces that effectively reflect the English text appear to be, as John described it, one-dimensional in terms of facilitating a movement from the current system to a payment for public goods system. That is the main focus of the Welsh proposals that are currently being consulted on and, indeed, the English proposals that are now in the Bill. Obviously, we have concerns about that, because effectively it is revolution as opposed to evolution. It is not an evolution if it is a transition to something that is, effectively, revolutionary and has never been done before. As I say, I am not a barrister or a lawyer, but there are big questions about how much that ties the Welsh Government down, if they were to decide to take a different course and perhaps reflect what is happening at an EU level or what is happening in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
George Eustice
Q
Dr Fenwick: In fairness to the Welsh Government, their focus is quite rightly on their consultation at the moment. That is the best indication we have of what they would like to do in Wales, which has an element of that type of direct support for businesses or economic resilience, as they call it. Clearly, the main focus is on moving away from support for farmers to a payment for public goods. On that issue I would highlight a major concern that we have, which is that Wales currently has a cap on its payments. As a union, we have supported capping agricultural payments since 2007, since the CAP Health Check.
At the moment it does not appear that capping is going to feature in England or Wales as regards public goods payments, whereas on the continent in the EU they are looking at bringing in lower caps to try and push money down to family farms. Our concern is that not having capping will move money away from family farms to private individuals, large companies, charities and so on, with no cap on how much money those businesses or charities—or whatever they are—can receive. We believe that it is absolutely the wrong direction of travel.
George Eustice
Q
Huw Thomas: They can be. The powers throughout the Bill are pretty broad, enabling powers. There is always an element of risk with such powers as to how they are utilised by Ministers. A lot of policy discretions are conferred upon Ministers, including financial discretions. The devil will be in the detail, as always, but there is not much detail in the Bill. It has to be read in conjunction with the consultation and the further policy statements from the Welsh Government next year, as well as the direction of travel they are wishing to take. It is difficult to say at the moment, but I do take your point.
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
Q
Huw Thomas: I think the part 7 clause 26 powers around the WTO, for example, could be concerning, because potentially they will artificially constrain the type and level of support that a devolved Administration might be able to pay because of considerations around the WTO. That may be one issue where there is potentially something that risks becoming contestable or contested in the future between the UK and the devolved Administrations.
John Davies: Obviously a UK framework is vital, not by imposition but by agreement. We need to get to the dispute resolution part of that, and clearly work out how those issues might be resolved. At the present time there is not that much clarity.
Huw Thomas: It is a proposal to take powers into the centre. It is not the common consent common framework that we, as NFU Cymru, always envisaged and espoused. We always said that we recognised the need for common frameworks, and that limits needed to be set on certain things, but they need to be decided by common consent, not imposed from the centre. With respect to the WTO provisions in part 7, the UK Government and the devolved Governments need to get together and agree between them, rather than having this quite heavy-handed approach that involves proposing to take these powers into the centre, and accepting the Secretary of State for DEFRA as the ultimate arbiter of who gets to do what.
The Chair
Dr Fenwick, Hansard cannot record nodding, but I take it you are agreeing.
Dr Fenwick: I have nothing to add; I agree entirely.
Ben Lake
Q
Huw Thomas: I think there was an expectation that there may be more in the Bill about common frameworks and how they might work. There was agreement in the spring around 24 identified areas that would require some sort of common framework, whether a statutory common framework or a memorandum of understanding between Governments.
I do not feel that we have moved forward enormously from that point. We need to get these things in place if we are to preserve the integrity of the UK single market and ensure that we are not distorting between the home nations. I was perhaps a little bit surprised that there was not provision. We perhaps had not moved forward a little bit from the position in the spring around the 24 identified areas.
Dr Fenwick: I agree entirely. We absolutely need those mechanisms and systems to arbitrate, to work out what is right and wrong. That is something that we have argued for the past two years. We certainly welcomed the announcement in recent weeks that there will be a review of how money is allocated between the devolved nations, and that is absolutely needed. It is a contentious issue—there is no denying that—but it had to be addressed.
We also need almost a parallel process to look at how countries agree on frameworks—whether it is through memorandums of understanding, rather than nations feeling or knowing that things are being imposed on them, against the spirit of devolution.
Ben Lake
Q
Dr Fenwick: It may be opportune to extend the remit of that Committee. We always hope it goes the way that we would like it to go. It certainly needs looking into because we worked for so many years with a council of Ministers. We now have a void, a vacuum, where there is potentially a free-for-all, and countries or nations could move in very different directions and cause market distortions internally, without anything to do with WTO. There could be internal market distortions that are not in anyone’s interest.
Trudy Harrison
Q
John Davies: There could be more in the Bill in terms of how we get a fairer share of the retail price, because we are at some historical lows, once again. Milk is slightly better than what it has been, but we are close to breaking even in nearly all of those commodities.
We need to take responsibility as well, mind, to become more efficient. The biggest factor is within my own farm gate; we do not shirk that responsibility, but we need to find ways in the Bill to ensure that other people are operating to similar standards. If we compete on a level playing field, we have an opportunity to do that. We have a higher welfare aspect and environmental aspect and that is a cost that has to be taken into account.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Huw Thomas: There are certainly powers within the Bill that would potentially see the strengthening of the farmer’s position within the supply chain. At NFU, we have been calling for more transparency around price reporting for some time.
Because the powers as drafted are so broad, I suppose it ultimately comes down to how they are used. There is scope to do some good here, but we need to ensure that Ministers go away and use the powers that they are granted to do that good for the supply chain. As John said, we do not know what sort of situation we will face post Brexit but we could face the very difficult situation of imports coming in produced to lower standards than in our domestic production, further undermining our prices and marketplace returns.
Dr Fenwick: It is worth noting that the current system is the latest incarnation of a system introduced after the war, which has reduced household expenditure on food by half since the 1950s. That has freed up money to allow people to go on holiday and what not. People spend less of their income on food now than they had to over the years. That is the result of a system that is specifically aimed at giving people plentiful, safe food at affordable prices. I am afraid to say that we now face a situation where that direct link between farming and food production is being removed. It is less direct than it was, obviously, but it is proposed that it be removed, and a quid pro quo is needed to restore the cheap food that we have managed to secure over the years.
In terms of many supply chains, yes, you can make the most of middle-class markets and local hotels and we see a lot of great innovation going on with farms—I am sure you see the same in the Lake district—but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of our produce goes on to what is effectively a global market or an EU market, and we are competing against people from across the EU, across the UK and so on, as regards quality, but a bulk product that is going into our supermarkets in this country. That needs to be taken account of—that we are competing against other people.
If, as some people say, agricultural support is so bad for agriculture and holds us back so much—I agree with John that elements of that are true—one would question why, if it is that bad, it is regarded by the World Trade Organisation as something that should not be allowed and should have limits on it. That would suggest that the WTO has missed the point, but I do not think that that is the case; I think some of us are missing the point.
Sandy Martin
Q
Huw Thomas: Clearly, we are reading the Agriculture Bill in conjunction with the “Brexit and our land” consultation that is taking place in Wales. They are not synchronous, because one came out before the other, but you can see where the direction of travel has been set.
Sandy Martin
Q
Huw Thomas: The Welsh Government have said that they will publish a White Paper early next year that will flesh out what they are consulting on at the moment, which will derive from this. In effect, there will be a consultation around that. Certainly, there would need to be further consultation before Ministers took some of the powers forward and utilised them, because they are so broadly drafted in the primary legislation that they could allow such a range of actions to be taken under their provisions. There has to be consultation with industry and stakeholders following that.
Dr Fenwick: I agree. It is part of a transparent, democratic system to consult. I do not mean on every occasion, on every tinkering, but when it comes to things that have an impact on jobs, people’s lives and so on, those should be consulted on.
Mr Goodwill
Q
Dr Fenwick: I agree. My first job this morning, before I got on the train, was to go down to our farmers’ co-op. It has branches all over the west side of Wales, from north to south, and employs large numbers of people. My grandfather has been a member of that co-operative since 1947, and it is one of a number across Wales. We sometimes forget that they are even co-operatives, but they do exist, and there are plenty of them in Wales, across England, and into Scotland.
I would guess that some of the funding made available to European co-operatives comes from rural development funding. We have an incredibly low historical allocation of rural development funding from the EU, as a result of our having handed it over as part of the CAP negotiations in the first part of this decade. We gave up what we were entitled to, effectively, when there was an equalisation process, which was obviously disappointing, and for that reason we have high modulation rates, particularly in Wales. As I am sure Mr Davies is aware, that is a big bone of contention, and it is to fill a gap that we have in our funding. It should not be forgotten that European businesses and farmers have access to far more funds when it comes to direct investment and support, because they make more use of a larger rural development programme budget.
John Davies: You are absolutely right in identifying the balance of power in the marketplace. We have been successful in terms of supply-side co-operatives in Wales, but we have not been as successful as the likes of Müller, Kerrygold and other co-operatives in other parts of the EU. We have to look at how this could work, and help and support that in the Bill, because there are opportunities to focus more on new product development. Having travelled to New Zealand and seen how a real focus of the farmer-controlled meat operations has been new product development and accessing new markets, over and above shareholder return, there are lessons to be learned from other parts of the world. You are absolutely right to identify those opportunities in the Bill.
Mr Goodwill
Q
John Davies: Having travelled to France and other parts of the world, there is a different approach to co-operative marketing, and we can learn some of that sticking-together principle more effectively. There are lessons to be learned. We need to look at how to do it. I do not think that is because of the deficiency payment; I think there is a slightly different mindset in the UK. We are slightly more independent, possibly. One penny will break a co-operative. I have had experience of being involved in a different farming co-operative in the past, and a 1p difference in your base price will break a co-operative.
Mr Goodwill
Q
John Davies: Absolutely. We need to look to each and every lever we can pull, and there is scope within the Bill to utilise those opportunities.
Dr Fenwick: It requires the political will to use those levers appropriately, and I am afraid to say that in the past, we have not seen that political will when it comes to some co-operatives and some farmer-owned businesses. We have seen bodies broken up, effectively, because it is perceived that they have too much power, and that is the opposite of what we would like to see in terms of empowerment of the industry. We need to make up for that huge imbalance that has developed over the last 30 or 40 years in terms of the supermarkets.
Deidre Brock
Q
Dr Fenwick: Only with regard to the capping of basic payments during a transition period in order to move money over to a public goods scheme. If I recollect correctly, there is no reference to the capping of payments, which is something that we have raised repeatedly. Indeed, some have told us that there should be no cap on payments, which is a huge concern because we saw capping as a great movement forward in terms of the reputation of what is currently the common agricultural policy and in terms of the reputation of the industry.
Sadly, when we see headlines in newspapers about millionaires or racehorse owners getting huge payments, we are all tarred with the same brush. People do not realise that in Wales they took the progressive move back in 2014 to cap agricultural payments. We appreciate that the CAP legislation was not designed as well as it could have been in terms of making it possible in every country; we appreciate that England had problems from that point of view, but it is a massive backward step not to have capping.
Ben Lake
Q
Dr Fenwick: Certainly, there has been a lot of discussion about how this could have been an opportunity to take account of the fact that Wales is currently losing money through the red meat levy legislation. We appreciate that some moves have been made to address and correct that, but it is far from ideal. We lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds when a single slaughterhouse closed a few years ago, and that hamstrung our meat marketing body hugely in terms of how it could market its meat, whether in England or on the continent. So it absolutely needs addressing. Certainly an opportunity has been lost there.
In terms of other elements, I am afraid I am more concerned about what is in it than what could have been in it.
John Davies: We want to see agriculture in the Agriculture Bill. We want to see a real, strong focus on the active farmer and how that comes through in terms of a sufficient degree of self-sufficiency. That would be useful. We see food security as a public good or a public right. That is vital. So there are a number of issues there. We want a safe and traceable domestic food supply. We want equal standards for imports and a level playing field, so that needs to be tightened up. There is an opportunity around public procurement. There is a real, strong opportunity around better labelling. It is vital that consumers are properly informed about their purchasing decisions. So there are a number of places there where we can see room for tightening and more detail. It is broad enough. We just need to focus in on that.
Chris Davies
Q
John Davies: We would have some concerns around that in terms of the active farmer. We do not accept that it will be the correct and proper time to transit out of direct support or a level of direct support, so obviously we would not agree with that. That option has not at the present time been flagged up strongly in the consultation, so we need to focus more on that, with the membership, but initially we would say no, we would not be supportive of that.
Dr Fenwick: I am afraid I was on a train, or on a tube train maybe, when that was raised, so I did not hear the discussion around it, but I agree with John Davies that it is a concern. We would have preferred to see some proactive moves to encourage young farmers and a transition from the older generation to the younger generation, with greater succession, etc., rather than moves which potentially leave vacuums, but are done for all the wrong reasons rather than being something that actually ensures that there is an incoming generation that probably is more deserving of any moneys.
Tonia Antoniazzi
Q
John Davies: It will have quite a major impact if transition is too quick. We have the opportunity, under the Bill, to transition over a seven-year period. I think the key thing is where we transition to. That is all part of the consultation at the present time. Until that is finalised and until we see the clear path there—I don’t mind transitioning more quickly to something that is desirable, but if not, obviously I want to take as long as possible. We have a seven-year plan at present, with the option to extend, and it is important that if things change we take the opportunity to pause and reflect, to see whether that is workable and whether the money has been well spent or not. There are flexibilities in the Bill.
Dr Fenwick: I am afraid we do not know what we are transitioning to in terms of its economic impact on individual businesses, on the supply chain, on rural jobs, and some urban jobs—indeed, in slaughterhouses and places like that. As John said, if it is transitioning potentially to something negative, we want to take as long as possible. You don’t want to transition away from a car to a bicycle; and we really do not know where we are going at the moment. It is extremely concerning.
What is being proposed in Wales, potentially: it will just be a slower death, maybe, for some communities if our worst concerns are realised. What we would say is that before making any suggestion of such a move, that detailed assessment has to be undertaken. It is no good trying to stop halfway through when you have lost 20% of your rural businesses and unemployment in rural areas is on the up. You simply need that impact assessment.
The Chair
I think, maybe, a final word, Mr Thomas?
Huw Thomas: I do not have much to add to the comments made by my colleagues there, but yes, a transition needs to be extremely carefully managed; otherwise, you risk doing some pretty significant collateral damage to the industry.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, may I thank the witnesses for their evidence? Dr Fenwick, Mr Davies, Mr Thomas—do you want one final word?
Dr Fenwick: I did want to put in a final word in regard to the transition period. We have a huge concern which relates to the fact that in Wales contracts are proposed for individual farmers. Our experience with regard to the administrative burden that that represents for the authorities does not fill us with any great hope that it would work well. We are talking about potentially trying to get in place tens of thousands of contracts in a short period of 18 months or two years. It has taken us seven years to get 3,700 complex contracts in place, yet we are now talking about potentially getting tens of thousands in a period of years, and introducing a system that would be far more burdensome for our administrators than the one we currently have.
The Chair
Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for your evidence. Have a safe journey home. We are grateful to you for the answers that you have given to all members of the Committee.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Iain Stewart.)
Westminster Hall
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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HELMS and the Green Deal
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered home energy and lifestyle management systems and the Green Deal.
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Robertson. Before I start, I should apologise to you and those present: this morning’s speech will be brought to you by Halls Soothers—although other sweets are available—so if I start coughing, please bear with me.
With winter approaching, the extra cost of heating a home will be a concern not only for income-poor families but for many of the Prime Minister’s “just about managing” families. Fuel poverty is still a reality for far too many in society. Unfortunately, many of those households live in energy-inefficient homes. That fact, combined with stagnant incomes and the impact of the Government’s austerity measures, leaves some households vulnerable to increasingly unaffordable energy bills.
To compound that, hundreds of my constituents now have unaffordable and hugely inflated bills thanks to the UK Government’s bungled green deal scheme. The green deal was a flagship scheme intended to give homeowners access to cheap loans to modify and improve home energy efficiency. The loans were to be paid back through monthly energy bills, which were to be cheaper due to the green investment made in people’s homes. That credit, however, was often sold as grant funding to confuse consumers.
The fundamental rule, or “golden rule” as it is known, was and is that the savings on bills should always be equal to or greater than the cost of the work. The idea was that consumers would be able to receive energy improvements in effect for free, reducing energy consumption and breaking free from spiralling energy bills. Not only would the house save money and have a lower carbon footprint but, it was hoped, such schemes would reduce carbon production throughout the country, helping to achieve the Government’s carbon reduction targets.
A scheme that empowers households to get out of fuel poverty and have warmer homes is always welcome, but for far too many this scheme failed, and failed utterly. The Government’s ambitious aims looked good on paper, but they fell well short and, as the result of a weak and ill-conceived framework, families were left far worse off. Rather than “pay as you save”, constituents were left paying more and saving nothing or, in far too many cases, actually footing the bill for fraud. Investment in energy savings should be a national priority, and I think that everyone across the House would agree that we need to meet fuel poverty targets and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but elements of the scheme were so badly designed and involved such ineffective regulation that for many it became a nightmare.
I should point out, before the Minister does in her summing up, that plenty of businesses and providers did not abuse the system, with the result that many consumers benefited from the scheme, as was originally envisaged. The green deal, however, was allowed to be abused by criminals who preyed on and exploited households, many of them vulnerable. Ultimately, regardless of one’s politics or trust in any Government, no one thinks they are about to be scammed when a Government logo is on the paperwork. We will come back to the Government, who were in effect the enablers of this great fraud, but the actual fraudsters themselves were Home Energy and Lifestyle Management Systems, or HELMS.
The behaviour of Home Energy and Lifestyle Management Ltd was inexcusable. The use of classic dodgy salesman tactics—overstaying in customers’ homes to intimidate them into a sale, blatant falsifying of figures, misleading documentation, fraudulent marking of signatures, insistence on inappropriate works and outright lying to elderly vulnerable individuals—has pushed victims into deeper fuel poverty and debt, with no access to a quick and effective remedy. In the majority of cases that I have seen, individuals were sold solar panels regardless of need or suitability. Once again misled on finance, those individuals unknowingly sold their ownership of the solar panel feed-in tariff to offset the up-front cost of works. Ultimately, that meant that households had solar panels on their roof, were possibly still liable for maintenance and servicing, and yet received no financial benefit.
More unbelievably, the managing director of the now liquidated company HELMS, Robert Skillen, not only is a director of PV Solar Investments Ltd—the separate company set up to receive HELMS’s customers’ feed-in tariffs that, shamefully, is still trading and is in receipt of mis-sold victims’ feed-in tariffs—and the man with the brassiest of brass necks, but is now looking to profit from “mis-sold energy claims” through a company called True Solar Savings, despite it not being authorised by the Claims Management Regulator. He has fleeced us once, but now wants to assist us in getting redress from his own company’s mis-selling. The man has zero shame, and his outrageous lack of recognition of his culpability is astounding.
Given Robert Skillen’s central role as managing director of HELMS, therefore, I strongly advise against any business interactions with that man or his companies. Robert Skillen and HELMS, however, were enabled by the UK Government, but my constituents and many others throughout the country are now paying the price for the Government’s casual short-sightedness.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
My constituency, like others, has been affected. One-hundred and sixty-nine of my constituents have been affected, and what was striking about the public meetings that we held was the proportion of elderly people in their 70s and 80s—one with dementia, another with almost total blindness—who were tricked into this. It was not, on any level, the selling of solar panels; it was fraud.
Gavin Newlands
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. We are not in a competition, but although the issue affected 169 people in her constituency, in mine 293 households received HELMS panels, out of more than 3,000 in Scotland. Like her, I held my first public meeting on the issue earlier this month. As we know, attendance at such meetings can be a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, but although the subject was rather niche, targeting households with solar panels, about 120 people were in attendance. The meeting was full of individuals with similar stories of being taken advantage of by outrageous mis-selling, pressured into agreeing to inappropriately costed works or told blatant lies for a quick sale.
Two of my constituents, Mr and Mrs Murray, were particularly affected. A HELMS salesman knocked on their door in Linwood—a part of my constituency particularly affected by the mis-selling—and stated that it was to have funding available to invest in homes and energy. He had pressured the Murrays by insisting that the funding was time-limited and finite. They were told that they should have loft insulation, exterior wall insulation and solar panel works. He mentioned no tie between finance and their energy bills, and nothing about a debt tied to their property until 2039 at £1.47 a day.
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
As my hon. Friend knows, last year I set up the all-party parliamentary group on green deal mis-selling, which I chair. We have been inundated by problems of that kind. The distinct issue in Scotland, with cladding work in particular, is the requirement for building warrants, which HELMS did not apply for and which cannot be applied for retrospectively. That leaves householders unable to sell or insure their homes. Does he agree that the Government should do more to support people in that position?
Gavin Newlands
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, the chair of the HELMS all-party group here at Westminster. I shall come to this, but the building warrants issue is complex. In fact, I apologise in advance for making a longer speech than I am accustomed to, because of so many such complexities, building warrants being just one of them.
Back to Mr and Mrs Murray. The HELMS salesman tied them into an additional finance agreement with a personal finance company for a debt repayment of more than £9,000 to meet the expense of the solar panel installation. My constituents acknowledge that they were aware of that finance, but were told by the salesman that they would receive feed-in tariff payments quarterly to offset that cost, as well as having the benefit of lowered energy consumption and billing. However, such was the unfathomable incompetency and mis-selling of HELMS that when the Murrays applied for their feed-in tariff payments, they were missing essential documentation for the process. They pleaded with HELMS, which remained unco-operative and, as we all know, then went into liquidation, leaving my constituents helpless.
It gets worse. In January 2016, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as was, introduced a statutory instrument requiring all existing renewable energy installations with certification issued before 15 January 2016 to submit their feed-in tariff application by 31 March 2016 or be unable to claim any feed-in tariffs or export payments. The UK Government not only failed to protect my constituents from the unscrupulous criminal behaviour of HELMS, despite accrediting it as an approved provider, but went on to implement procedures that would prevent my constituents from ever receiving payment for the solar panels that they pay £88 a month for. Mr and Mrs Murray have gone from paying £90 a month for energy to paying £220 a month, all under a Government incentive.
Many people did not know either that a 25-year debt would be tied to their house, potentially making it difficult to sell. An even bigger impediment to selling houses is that many households—possibly the vast majority—have no building warrant for the insulation that was installed on the exterior of their property. They were not informed of the need to apply for a warrant, and now not only might struggle to get one but may have to cough up the statutory uplift of 300% extra for a late application.
To compound that, in some cases when homes generate on-site renewable electricity via generating equipment such as solar panels, their import supply meter is incompatible with and affected by that on-site generation, sometimes resulting in inaccurate meter readings and billing issues. The current metering system and equipment was designed and configured to record meter electricity flows from the distribution network to consumer premises, but on-site generation has in some cases resulted in metering difficulties at premises where it is used, which are increasing in number.
Two things can happen. First, the import supply meter can run backwards. Since the ’80s, to prevent tampering, meters have been fitted with backstops so they cannot run in the wrong direction. Where on-site generators are connected at sites with meters that do not have backstops, exporting electricity causes the meter to run backwards. As a result, the consumer’s import meter readings are reduced by the amount of electricity they export. When that is discovered, the supplier may recalculate the consumer’s bill for the period for which the meter operated incorrectly and charge the consumer for the shortfall. In most cases, on-site generation exports are unmetered and the supplier needs to use estimates to calculate the bill.
In other cases, the meter treats all electricity in the same way. Some digital meters are configured in a way that results in them adding exported electricity to the imported electricity meter reading, which can result in the consumer paying for both imported and exported electricity. Again, once that situation is identified, historical bills need to be estimated.
Two other constituents of mine, Mr and Mrs Scott, had a HELMS salesman at their door five times. On the fifth occasion, Mrs Scott agreed to the works. She did so only after researching the Government’s accreditation and backing of HELMS. The family have gone from paying around £70 a month in energy bills to paying between £170 and £265 a month. The reason for that increase and variation in expenditure is that, on top of the green deal finance charges, the meter and the panels are incompatible. As a result, the family’s supply meter runs backwards and my constituents pay estimated bills from their supplier. They have fought for years to have that corrected. Only now, with prompting and reference to Ofgem guidance, has their supplier agreed to replace their supply meter with a compatible one.
That shows how ill-equipped HELMS was. Its lack of knowledge—or more likely, if we are honest, its lack of care—about panel and meter compatibility was outrageous. That should never have been an issue, and my constituents should never have seen their energy bills triple.
Members are no doubt beginning to see just how complex this issue is. My constituents and many other people across the UK have been through years of agony in seeking redress. HELMS failed to correct complaints. Constituents who took their cases to the green deal ombudsman were told they could no longer use that as a route to redress because HELMS no longer participated in the ombudsman scheme. Cases sat with the Financial Ombudsman Service for well over a year with no action. HELMS was liquidated and redress, such as it was, was unobtainable.
This was a UK Government incentive, backed and promoted as such. HELMS was accredited, and indeed promoted, under the Government banner, allowing it to enter homes and sell under a false umbrella of trust. Many of the families I have dealt with were sold on the phrase, “Government backed”. In fact, that was what persuaded many of them to listen to the dodgy sales patter in the first place. I have subsequently found that during that time, when someone searched online for a list of Government-accredited providers, HELMS was often top of the list.
How can the Government sit idle while households are left saddled with the hardships caused by HELMS? The very reason why work was agreed to was the shiny stamp of approval from the UK Government. What good is Government accreditation if it is worthless when issues and violations occur?
Who takes responsibility? HELMS and Robert Skillen have thus far escaped ultimate accountability. Despite being fined £200,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office, they paid a mere £10,000 before the liquidation of HELMS. That highlights why the ICO has called on the Government to allow it to issue penalties of up to £500,000 to the company directors responsible.
Thus far, the Government have washed their hands of any responsibility for this mess. Instead, they hope the Green Deal Finance Company, which purchased the green deal loan book from them, will deal with it. Although GDFC was aware of some irregularities, it was not informed of the scale of the mis-selling and fraud that HELMS undertook. Given the delays with seeking redress through the ombudsman, GDFC offered to take over the case load directly to try to speed up the process. Although that has helped, the process is still too slow. GDFC has admitted that it was ill-equipped and under-staffed to deal with the scale of the issue. It has apologised for the delay and vowed to speed up the process.
Colleagues may have a different take and may have casework to prove otherwise, but I have met GDFC three times—I was particularly pleased that it attended my public meeting in Linwood—and my impression is that it is diligently, if slowly, working through the various claims and, in the majority of cases, making offers to reduce loans or cancel them altogether. Of course mistakes will be made—my office has asked GDFC to reassess particular decisions, and it will continue to ask if necessary—but thus far, in my view, GDFC has worked in good faith.
Dr Whitford
Is not part of this issue that people of that age should never have been sold 25-year finance for solar panels that may last only 15 years or so? The offer to my constituents seems to have been only to reduce what they owe, not to clear it. They are still being told, “We’ll let you off £4,000, but you still owe us £6,000 for panels that aren’t working.”
Gavin Newlands
I could not agree more. The age at which some people entered 25-year agreements is shameful. That should never have been allowed. It was obviously known that that debt would ultimately just be tied to the house rather than to the individuals concerned. The reductions in payments ultimately go back to the Government’s golden rule of trying to put the consumer in no worse a position than they were previously. In my mind, that is not good enough. That is why the Government should step in rather than allowing the Green Deal Finance Company to deal with the issue itself.
An independent source calculated that the compensation process, which GDFC had no obligation to instigate, may cost the company upwards of £20 million. For its part, GDFC thinks that there remains merit in the green deal scheme. Everyone agrees with the idea, albeit with some regulatory tweaks and tightening up, but we have issues with how it was implemented and regulated.
GDFC itself has identified some of the issues that should be addressed. First, it is unclear whether a consumer with a complaint about a green deal provider should take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service, the green deal ombudsman or Ofgem. There is a risk that each regulator relies on the activities of the others, and that firms that pose a risk to consumers are not properly monitored or controlled.
Furthermore—this is crucial in the vast majority of HELMS cases—despite the regulation built into the scheme through dual regulation by the Green Deal Oversight and Registration Body and the Financial Conduct Authority, there is a complete absence of regulation of the assignment of feed-in tariff payments, which are not regulated by either of those bodies. That has caused severe consumer detriment. The feed-in tariff assignment was in many cases grossly undervalued. GDFC examined HELMS customer documentation and discovered that there was no calculation of the value paid for the feed-in tariff. HELMS simply took the difference between the green deal loan value and the cost of the solar panel installation. That meant it was incentivised to maximise green deal advice report savings by manipulating the energy performance certificate assessment, thereby maximising the value of the green deal loan and minimising the amount paid for the feed-in tariff. The effect was to maximise the net income of PVSI, HELMS’s sister company.
There is no statutory mechanism for the feed-in tariff to be reassigned in the case of mis-selling. There is no regulation of the company that receives the feed-in tariff. The contract that some customers signed and some discovered they had not signed allows the customer to buy back the rights to the feed-in tariff from PVSI, but only at the original purchase price, notwithstanding how far through the feed-in tariff income stream that takes place. GDFC believes that the feed-in tariff contracts with PVSI should be set aside. I agree, and I am sure that hon. Members do too.
As I have said, when people see any kind of Government logo on a document, the last thing they expect is to be scammed. That is why the UK Government must do more to help people in that position. My colleagues in the all-party parliamentary group in Westminster and the cross-party group in Holyrood will not allow the UK Government to wash their hands of this responsibility.
I have a number of questions for the Minister, who I know is standing in for the Minister for Energy and Clean Growth, the right hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), so I hope that she will commit to respond in writing to questions that she is unable to answer today. The right hon. Member for Devizes said that she would meet me; will the Minister confirm that she is willing to meet me, the Green Deal Finance Company and trading standards in the same meeting?
Many have already paid off their loans for a number of reasons: peace of mind, concerns about carrying extra debt or because they had difficulties selling their property. They are still potential victims of fraud, but without an active loan, they cannot gain redress from the Green Deal Finance Company. What happens to them? How do they get their money back?
What was the Green Deal Finance Company advised about HELMS and mis-selling more generally when it was sold the loan book? Why was the feed-in tariff element not regulated? Would the Minister consider legislation to regulate it? Will the Government take steps to ensure that the ombudsman is appropriately resourced and has more powers to deal with rogue providers? Will the Minister meet the power companies to ensure that the metering problems are fixed as a matter of urgency and that no house will be left worse off or in debt as a result of inadequate metering? Crucially, will she commit, at the very least, to considering a compensation fund for those affected?
Thus far there has been nothing short of an abdication of duty by the Government. They have an obligation to do something to help the thousands of households that have been affected by this fraudulent behaviour. The scandalous mis-selling of panels was carried out by HELMS but enabled by the UK Government under their banner. Therefore, it is the Government’s responsibility to fix this mess and ensure that our constituents are adequately compensated in a timely fashion. A fund to provide financial relief would be a good start to repairing some of that damage. It is beyond time that the UK Government recognised their role in the fraudulent behaviour of HELMS. My constituents and, indeed, many thousands of others across Scotland and the UK, need answers and action now.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Mr Robertson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) on securing the debate and on making the case so succinctly on behalf of his constituents. I am sure that colleagues are well aware that the green deal was not extended to Northern Ireland, but tackling fuel poverty and making homes more energy efficient remains a priority for us. I will speak about a number of similar schemes and options available in Northern Ireland. I support the hon. Gentleman and I am sure that other hon. Members will back him up.
I support redress for all the hon. Gentleman’s constituents and others who have been financially disadvantaged to a considerable extent. When reading up on the topic, I was truly shocked to read about the questionable business practices that many HELMS employees seemed to adopt; we have heard about some already and we will hear more. It is no wonder that so many Members are here today talking about the negative impact on their constituents. Many were left out of pocket and some have struggled to sell their homes, which the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) mentioned.
David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)
Over the past few years, there has been an increase in fraud, especially in relation to solar panels. In 2017, directors of a company were jailed, and recently a six-member gang committed a £17 million fraud in a solar panel scam. The full rigour of the law must be brought to bear on the company directors responsible.
Jim Shannon
The Minister is listening intently to what is being said and I look forward to her response. I know this matter is not ultimately her responsibility and she is filling in; nevertheless, I hope she is able to respond to my hon. Friend’s intervention.
When the company went into liquidation, many customers found themselves at a total loss, unable to take up their case with either the ombudsman or the company. The fact that the green deal was backed by Government undoubtedly gave the scheme credibility. The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North said that one of his constituents phoned to check the scheme and found that it was Government-backed, so thought that it must be all right, but it was not. Coupled with the idea of saving money and being green, that resulted in many customers signing agreements that they did not necessarily understand, on the premise that their bills would not increase. It was disappointing for many that that did not turn out to be the case.
Members have given evidence that these operators of the scheme took advantage of their constituents. That said, Members must ensure that we do not undermine public trust in these types of scheme, given the potential benefits they can deliver. For example, in Northern Ireland, we have worked hard to tackle fuel poverty, and earlier this year, fuel poverty figures for the Province fell to 22%—a welcome drop from 42%. That indicates what we are doing back home, even with a stuttering Assembly.
Dr Whitford
I understand that the Government hope to do a future green deal project. Will that not be completely undermined if this issue is not resolved?
Jim Shannon
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The Government have a great responsibility to address the issue for the sake of the credibility of any future schemes and so that participants in them will not worry about the future.
It is important to recognise that price fluctuations in home heating oil played a role in the fuel poverty figures I just gave. The reduction is welcome news, but we should not rest on our laurels: 22% of people considered fuel poor is still 22% too many.
A scheme that has proved to be extremely successful is the Northern Ireland sustainable energy programme. It has a particular focus on tackling fuel poverty, with 80% of funding ring-fenced for vulnerable and low-income families. The NISEP provides help to install energy-saving measures in homes, including energy-efficient boilers, heating controls, loft insulation and cavity wall insulation. With funding coming from a levy paid by all electricity customers, the scheme is delivered by energy companies and managed by the Utility Regulator. We have a system in place that has managed the programme well and delivered.
In 2017-18, five energy companies provided schemes, each of which had different eligibility criteria and incentives and/or grants to help people to make their homes more energy efficient and perhaps reduce their overall energy bills. As I mentioned, the focus is on those at risk of fuel poverty—for example, many of the schemes work directly with housing associations, which identify eligible tenants. The sheer variety of schemes means that people can make informed decisions about which scheme would best suit them and address their specific needs.
The NISEP provides some £7.9 million towards energy efficiency interventions, which include insulation and heating upgrades. It has proved so successful that it has been extended again until March 2019. The programme is working. The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North referred to a different scheme. I only wish that scheme were the same as then we would not have needed this debate. We have accountability whereas, as he said and as we want to illustrate, there is no accountability in that scheme.
Angela Crawley
The hon. Gentleman is speaking to specific issues of fuel poverty in Northern Ireland. To come back to the mis-selling of the green deal, does he agree that people were conned into buying mis-sold products on the basis that there were UK Government logos on the paperwork, and UK Government approval gave them the confidence to go ahead, so the Government should compensate those individuals? That is what we are seeking from the debate.
Jim Shannon
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. With great respect to the Minister and the Government, I expect the Government to respond positively to the request being made on behalf of the constituents who have been disadvantaged and mis-sold products and who, as a consequence, are poorer today than they thought they would be. I cannot understand how someone who was paying an electricity bill of £80 a month can suddenly be paying £170 or £240 a month, as the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North described. How can that be cheaper? How can it be legal? How can that be allowed to happen? That must be taken on board.
Across the United Kingdom, we all recognise the importance of becoming greener and the need to have a diverse and sustainable energy mix, which is why it is important to look at new technologies as well as to harness those that are already tried and tested. The Northern Ireland renewables obligation, like its equivalent in Great Britain, requires suppliers to source an increasing proportion of the electricity they supply from renewable sources. Colleagues might be surprised that, despite the often wet and windy climate in Strangford—in fact, my constituency has among the lowest rainfall in Northern Ireland; we sometimes wonder if that is true, but the statistics prove it—one of the most popular sources of renewable energy that people are turning to is solar. This might be controversial given the topic of the debate, but it really does work when done well.
There is a number of large farms in Strangford, and many of them have installed solar panels—in fact, one farm in my constituency has 10 acres of solar panels. That is an example of what can happen when green energy is done right, and that is what we want. With renewables obligation certificates guaranteeing payment for every unit of electricity generated, it is not surprising that so many are investing in solar panels. Not only can people save money on electricity bills, but they help to make Northern Ireland, and the whole United Kingdom, a greener place for the next generation, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
What has happened with HELMS has probably put a lot of constituents off installing solar panels and, more broadly, installing renewable energy measures, but as we try to tackle climate change and battle to keep the lights on, it is important that we look closely at green energy measures, from electric cars and smart homes to making simple energy-efficiency changes to our homes. Not everyone will benefit from solar panels—people who do not generate enough electricity are unlikely to reap benefits and will end up paying more. As has been illustrated today, that was the case for many hon. Members’ constituents, and HELMS was at fault. The Minister, the Department and the Government must respond. However, it is so important that we do all we can both to help people out of fuel poverty and to support the use of renewables where possible and appropriate.
Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) on securing the debate and making a powerful speech to introduce the complex but dramatic and distressing situation of green deal mis-selling and the impact of HELMS in particular.
I was elected last year by a community that I have grown up and lived in my whole life. Balornock is probably similar in many ways to Linwood in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency: it was an overspill estate created after the second world war, built at a time of great optimism in the Glasgow city region, where people were moving out of overcrowded slum tenements in the inner city and into what they saw as new build housing, with indoor toilets and front and back gardens. The community was largely born of the baby boomer generation, who moved in and have lived there their whole lives. Many benefited, as they saw it, from buying their council houses in the 1980s and 1990s, and, as they reached retirement, they wanted to make improvements to their houses.
The community was built out of great optimism and aspiration for the future. Five years ago, the green deal was launched to great fanfare by the Tory Government, with the promise of a win-win situation for homeowners: lower energy bills and the chance to do their bit for the environment. It seemed like a great idea. Those who sought to exploit that scheme cynically homed in and targeted communities, particular those with a large population of baby boomers in self-contained housing units—not flatted accommodation—with back and front gardens. If the scheme sounded too good to be true, that was because for some in those communities it turned out to be exactly that.
Dozens of my constituents in Glasgow signed up to install green deal-financed improvements to their homes, such as solar panels and insulated cladding, but that has proven to be one of the worst decisions they have ever made. Instead of realising the Government’s vision of a flagship programme to reduce fuel poverty and improve energy efficiency, the complete failure to regulate the scheme properly has allowed it to be ruthlessly exploited by gangsters and other rogue traders, who have systematically preyed on trusting people who thought that, as the scheme was approved and accredited by the Government, they could trust its credentials and sign up.
In 2015 Christine McBain, one of my constituents, handed over her life’s savings to a Cambuslang-based green deal provider called Home Energy and Lifestyle Management Systems—otherwise known as HELMS—to put external wall insulation on her Swedish timber-framed house in Balornock. Those houses are a common feature of Balornock, because after the second world war the overspill in Glasgow was so problematic that timber kit houses were imported from Scandinavia, such was the pressure on housing. More than half a century later, those houses are not the most energy-efficient, so this offer seemed like a plausible way for those homeowners to make them better. As I have said, it turned out to be the worst decision they ever made.
Another constituent, 86-year-old Mary, handed over her lifetime’s savings and has been left with £17,000 of debt after being duped by HELMS with no sign of any redress. It is the most appalling experience as an MP to see people who are meant to be enjoying their retirement, and feeling safe in their life’s work and savings, but who have been stripped of any sense of security and are in absolute distress about what they are having to deal with. If this is not dealt with urgently, sadly they will have to deal with it for the remainder of their lives. That is a shameful indictment on the Government’s failure to regulate their policy.
Christine and Mary are among many local residents in my constituency who have been left totally in limbo by HELMS. The company carried out similar works on more than 160 properties in my constituency without obtaining the necessary building warrants, cynically preying on local residents with promises of free solar panels and cavity wall insulation that would save them thousands of pounds. Normally such a matter would be easily remedied with a retrospective application for a building warrant from Glasgow City Council. However, because building standards were not adhered to by HELMS, no backdated planning permission can be granted without costly surveys. In addition, the statutory fee for a building warrant will be tripled where works have already been completed. Residents simply do not have the financial resources to fund that, and in the absence of building warrants the houses are now uninsurable and unsellable. Residents—many in the latter years of their lives—feel effectively imprisoned in their own homes. That is shameful.
I am currently seeking agreement from Glasgow City Council to waive the multiplier fee for the retrospective warrant and to cover the cost of the surveys needed for the building works. Will the Minister write to Glasgow City Council’s chief executive to make a similar call?
Dr Whitford
Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that the underlying fault lies with the UK Government scheme? To me, the UK Government lobbying Glasgow City Council to pick up those costs, rather than offering to fund them, seems the wrong way round.
Mr Sweeney
The hon. Lady makes a fair point. I urge the Minister to show some leadership and overall responsibility. In the first instance, she should contact Glasgow City Council’s chief executive and offer a dialogue. I would be receptive to the hon. Lady’s proposal of the Government offering to finance those costs as a way of breaking the impasse and getting the problem dealt with. The problem requires a whole-Government approach from city level, Scotland level and UK level. That would be the most proactive way to deal with it. Ultimately, however, responsibility lies with the Department that introduced the scheme, and it should show some moral and financial leadership.
Earlier this year I met representatives of the Green Deal Finance Company to raise my constituents’ concerns. In the last year alone the GDFC has upheld 169 complaints against HELMS, compared with 14 complaints against all other contractors upheld since 2013. Clearly, one contractor is a massive outlier in those figures. Some 154 cases against HELMS remain under consideration by the GDFC. However, the piecemeal approach to handling complaints has put the onus on the victims. The sheer number of complaints upheld against HELMS suggests that there was a systemic failure of regulation by the Government and that a proactive approach is now needed, to tackle that huge failure in the green deal scheme. It was the responsibility of the Minister and the GDFC to lead in the matter; it cannot be the responsibility of residents who are already distressed, disoriented and at their wits’ end in trying to deal with it. They cannot be put under further stress from the huge effort of having to right the wrong.
Angela Crawley
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware, from speaking to his constituents, that people who chose to pay over several years through their electricity bills are not able to withhold payment, which is a common and acceptable consumer rights practice, if they believe that there was mis-selling. If the power company does not receive the funds, those people accrue debt. They cannot prevent the green deal payment from being made through their energy bills, which means they accrue more debt in the process.
Mr Sweeney
I completely agree. One of the most insidious aspects of the green deal scheme is that it locks people into a structural system. The loan is tied to the house, so the property imprisons the resident. That is the most appalling aspect of the way things have been manipulated by HELMS and other nefarious practitioners of the scheme.
HELMS made more than 6 million nuisance sales calls and, as the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North said, was fined £200,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office. The Department of Energy and Climate Change also fined the firm another £10,500, but conveniently the company was put into liquidation by its owners, who walked away after paying just £10,000 of the fines owed. The company was owned by the multi-millionaire Robert Skillen, who continues to live a highly privileged lifestyle at the expense of the thousands of people he ripped off—including my constituents—leaving a trail of misery and chaos in his wake. He fled abroad and continues to profit from his fraudulent business practices. If he had any honour he would return to the UK and face the accusations against him. Indeed, he should face prosecution for fraud.
Gavin Newlands
I just want to make Members aware that Mr Skillen has returned to the country—on a number of occasions, I think. Once he turned up at the Green Deal Finance Company to ask for the details of the customers who have contacted it, so that he could contact them directly, such is the shamelessness of the man.
Mr Sweeney
It is appalling to realise that this chap has such a shameless attitude that he does not accept the harm he has caused to thousands of people, who cannot sleep at night. I hope that he will realise the impact he has had on them. However, it is time the Minister and the GDFC took formal steps to censure and effectively blacklist the guy, to stop him continuing to exploit vulnerable people.
As the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) mentioned, dozens of other homeowners in Glasgow North East are still literally paying the price of the green deal’s failure, through the finance deals that they were conned into to get the work done. A home is somewhere that we should all be able to consider a sanctuary and place of safety. However, many are so depressed by the green deal trap that they can no longer bear to live in their own homes, which are the very source of their turmoil.
Most people would consider a Government-backed scheme such as the green deal to carry a copper-bottomed guarantee, but for many of my constituents the feeling is one of total betrayal by the authorities they trusted. The Tory Government created the environment in which rogue traders could pull a fast one. The Government and the Green Deal Finance Company must now do everything they can to find a remedy for those who have been adversely affected. They must contact all 4,226 HELMS loan recipients, to make them aware of what they can do to find redress if they experience financial detriment because of the scheme. They must also consider a compensation scheme for those affected by mis-selling by HELMS.
That is why after I was elected I joined the all-party parliamentary group on green deal mis-selling, along with my hon. Friends the Members for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) and for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney), and why I presented a petition to Parliament earlier this year, urging the House of Commons to ensure that the Government compensate and protect people who have suffered detriment because of the green deal scheme. In the interest of fairness and justice the Government should now take steps to ensure that the same thing can never happen in future.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
I am delighted to participate in the debate, Mr Robertson. I extend my heartfelt thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) for securing a debate to expose HELMS’s mis-selling of energy-efficient products under the UK Government’s green deal programme. It has affected many of my constituents. Indeed, as we have heard, we all have constituents who have been victims of that mis-selling, and who have been caused considerable anxiety, stress and financial loss as a result of the scandal. The UK Government, as every Member who has spoken has said, need to step up and take responsibility.
There is no denying that the scheme was Government-backed, but it turns out that the wider regulatory provisions failed to ensure that the deal was fit for purpose. What is required is for the UK Government to put in place a compensation scheme for all the consumers who have been left out of pocket—and there are many. We now have a situation where some homeowners who were taken in by the scheme have been left unable to sell their homes. They are not making the savings that they were told they would. It has all come to nothing. Some have been left with higher bills than they had before. The work carried out has often been substandard. Building warrants for wall cladding have not been obtained, so the consumers affected have had to pay for retrospective warrants at 300% of the cost of a normal building warrant, or have had to pay to have corrective works done, because building standards will not issue a warrant if they deem the work not to have been done properly. We have constituents who are not on a feed-in tariff because they were not registered prior to March 2016. Far too many people now face the prospect of monthly repayments for finance deals with extensive payback periods in excess of 20 years. How can that possibly be acceptable?
I am pleased that the Minister for Energy and Clean Growth assured me in a debate on 10 October that she would ask her officials to look at the loan arrangements. She pointed out:
“The green deal…was designed to unlock the issue of persuading people to improve the energy efficiency measures of their homes. Currently, all contracts are covered by existing consumer protection, but as a second action point I undertake to go away and review this specific company and write to her with the state of progress on those conversations.”—[Official Report, 10 October 2018; Vol. 647, c. 110WH.]
I await that letter with eager anticipation. I am sure that the Minister who is responding today can see that, far from unlocking
“the issue of persuading people to improve the energy efficiency measures of their homes”,
the scandal has undoubtedly set that cause back considerably, which is in no one’s interest. However, the Government could do much to mitigate the distrust that has been sown, the alarm that has been caused and the financial loss that those caught up in the scandal feel.
We have heard that the issue is complex, but in another sense it is very simple: the UK Government-backed scheme has led to ordinary consumers facing huge difficulties, and it is incumbent on the UK Government—there is a moral imperative—to put it right. The debacle shows that the UK Government’s system of regulation is simply not fit for purpose. Consumers did not have the protection under the law that they were entitled to expect. That needs to be addressed. Those consumers who inadvertently and unwittingly signed over their feed-in tariffs must have them returned. Today, those who have suffered in the HELMS fiasco simply want to know whether the Government are going to step up, or whether they are going to leave those who trusted the Government-backed scheme floundering in debt, hardship and despair. I urge the Minister to do the right thing and help the people who have been let down, misled and swindled by the scheme.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)
Order. I should like to leave a couple of minutes at the end of the debate for the mover of the motion.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. Like others, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) on securing this important debate. He made the case against HELMS excellently—the mis-selling of loans, the outright fraud, the fact that it was deemed to be a Government-backed scheme, the targeting of the vulnerable, the transfer of feed-in tariffs, and the personal finance arrangements that effectively forced people to commission other works. Some people took out loans for works that the Scottish Government would have paid for directly because they invest in energy efficiency measures.
My hon. Friend mentioned that building warrants were not applied for and people were not told that they needed them; now, statutory fees are added if people apply for a building warrant retrospectively. We heard about incorrect metering, and the fact that HELMS was able to go into liquidation and walk away, paying just £10,000 out of a record £200,000 fine for cold calling. We heard about the Government’s total inaction and inadequate governance, and about the Government’s attitude, which when combined with the actions of HELMS, has created fuel-poor households rather than helping people with their fuel bills.
My hon. Friend’s comments were echoed by other speakers. The hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) spoke about people being imprisoned or trapped in their homes, which is a travesty. He said that he asked Glasgow City Council to waive the statutory late fees for building warrants, and I put the same request to my local authority. The problem is that these are statutory fees—in law, they cannot be waived. That puts the ball firmly in the corner of the UK Government, who should pay those fees.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
It is a disgrace that people are being locked in to these deals. Older adults and vulnerable individuals were, I believe, deliberately mis-sold these products. In some cases in my constituency, which thankfully have now been dealt with, it meant that elderly individuals could not move from their homes to sheltered accommodation or nursing homes when they needed care.
Alan Brown
It is a shocking indictment and really disgraceful that people are trapped and cannot get into houses that are fit for purpose.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) correctly highlighted the need for compensation, the issue of people who are unable to sell their homes, and the March 2016 feed-in tariff deadline that means that people are missing out on the tariffs they expected. It was good to hear a concession from the Minister about reviewing consumer regulation, and it will be interesting to see how that progresses. My hon. Friend issued a further challenge to the Government, and we all want to see action and intervention on this.
My hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North highlighted issues that are familiar to SNP Members but that the UK Government have so far chosen to ignore, despite numerous written parliamentary questions and letters from MSPs and MPs, including me. Surely today the Minister will confirm that the UK Government will take action and listen to our calls for a compensation fund for those affected.
Let me give some headline statistics: 162 households in my constituency have green deal finance with HELMS, and of those 142 have photovoltaic installations. Some 3,054 households in Scotland have HELMS green deal finance for PVs, and there are more than 4,000 across the UK. Other Members have mentioned the duration of loans: 93% of those loans in Scotland, including for 97% of my affected constituents, are in the range of 20 to 25 years. Think of that: a supposedly spend-to-save measure is being paid back over 20 or 25 years. No private company would take out such a loan to make projected minor annual savings because the risk is too great. We already know about the dodgy installations and wiring, but there is no way that those PV cells have a lifespan of 20 to 25 years. The additional ongoing maintenance required will offset any projected savings that people were led to believe they would get. Imagine having an asset that will not last for the life of the loan—it is criminal. Anyone aged 40 or over who has taken out a loan will still be paying it back when they reach state retirement age and beyond. That would be bad enough under normal loan ethics, but as we have heard, many people who took out those loans were duped by salesmen who said that savings would pay for a Government-backed scheme. What does the Minister say to the people who have been cruelly conned and left with long-term loans?
Angela Crawley
One couple who approached me had specifically been told that installing solar panels would help them make money on the sale of their home, but instead they have been paying double and triple the amount for their electricity. Does my hon. Friend agree that those who have been hardest hit are people in middle to low-income homes?
Alan Brown
I completely agree: this scheme is creating fuel-poor households, which is why Government intervention is needed.
How did this come about? For me, the situation results from a combination of a few factors. It was originally a Liberal Democrat policy that clearly had not been correctly thought through, and there was a Tory partner in the coalition Government who maintained a “hands off—market forces will prevail” ideology, which prevented direct Government intervention. There was always the desire not to get directly involved. Some unscrupulous businessmen saw a fantastic opportunity to make money at the expense of the vulnerable. The impact of events have since been compounded by successive Tory Governments who have refused to take a lead as the mis-selling scandal unravelled.
I find it incomprehensible that the UK Government have so far not seen fit to have a proper investigation into this matter and they are forcing victims to take out individual claims. That adds to the stress of the situation, and coupled with the non-disclosure agreement that is associated with any settlement offered from the Green Deal Finance Company, it is apparent that the initial approach is to minimise any refunds to those who deserve them. It is a classic “divide and conquer” approach, rather than an attempt to do the right thing.
When I read the debates on the Energy Bill in 2011, I noted that the current Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth served on the Bill Committee. Given her familiarity with the legislation and the wider points debated in Committee and other debates, surely she would want to lead in fixing this mess. Indeed, as this mess has unfolded, it has become clear that the governance arrangements were not fit for purpose. Interestingly, the SNP spokesperson at that time, the former Member for Angus, Mike Weir, raised concerns on Second Reading, saying:
“One of the problems with energy mis-selling was that it was a long time before many of the cases came to light. Does the Minister have any thoughts on ensuring that the standards that are to be imposed on those selling green energy are regularly inspected to ensure that any problems can be detected at an early stage?”
The Minister responded:
“I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we will keep all elements of the green deal under close review…we will need continually to monitor all aspects of it, especially those relating to selling and mis-selling… If we identify any areas in which we think improvements can be made, we will not hesitate to make them.”—[Official Report, 14 September 2011; Vol. 532, c. 1049.]
Unfortunately, Mike Weir has been proved right. The UK Government did not uphold their end of the bargain regarding the governance and review that they said they would undertake.
On governance, the length of the loans alone should have prompted an automatic red flag. The 242 complaints about cold calling between October and December 2014 offering “free” solar panels should have resulted in much quicker clampdown on the actions of HELMS, but the Government were too slow to act. We know what the then Energy Minister, Greg Barker, thought of HELMS—he praised it for its entrepreneurial start-up skills. Mr Barker is okay now: he stepped down in 2015 and was promptly made a life peer in the House of Lords. The Secretary of State for Energy at that time lost his seat in 2015 but was knighted in the 2016 new year honours list and is now back as an hon. Member in this House. I am sure that my constituents will want to know why those who got it wrong have been rewarded and, as we have heard, those who have been wronged are still fighting for justice and have been ignored by the UK Government.
As we have heard, someone else who did okay out of this was the director, Robert Skillen, who was up to his neck in it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North said, Mr Skillen has some amount of brass neck to come back and campaign to protect people from the mis-selling that he was involved in. That is shocking. I hope the Minister will confirm that all necessary agencies and authorities will look into his ongoing activities and see what can be done to prevent further fraudulent action by him.
Coming back to governance, in a written answer to my parliamentary question on what review the Government had undertaken of the so-called golden rule and how it was working, the answer was “None.” Once the scheme was up and running, why did nobody look at whether the golden rule was working and whether the savings that had been predicted were being generated? That is another dereliction of duty. Who would think that basing a whole scheme on one year’s savings against a loan was a good idea? We need a proper root-and-branch review of HELMS installations, and I suggest that we need to extend it to wider green deal installations elsewhere.
The Tory Government pulled the green deal, but what analysis did they do when they put a block on it? When will we hear why they pulled it and what lessons were learned? While the Tory Government has stood back, it has been left to MSPs, MPs and citizens advice bureaux to try to assist affected constituents, but we are doing so with both hands tied behind our back because we do not have the address information. Only the Green Deal Finance Company, and therefore the Government, know exactly who has these green deal finance deals from HELMS. Again, that is why we need Government intervention. Before I conclude, I must put on record my tribute to the work done by my local CAB, particularly Linda Corbett, who has done fantastic work on digging into HELMS, understanding the issue, taking it forward and helping people, and to a local constituent, Isobel McNicol, who started a HELMS awareness and campaign group. However, it should not be left to those people to act; Government intervention is needed.
In the ministerial response to me the Government rejected the assertion that the whole issue is shrouded in secrecy, but I suggest there is still not enough transparency. We need to know how many people have been defrauded of their feed-in tariff. In response to a written parliamentary question of mine, I was told that it is not the Government who hold the information on whose feed-in tariffs have been transferred, but Ofgem. The Government need to get an understanding of the matter, because we have heard that there has been widespread fraud on the transferring of feed-in tariffs.
As others have said, this has been a flawed energy policy from the start. The problems will set back efforts to get people to sign up to future energy efficiency measures. Some people who are fuel poor and deserve to have energy efficiency measures installed in their homes will be afraid to do so. The Government must get a grip, set up a compensation fund, do a proper investigation and start taking collective action.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
This debate revolves around a number of issues—not just the question of one rogue company, but wider issues relating to the nature of the green deal programme when it was set up, what it decided to do with regard to redress arrangements, how the relationship of payment to reward was set up, and various other issues. That positions the debate firmly as being about the Government’s response to a number of these issues, not just the legal responses to a particular company that has clearly acted reprehensibly in engaging customers in deals that were anything but green and anything but advantageous to them.
I therefore congratulate the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) on securing this important debate. It is a debate that goes back to when the green deal was set up in the first place, with the Energy Act 2011. As the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) observed, the current Energy Minister participated as a member of the Bill Committee. I think the hon. Gentleman will also be aware that I, too, was a member of that Committee, and many of the issues that have been raised this morning concerning aspects of the green deal were raised during the process of bringing the Act into being.
One particular issue that I and others raised during passage of that Act was the concept of the golden rule in the green deal. The central selling point was that people would never pay more than they would get back in savings from arrangements relating to the green deal—what they would save as a result of green deal treatments would always be greater than what they paid up front.
It was pointed out during the passage of the 2011 Act that that idea was an elastic concept, and that it was always going to be difficult to get the right balance in the relationship between payments and savings. It is that aspect of the green deal that HELMS appears to have taken particular advantage of. In fact, it is fair to say that the company systematically exploited every single weakness in the green deal in its approach to customers. It took not only all the feed-in tariff from customers, but the export tariff, which it put into a separate company. It made a lot of money out of that process, because the feed-in tariff at that point was pretty generous to customers, yet it still engaged customers in loans for those properties.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) have mentioned just how many of their constituents were systematically victimised by this scam. They were victims not only of a scam, but of a scam that appeared to them to have been authorised by the Government. During the passage of the 2011 Act, considerable efforts were made to ensure that the green deal was authorisable by Government, but not enough efforts were made subsequently to ensure that what was authorisable by Government was actually sound and authorised by Government. As hon. Members have mentioned, in the early stages a number of companies such as HELMS were praised by Ministers as great examples of companies that could be properly authorised and could safely go around carrying out green deal arrangements.
As hon. Members know, the green deal was a complete fiasco and was closed down by the Government shortly after they took office following the 2015 election. Members may recall a former Energy Minister saying that he would not sleep at night unless millions of people had taken up the green deal. The number who did turned out to be only a tiny proportion of those who would have taken up the green deal. The interest rate on the loans was clearly a big factor in the low take-up. Indeed, as Members have attested to today, it is a factor in the overhanging loans that a number of people have, for up to 25 years, as a result of the mis-selling by HELMS and one or two other companies. This is not a happy tale at all. What we have heard about today are particular aspects of a wider scheme that was pretty flawed in both concept and execution.
Of course, on top of that is the fact that the Government not only withdrew from the green deal but then sold the whole loan book to a private company, the Green Deal Finance Company. It is now landed with a number of complaints, because the Government are effectively saying, “It’s nothing to do with us; it’s the Green Deal Finance Company, a private company.” It is fair to say, as hon. Members have reflected on, that the company is trying to do something about the overhanging debts that a number of people have as a result of being on the green deal loan book. Indeed, there are several reports of the Green Deal Finance Company reducing the loan debt of particular people to a level at which it does match the requirements of the golden rule, so that they are not continuing to pay more on their bills than they are saving in energy charges. But that is only scratching the surface, because only a few people have been dealt with in that positive way by the Green Deal Finance Company. There is clearly a much wider issue, which relates back to how the green deal was set up. A redress system was not built into the green deal as it unfolded, and the mess that resulted from those shortcomings is still with us today.
It is incumbent on the Government to take much greater responsibility for their own mess, for the consequences of the weaknesses in the green deal as it came forward, and certainly in the case of HELMS, a company that the Government were talking up, shall we say, until fairly shortly before it went out of business, with all the problems attached to that. I look forward to hearing from the Minister today what proposals the Government have to take this matter forward in a positive way. I note that, in answer to a written question at the beginning of the year, the Government said that they were actively involved with bodies relevant to this issue and hoped that there would be a resolution. I would be interested to know the bodies with which the Government have been involved in discussions, what they think would be an active resolution to this issue and how they are progressing with that active resolution.
My personal view is that it is imperative that some active resolution is brought about across the board, because this is a reputational issue for any future energy efficiency or home improvement scheme. If customers engaging with those schemes have no confidence in the schemes working, they will not happen. It is absolutely imperative that we get energy efficiency and green energy schemes going in this country as part of the challenge of decarbonising our energy systems and uprating the energy efficiency of homes across the country. It is important that that gets under way for the future with a clean slate and a clean bill of health for what is being done.
It is therefore incumbent on the Government, in order to foster good will towards future energy efficiency schemes and to put right the wrongs of the past, to actively engage in finding solutions to the problems of mis-selling that we have heard about this morning and to consider the wider issue of the deficiencies of the green deal scheme and the need to ensure that we get it right for any successor schemes, whether privately or publicly funded, in future.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) on securing the debate. I welcome the comments and interest of other hon. Members; they mentioned the particular issues for their constituents. We have a shared wish to see proper redress for consumers who have been mis-sold green deal plans. I thank the hon. Gentleman for highlighting the case of Mr and Mrs Murray. We listened to his account of the sadness and horror that they have experienced.
I want to make a particular point at this stage. As the Minister responsible for consumer protection, company law and the insolvency process, I place it on record that the Government are committed to ensuring that rogue directors, rogue traders, are investigated, in the interest of protecting consumers. I feel very strongly about that in this role and, obviously, my other roles in Government.
In total, Home Energy and Lifestyle Management Ltd, which I shall refer to as HELMS, was responsible for selling 4,581 green deal plans. Of those, 3,068 were sold to households in Scotland and 293 in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. We understand that about 460 consumers have made complaints about the green deal plans provided to them by HELMS. That is a substantial number and it is a real concern, but let us remember that a large majority of green deal plans run smoothly, without complaint.
Most complaints focus on the fact that HELMS led consumers to understand that there would be no cost to their installation. HELMS gave consumers the impression that that was possible because of the nature of the Government’s green deal scheme. Consumers were then surprised to see green deal payments appear on their electricity bills. Many consumers were unaware that they were entering into a credit agreement, or of the opportunity that they had to cancel their agreement. That runs counter to what the green deal is about—enabling consumers to install energy efficiency measures through a loan and then repay through the resulting savings on their energy bills.
The consumer’s position was often worsened because they were persuaded by HELMS to assign elsewhere the rights to any feed-in tariff from the measures. HELMS encouraged many to transfer their feed-in tariff rights to a separate company—one related to HELMS—as a contribution to the costs of their installation. That meant that consumers could not put that potential funding stream towards meeting the costs of the green deal plans, and HELMS failed to inform the consumer of the impact.
Before saying more about the HELMS cases, I shall provide some background on the green deal. It was launched by the coalition Government in 2013. Under the green deal, consumers can borrow money to fund improvements and repay the loans over time through their electricity bills. In the case of solar PV, consumers can begin to use renewable energy generated on-site in their homes. The savings can then be used to repay the loan. A principle called the golden rule, which has been mentioned today, is in place and intended to ensure that loan repayments do not exceed expected savings.
It is true that at the time the Government and, indeed, hon. Members from across the parties had high hopes for the green deal. But it failed to take off to the levels expected. Various reasons have been offered for that. They include its complexity and the fact that it did not properly consider consumer demand to undertake energy efficiency improvements in this way. The original scheme design was not perfect, but we and others believe that the pay-as-you-save mechanism at the heart of the green deal can still play a valuable role in the future. We have published the summary of responses to our call for evidence and will consult on proposals in due course. The right consumer protection will be paramount in any reformed scheme.
We want to improve the green deal, but it is far from being the only game in town for energy efficiency. Just yesterday the House debated the Draft Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2018, under which we are looking to further improve the already successful energy company obligation scheme. Since 2013, it has led to over 2.4 million measures being installed in nearly 2 million homes.
To make things right for the consumers who have suffered from the activities of HELMS, it is important to know that there is a specific process for handling complaints under the green deal. Consumers should first approach their green deal provider. If the problem is not resolved, the consumer may then approach the green deal ombudsman or the financial ombudsman service, depending on the nature of the complaint. Ombudsman decisions are binding on the green deal provider. If the consumer is still dissatisfied, they can refer their complaint to the Secretary of State for consideration.
The liquidation of HELMS further complicated resolving consumer complaints, as it meant any ombudsman decisions against HELMS could not be implemented through the company. Therefore, my Department worked with other key parties to establish a mechanism to offer a resolution for consumers. The Green Deal Finance Company reviews those cases and, where it considers it appropriate, makes settlement offers to consumers. If they are dissatisfied with any offer received, consumers can still refer their cases to the Secretary of State under the green deal framework regulations. The Secretary of State has the power to reduce or cancel loans where he is satisfied that the consumer has suffered, or is likely to suffer, a substantive loss.
Mr Sweeney
Does the Minister think that, rather than the onus being on the individual to seek that assistance, the Green Deal Finance Company ought to be writing to every recipient of a loan and every customer of HELMS to make them aware of the route to getting redress, if they need it?
Kelly Tolhurst
The Green Deal Finance Company will make those offers. If they are not accepted by the consumer, the onus is on them to recommend the case to the Secretary of State and for him to take the decision. That is the redress process that we have put in place.
Alan Brown
I thank the Minister for giving way again. She said that roughly 10% of people who have a HELMS green deal have instigated a complaint. Therefore, 90% of those sitting on these deals have not complained, and many do not even know that they have been conned. That is why the Government have a responsibility to contact them directly and begin investigating, to see what help they can give.
Kelly Tolhurst
If that has not already been done, I am sure it will be looked at. I am not sure whether it has been done or not, as I do not have that information.
Gavin Newlands
The Minister spoke about the compensation that effectively comes through the Green Deal Finance Company. Does she think it right that a private company, which had nothing to do with the initial mis-selling or scamming, is left to deal with this issue and possibly £20 million of compensation to consumers, instead of the Government, whose scheme it actually was?
Kelly Tolhurst
As a Government, we have worked with the Green Deal Finance Company to establish the redress system. That is why it can make offers and has done so. I will repeat the process again. If consumers are not happy with the offer that has been made, they can refer the case to the Secretary of State. We understand that only 100 offers have been accepted and 52 have been referred to the Secretary of State, so I encourage consumers to refer them to the Secretary of State. So far, only one decision has been taken on a HELMS case, but the Department is considering the evidence in other cases before the Secretary of State decides what sanction, if any, is appropriate. We expect more decisions to follow shortly.
From the outset, the green deal was subject to a monitoring regime administered by the Green Deal Oversight and Registration Body, which started investigating HELMS in October 2013 and concluded with a report in March 2015. Based on that report, the Government concluded that there had been significant consumer protection issues with the company, and the then Department of Energy and Climate Change imposed a final sanction on HELMS in November 2015. In September 2015, the Information Commissioner’s Office issued HELMS with a £200,000 nuisance calls fine—its largest ever at the time—after ruling that it
“recklessly broke marketing call regulations.”
Soon afterwards HELMS stopped issuing green deal plans, and in March 2016 it entered into liquidation.
I regret that it is taking some time to reach conclusions in many of the cases, but I would like to assure everyone that my Department is focused on progressing them as quickly and fairly as possible. We need to ensure the necessary evidence on substantive loss being incurred and to allow time for representations to be made.
Notwithstanding such mis-selling issues, let us be clear that solar PV in the UK is a success story, with rapid deployment over the last eight years. We are now exceeding our projections on solar PV deployment. In 2013 we estimated that solar capacity would reach 10 to 12 gigawatts by 2020, but the latest figures indicate that we now have over 13 gigawatts of solar capacity installed in the UK—enough to power over 3 million homes.
As I have said, I would be happy to meet with trading standards and the constituent of the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North—I want to get a greater understanding—but will quickly answer some of the questions raised, so that the hon. Gentleman has time to wrap up.
I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for his point about Northern Ireland. The green deal has not applied in Northern Ireland, because some of these matters are fully devolved. I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) for his comments. I would like to hear further information on the issues particularly affecting properties in his constituency, which I can pass on to the Secretary of State. I also thank the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) for her comments. She is always a champion for her constituents, and where she feels there is an injustice, she stands up for them. The green deal framework ensures that payments should not exceed the period of the savings—over 15 to 20 years. Providers that do that will be found in breach and then action can be taken by the Secretary of State, including fines and stopping the actual deal. I would be interested to know about particular ongoing cases that may be of interest.
Unfortunately, we will probably never be able to completely eradicate mis-selling but, as a Minister in this Department, it is something I feel strongly about. Where it does happen, we will try to have the best processes in place to deal with it. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North for securing this debate and I look forward to seeing him in the future.
Gavin Newlands
I appreciate the Minister’s response. Will she commit to answering in writing the questions that I asked? [Interruption.] For the record, she has nodded her head.
This has been an excellent and worthwhile debate. We have heard some shocking cases from across the country. The Minister’s admission that the scheme is not perfect may be the line of the day, such is the scale of the understatement. My hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) noted that only 10% of HELMS customers have complained, which highlights the fact that so far we have only dealt with the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to come.
The Chamber might not be full, but I remind the Minister that, as she said, 3,000 homes in Scotland and around 4,500 across the UK have been affected. I accept that the Government did not intend this to happen. What has happened is the unintended consequence of ineffective regulation and oversight. There is nothing we can do about the past, but the Government can still do the right thing by putting a compensation scheme in place, tightening up the regulations for any future green deal offers and taking some responsibility. I urge them to do so as soon as possible.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered home energy and lifestyle management systems and the Green Deal.
Future of BBC Parliament
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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John Grogan (Keighley) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the future of BBC Parliament.
It gives me great pleasure to speak in praise of BBC Parliament, which is the most watched and most successful dedicated parliamentary TV channel in the world. In a good month, when there is controversy in this place, BBC Parliament has a reach of more than 2 million viewers. It is true that the average age of those viewers is quite high, with 60% of them over 60, but as I approach the age of 60—I would not presume to guess your age, Mr Robertson, but I am 57—I think that might not be such a bad thing, because many people involved in all our political parties are the “young retired”, which is a growing age group that needs to be served.
The whole population may not have noticed but BBC Parliament in its current form was under serious threat over the summer, and I want to speak in praise of the people, in this place and elsewhere, who saved it for the nation. Those people include the director-general of the BBC, Mr Speaker, the Lord Speaker, and the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins). I intend to tell the story of what happened, which is a good story with a happy ending. I will do three things in my contribution: look at the history and the context of parliamentary broadcasting, consider the controversy over the summer, and try to point the way for the future. In 10 years, when, I anticipate, I will be retired and watching Yorkshire play cricket, where will BBC Parliament be?
While I was preparing for the debate over a cup of coffee in the Members’ Tea Room, I looked up and saw a picture of John Wilkes, which reminded me that the reporting of this place has never been straightforward and simple. There has always been controversy. My 14th birthday, 24 February 1975, happens to be the day that this House debated whether to televise Parliament. In the end, the House decided not to televise Parliament but instead to start experimenting with radio. Coverage began on the radio, and BBC Radio 4 listeners were up in arms about the afternoon play being shoved aside sometimes, but the experiment went on, and three years later it was confirmed that the BBC and others would be able to broadcast parliamentary proceedings on the radio permanently. I remember when I was 18 listening to Michael Foot summing up for Her Majesty’s Government against the vote of no confidence that finally brought the Government down by one vote. I remember being impressed by the atmosphere and the argument that night as I listened to the radio. That coverage was not easily achieved, however, and the debate then turned to television.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on a timely debate, given the context that he has laid out. He talks about things that are not easily achieved. Does he agree that, in a wider context, what should be more easily achieved within the BBC is more openness and transparency regarding how it commissions programmes, spends money and deploys resources? There has been a veil of secrecy over much of the BBC. I do not make any assertions about BBC Parliament, but about the BBC more widely. We need to get to the nub of the matter in a wider BBC context.
I have applied for debates in this Chamber—thus far unsuccessfully, but hopefully I will be successful in the next few weeks—so that I can elaborate to some considerable degree on the complete lack of transparency and openness in the BBC more widely.
John Grogan
Openness and transparency are always to be encouraged. I wish the hon. Gentleman luck in pitching for a future debate, at which I hope to be present.
The debate about television and Parliament was heated. The late Howard Wilson, who was my father’s hero, is mentioned in the Crossman diaries asking Crossman whether the BBC would be able to cut the video tape up, take a bit of speech and introduce it into a magazine programme. Crossman replied, “Certainly,” and Wilson concluded that that could not possibly be allowed. In the 1972 debate, the Conservative Back Bencher Brian Batsford said:
“The introduction of the cameras will bridge the gulf which has widened so much between Parliament and the people.”—[Official Report, 19 October 1972; Vol. 843, c. 468.]
The 1970s were a time of conflict in Northern Ireland and of industrial strife. The nation was divided, people said. One BBC executive said, perhaps rather hopefully:
“What then is our public attitude? It is to let the different voices speak for themselves.”
He was in favour of parliamentary broadcasting.
To move the story on, the other place was more progressive. It brought in cameras in 1983, some years before the Commons finally decided do so in 1988, after no fewer than 11 debates in the preceding 14 years. Ian Gow was the first person to be seen on screen.
Without going into all the details, broadcasting in the ’90s was organised through a consortium of cable channels that went under the name of the United Artists cable channel. It broadcast Parliament until 1998, but perhaps the viewing figures were not as high as it had hoped when it took on the contract, so it wanted to pull out. There was a big debate in this place about whether it was appropriate for the BBC to take over. The discussions and negotiations went on for some months, but then a deal was done between the BBC and Parliament and live coverage began. Connoisseurs of BBC Parliament will remember that in the early part of this century, the lack of bandwidth on Freeview TV was such that the pictures of the Commons in operation took up only a quarter of the screen and there were various captions. As the decade went on, digital TV improved and the BBC got more bandwidth, and we got BBC Parliament as we have it today.
That brings me to the second part of my remarks. This summer, the day after Croatia beat England in the World cup semi-finals—if there could be any bigger blow—it leaked out that, as part of several changes to political programming that the BBC was going to make, BBC Parliament was not going to continue in its current form. The proposal was not to totally discontinue the channel but to remove any of the associated programming. Even the captions were under threat. The BBC would have continued to take the feed from this place and the House of Lords and so on, but would not have broadcast during parliamentary recesses. It would only do the very basics, and no doubt that that would have come under threat in years hence.
I am the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary BBC group and I recognise the tremendous pressures that the BBC is under. It has to save £550 million by 2021-22. BBC News, which took the decision to try to scale back BBC Parliament, has to find £80 million in that period. I realise that there are challenges for the BBC management, but the cost of BBC Parliament is such that they would have saved only about £500,000 by getting rid of most of the staff. The transmission costs of BBC Parliament are nearly £7 million and another £1.7 million is spent on content and distribution, so the really significant money is in actually transmitting the channel, which I will come back to in a minute.
What happened then was that at a sitting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee just before Parliament went into recess, Lord Hall was asked by the Chair if he would be pulling all of the additional edited programmes on BBC Parliament. Those programmes obviously include things such as the coverage of the conferences and of Select Committees, but there is also a book programme about political books and a host of programming based on anniversaries, including of general elections. Indeed, there was programme a few years ago on the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death, with a replaying of his funeral and so on. All this associated political programming would have gone. Recently, Steve Richards has done a series in the old style of A.J.P. Taylor really, just extemporising—rather like I am doing now—for a period to the camera, and his theme was “Prime Ministers” who never quite became Prime Minister, and so on. As I say, all of that programming would have gone.
Lord Hall suddenly said in reply to the Chair of the Committee:
“I want the edited programmes to continue. Let me just say we are constantly reviewing what we do…Could we do this better? Could we do it more effectively? But do not read into that necessarily something that we intend to do.”
That was a glorious moment. Some in the House may have watched “W1A”, a BBC comedy about the inner workings of the BBC—there was a similar comedy about the inner workings of the Olympics—and this was a “W1A” moment. The poor press officer at the BBC then had to issue a press release saying:
“As the director general has said, certain programming on BBC Parliament will continue as before”.
That was a very elegantly achieved U-turn.
Then the Speaker stepped in and he also made representations, so it looks now as though BBC Parliament will continue very much as before, with its current staffing levels, producing the range of programming that I have referred to. It really is important also to have the captions on the screen. Another programme that BBC Parliament has made is the “A to Z of Parliament”, which explains different things we do here in Parliament—for example, Divisions—to the public. In that sense, there is a good story to tell about BBC Parliament, but as I said earlier, today I want to look ahead and consider what BBC Parliament could be like in 10 years’ time. How can we attract more people—perhaps more younger people—to watch it and how can we take it forward?
I remember that about 10 years ago, when I was previously in the House, I worked with my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson), now Deputy Leader of the Labour party, to save BBC 6 Music and the BBC Asian Network on the radio. I would like BBC Parliament to improve and expand, rather like BBC 6 Music has in the 10 years since it came under threat. How might BBC Parliament do that? It is obviously a question of resources and so on, but if the BBC put its mind to it, working in association with the parliamentary broadcasting unit, it could do for Parliament what it has done for things such as the Olympics, the FA cup and so on. It is a common theme in the BBC now to have My BBC—a digital concept. If I am interested in Bradford City’s results I can get an alert from the BBC about those results, or if I am interested in a particular area of news I can get alerts about programming in that area of news.
I think the parliamentary broadcasting unit now has, on some days, no fewer than 20 transmissions from various Committees around this House. There must be a way of linking those transmissions in to the promotional power of the BBC. Indeed, Lord Hall said in the Select Committee hearing:
“For example, could we…work with the parliamentary website to allow people to search more easily by topic, to have notifications when things are being brought up in the House? Could we extend our service in that sort of way, too, so that if you are particularly interested in…say the A303…every time that came up in Parliament you were told it was about to come up”.
I understand that Lord Hall, who has a very progressive vision, may well meet the Speaker to discuss that. As a vice-chair of the APPG on the BBC, I will write to the Speaker and the director-general of the BBC suggesting that the director-general to come into Parliament and perhaps have a seminar—if the Speaker would host that in his house, it would be great—about the future of BBC Parliament, with the authorities of the House present as well, to consider how we can improve the channel’s digital output.
In years to come, TV will probably change again. In recent years, all TV sets have switched to digital. There was a tremendous effort by the private sector and the Government, who worked together to make that change happen. In the future, something similar will probably be done with connected TVs. At some stage in the future, we will probably all have connected TVs, so I guess that eventually the BBC will make savings on the transmission costs of BBC Parliament. In the years ahead, it is really important that BBC Parliament remains a terrestrial channel that everyone can access, regardless of income. I hope that that has been achieved, but it is also important that we consider how the broadcasting of this place, the other place, our Committees and so on can be reviewed, to refresh it for another age. I say that because one of the things that has happened in recent years is that many young people have become involved and interested in all sorts of politics. BBC Parliament has done a massive and magnificent job for our nation over the last 20 years or so, and I would like to see it doing a similar but different job in the years to come for the generations to come.
The Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries (Margot James)
Thank you, Mr Robertson, for calling me to speak. This is the first time that I have served under your chairmanship, and I am delighted to do so.
I almost forgot that I had to respond to the debate, because I was enjoying the contribution by the hon. Member for Keighley (John Grogan) so much. I thank him for that and I congratulate him on securing this very important debate on the future of the BBC Parliament service. He made a marvellous speech, taking me back to the ’70s, when my interest in politics was first inspired. He mentioned people such as the late and lamented Ian Gow, and he even alluded to that marvellous night—from my perspective—of the no confidence motion that brought Britain’s first woman Prime Minister to power.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned Harold Wilson, who he said was his father’s hero. Actually, in my young years I revered Harold Wilson, as I believe did Michael Portillo, so he had many admirers; he was the most amazing politician and an inspirational figure of the ’60s and ’70s. I was also fascinated to learn that the House of Lords stole a march on us by five years; I did not know that it was the first House to agree to broadcasting and that it took the Commons so much longer.
The hon. Gentleman made various recommendations. I shall certainly listen to the programme by Steve Richards on the politicians who never quite made it to becoming Prime Minister. There might be a subsequent series called, “The Prime Ministers we never had—thank God!” [Laughter.] Perhaps I had better not dwell on that point. Nevertheless, the hon. Gentleman’s contribution was fantastic and I learned so much from it.
The BBC is rightly one of the UK’s most treasured institutions. It sets a fantastic example as a world-leading—indeed, the world-leading—public service broadcaster. There are BBC programmes that are perhaps off the point of this debate, such as “Planet Earth”, “Strictly Come Dancing”, the “Today” programme—I am sure we all enjoy that—and “Bodyguard”, but all of those outputs come from the licence fee, which allows the BBC to reach UK audiences everywhere, through the TVs in our homes, the radios in our cars and, of course, the devices in our pockets or on our wrists.
Mr Gregory Campbell
I thank the Minister for giving way. Does she agree that, despite having outlined some of the magnificent programmes that the BBC makes, there are issues with the BBC in a wider sense? For example, I have just come today from the National Audit Office in London, as I am trying to establish more openness and transparency for the BBC. Given that it receives almost £4 billion of licence fee-payers’ money from the public purse, it needs to be much more open about how it spends that resource and accounts for spending it.
Margot James
I think that all large organisations are on a journey to become more transparent and accountable. Indeed, the BBC’s annual plan sets out clear commissioning priorities, and transparency is fundamental to that. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is aware of this, but Ofcom is currently consulting on the commissioning process, including the transparency of that process. If that consultation is not yet closed, I urge him to contribute to it. Ofcom expects to make a statement about the mater by the end of this year.
Crucial to the BBC’s duty to provide impartial and accurate news and information is the building of people’s understanding of the UK, its democratic processes and the wider world, so that all audiences can engage fully in those processes as active and informed citizens. I am sure that the hon. Member for Keighley is aware of the BBC’s Democracy programme, which is all about facilitating greater democratic accountability and participation at a local level.
Scrutiny of politics—local and national—is vital, and the BBC provides a window for the public into discussions and debates. I did not know that the parliamentary broadcasting unit broadcasts an average of 20 different sessions of Parliament a day. That is absolutely fantastic, and BBC Parliament is an absolutely key part of delivering that unique responsibility, providing unparalleled openness and transparency by allowing viewers direct access to everyday political activities, not just here in Westminster but in Holyrood, Stormont—when it is sitting—and Cardiff, and helping them to make sense of the business of politics, through clear insight and explanation and links to other BBC sources. The channel contributes directly to genuine engagement in UK political life through the programmes it shows. Live daily coverage of how decisions are made and how the public is represented allows people to watch and listen to their representatives and hold them to account, and viewers can watch repeats of sessions on topics they are passionate about but may have missed because of the demands of everyday life.
As I said, BBC Parliament delivers significant coverage throughout the UK’s regions, showing, in the last year, 427 hours from the devolved Assemblies—an enormous amount that exceeds Ofcom’s quota for the channel. That coverage provides a critical link between voters and their representatives, and shines a light on the issues that affect everyone, regardless of where they live and work. That is an encouraging sign that the BBC is fulfilling its public duties, and it demonstrates the value of the BBC Parliament service.
In addition, weekly edited BBC Parliament programmes, such as “Today in Parliament”, which I enjoy, when I can, at 11.30 in the evening, and “The Week in Parliament”, deliver tailored insight into and analysis of the business of the day. A great example, which regrettably I am yet to see, is “Suffragette Allies”, which was broadcast as part of the BBC’s year-long celebration of the centenary of women’s partial suffrage.
BBC Parliament, as the UK’s only channel dedicated exclusively to politics, is an example of the public service ethos that lies at the heart of the BBC, providing a service that cannot be provided by anyone else. The monthly reach of the dedicated parliamentary channel is almost 2 million viewers and listeners, and the average BBC Parliament viewer watches the channel for almost two hours a week, which is a significant volume of viewing by person and speaks to the value that the channel delivers. The hon. Member for Keighley noted the average age of the viewers and listeners—I am that age, being over 60. However, although I am passionate about encouraging the BBC to attract younger viewers and listeners, we do not want that to be at the expense of, but rather as well as, people over 60, or 50, or any other age. It is all to the good that BBC Parliament will remain, and I was interested in his comments about its future.
All of that is delivered with a content spend of only £1.6 million, which was just 0.1% of the total BBC television content spend last year. I am not privy to the reasons for the BBC’s review of the channel, but the golden rule about saving money that I followed when I was in business was, “You can only save money from where money is.” As that 0.1% is a very small budget to start with, I trust it will be safe from that kind of scrutiny. It obviously needs to deliver value, but the hon. Member for Keighley and I have made clear the enormous value that such a modest spend generates. At a time when misinformation and fake news are rife, safeguarding trusted, impartial and accurate political coverage for audiences in the UK and beyond is more important than ever.
Underpinning all of that is the BBC’s independence. As hon. Members know, the BBC is operationally and editorially independent from the Government, and rightly so. Independence means that the BBC can make tough editorial decisions to robustly hold Parliament and the devolved Assemblies to account, and to scrutinise our actions without fear of reprisals. Independence allows the BBC to help voters understand and engage with parliamentary and political events. Voters trust that BBC coverage is accurate and impartial. I know that there are challenges to that trust, because I receive letters from people—
Margot James
I am aware of the hon. Gentleman’s earlier comments. Trust must constantly be earned; it can never be taken for granted.
The welcome news, which the hon. Member for Keighley mentioned, is that the BBC recently announced that its planned cuts to edited daily and weekly BBC Parliament programmes will not now go ahead. I am very pleased to hear that decision, which I am sure we all welcome. I am reassured by the BBC’s comments to me that political and parliamentary content has a strong future on the BBC. I trust that the BBC will take note of the hon. Gentleman’s good ideas about looking to the future of the parliamentary broadcasting unit, with the development of artificial intelligence, notifications and all manner of automatic transmission opportunities that are more personally targeted at viewers’ and listeners’ interests. There is a great future in that. The hon. Gentleman has invited the director-general into Parliament, and I will encourage him to take up that invitation and join in any meeting that can be convened.
In an increasingly digital world, I am excited to see how the BBC has responded to the campaign. I wholeheartedly support its ambition and look forward to hearing further about its plans for the parliamentary broadcasting unit, which does such valuable and important work. I now leave a few minutes to the hon. Gentleman, in case he wishes to contribute further.
Margot James
I am never quite sure, Mr Robertson; I have done these debates so often and in some I have been admonished for not leaving time.
I could never run out of things to say about the BBC. We are so fortunate in this country to have this truly great public service broadcaster. I am grateful, again, to the hon. Member for Keighley for teaching me so much about the parliamentary broadcasting unit and its offer, and some of the history of the whole thing. It has been marvellous.
Question put and agreed to.
Drugs Policy
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered drugs policy.
The UK’s drugs policy is not just a combination of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, and a host of schedules and classifications; a range of laws has been developed and put in place over the years, guided by our perceived knowledge and our current attitude. We put those laws in place because we thought it was the right thing to do, and I believe that we got it wrong.
Outwith drugs law, we have laws that regulate the production, distribution, marketing and consumption of alcohol. Alcohol is an interesting case, because it is not included in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It remains socially acceptable. It is consumed openly at christenings, naming ceremonies, weddings, civil partnerships and even funerals—society finds a place for alcohol at hatches, matches and dispatches. However, it was not always that way. Prohibition and abstinence were once very strong movements. In the 1920s, some states in the USA made alcohol illegal, and something strange happened. Prohibition, rather than stopping people drinking alcohol, delivered production, distribution and consumers into the hands of criminals who recognised a money-spinning venture when they saw one. The product became more potent, because that meant distributing smaller quantities while maintaining profit margins, and criminal gangs used extreme violence to protect their territory from rival gangs or gangsters. Levels of violence spiralled, and more and more people were criminalised for using alcohol. According to the academic and historian Michael Lerner:
“As the trade in illegal alcohol became more lucrative, the quality of alcohol on the black market declined. On average, 1000 Americans died every year during the Prohibition from the effects of drinking tainted liquor.”
When prohibition ended, levels of crime dropped dramatically and people’s health improved. They continued to drink alcohol, but the product was quality controlled and monitored, and nobody had to use violence to protect their market.
To this day, alcohol continues to damage people’s lives and ruin their health, but it is legal and regulated. Increasingly, people can find educational support, because they have no fear of being criminalised. Maybe in an ideal world, everybody would be so happy and content—so free of stress and anxiety, so confident and self-assured—that there would be no requirement for alcohol, or indeed any recreational drugs. However, we do not live in that ideal world, and we never have. Throughout history, for a variety of reasons, people have taken drugs. One hundred years ago, people could buy cocaine, heroin or morphine at pharmacies and department stores. During the first world war, Harrods sold kits with syringes and tubes of cocaine and heroin for the boys on the frontline. Queen Victoria recommended Vin Mariani—wine laced with cocaine. Anthony Eden was prescribed purple hearts throughout the Suez crisis. Those people lived under what was termed “the British system,” which was a light-touch approach to drug consumption, one of tolerance and treatment.
Things changed during the 1960s. In 1961 the UN single convention on narcotic drugs was passed. It was not popular in the UK, because we could see that the British system was working. That convention, driven by prejudice, became the only UN convention ever to use the word “evil”. Torture, apartheid and nuclear war do not warrant the term “evil”, according to the UN. Genocide is referred to as “an odious scourge” or “barbarous acts”. The term “evil” is reserved for drugs—drugs that had previously been available in many different guises in high street pharmacies. The stigmatising of users went up a gear. In 1971, through the Misuse of Drugs Act, criminalisation became the name of the game. The result has been years of violence, tensions and organised crime, and a monumental increase in addiction.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Ind)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on a first-class speech. Could he say roughly what proportion of people in prison are there because of the drugs trade? What are the costs to the criminal justice system, and what is the total social cost of drugs? I hope he will cover those points in his speech.
Ronnie Cowan
I did not know there was a quiz. I have a prison in my constituency—I was talking to its governor two or three weeks ago—and the majority of the prisoners are there for offences related in some way, shape or form to the consumption or sale of drugs, or to the drugs market and the violence around it. We also know that there are more drugs, particularly synthetic drugs, available in our prisons than out on the streets.
Members will be glad to hear that the Office for National Statistics began collating consistent data on drug deaths in England and Wales from 1993. Those figures show an increase in drug misuse mortality rates among both men and women since 1996. UK opioid-related deaths rose between 2012 and 2015, increasing by 58% in England, 23% in Wales, 21% in Scotland and 47% in Northern Ireland. UK Focal Point on Drugs estimates that the number of problem drug users is 300,000 in England, 60,000 in Scotland and 30,000 in Wales. Those statistics are the result of current drugs policy, and behind those statistics are lives in ruins.
I fully understand why people exposed to the cruelty inflicted on their loved ones by current drugs policy would want to lash out in retribution. If somebody provided one of my loved ones with a pill at a music festival, and that pill killed them, my initial reaction would be to hunt the seller down like a dog and have them strung up. I would be wrong. At the next festival, another person would be selling the same drugs to other people, and another tragedy would unfold. This understanding is exemplified by the members of Anyone’s Child, who have been directly affected by the loss of, or damage caused to, a close friend or family member. Those people understand that vengeance will not bring back their loved one or undo the damage done. They understand that unless we change our current drugs policy and how we enforce it, more innocent people will die. It is their desire that their experience of loss does not fall on anyone else’s family member or friend. Is the Minister prepared to sit down and talk with members of Anyone’s Child? Nothing?
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and making some powerful points. He and I both attended a recent meeting of the drugs, alcohol and justice cross-party parliamentary group, on the topic of drug-related deaths, where we heard Rudi Fortson QC explain how policies could be readily implemented to reduce drug and alcohol-related deaths. Does he agree that it would be good for Ministers to meet Rudi Fortson and hear what policies could be applied instantly that would make a big difference?
Ronnie Cowan
It is always good when I hear that people like Rudi Fortson QC—a person who has lived his life through the law—are looking at the current situation and thinking, “We have to change this.” It backs up everything I believe, but Rudi Fortson’s background makes him much more qualified in those terms than I am. I wonder whether the Government are engaging with people of his calibre.
Last week, Canada joined nine states of the USA and Washington DC by legalising recreational cannabis. Various provinces of Canada have taken different approaches regarding age limits: some allow people to grow their own cannabis, limiting them to four plants, while others do not allow home growing. We should be looking to those parts of the world to gather evidence and decide whether their approach is beneficial, and whether we should follow suit. Canada has the same problems as us but, like Portugal, Uruguay and other countries, it has taken a different approach to providing a solution. That solution is not “drugs for everybody”; it is “regulate the marketplace and take control away from the criminals”.
In the UK, parents who fear that their child might be dabbling in drugs, or even developing a habit, are extremely reluctant to engage with support groups that could divert their child from the path they are on. The parents are reluctant because they do not want to place their child on the police radar. They fear that their child could be arrested, get a criminal record or even be sent to prison. Early intervention can be the key to avoiding drug-related harm, and we should not be putting obstacles in the way of those who could be affected. We must encourage users to engage without fear of prosecution and free up police time and resources to fight crime. Will the Minister tell me whether the UK Government have engaged with other countries to access their research, which could assist us in becoming better informed and in taking an evidence-based approach to legislation? We need to listen to those affected, who can see a need for change but are not in a position to effect it.
Prior to this debate, the Westminster digital engagement team put out an appeal on social media, advertising the debate and asking the people of this country, “What do you think?” Nearly 20,000 people were engaged. The majority of the responses came back saying, “Legalise cannabis.” Some called for drugs to be regulated and taxed. A few said that they had lost loved ones as a result of the current policy. Some commenters called for drug addiction to be seen as a health issue, rather than a criminal one. Lots of commenters called for the UK to take the same approach as Portugal. That is the people of this country talking.
The problematic users, the kids on estates recruited to county lines, the medical professionals, the support workers and the law enforcers should be listened to. Peter Bleksley was a young cop during the Brixton riots. He went on to become one of the Met’s most celebrated undercover agents. He was a founding member of SO10, Scotland Yard’s dedicated covert policing unit. He said:
“I look back now and think, well, are there less drugs and guns on the streets because of what my colleagues and I did? And of course the answer is an emphatic, NO. We could wallpaper my bedroom with commendation certificates—they sit in the loft gathering dust. What a waste of time.”
Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
The UK Government spent an estimated £1.6 billion on drug law enforcement in 2014-15. Drug treatment has been cut by 14% in the past couple of years. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is a false economy, especially as Public Health England estimates that for every pound spent on drug treatment, there is a £4 social return?
Ronnie Cowan
I absolutely agree. If we could see the results from the money being spent on the criminal justice system, I would back off and say, “Well, it is working”, but it clearly is not. To extend the hon. Lady’s point, every £1 spent on early intervention saves £7 in the criminal justice system further down the line. Even if someone does not give a damn about these people, it makes good financial sense to step in anyway and get early intervention.
Peter Bleksley is not alone. A host of personal testimony has been gathered by the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. I will offer four more examples from these experts. Patrick Hennessey, a British Army officer in the Grenadier Guards who served in Afghanistan, said:
“In Afghanistan I fought on one ‘front-line’ of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ and in Hackney I live side-by-side with the other and it’s obviously failing at either end. If real generals pursued an actual war like generations of politicians have pursued this farce they’d be court-martialled and sent to prison.”
Paul Whitehouse, chief constable, said:
“Far from making communities safer, current drug laws have the unintended consequence of placing barriers between the police and often vulnerable individuals.”
Graham Seaby, a former detective superintendent in the international and organised crime branch of New Scotland Yard, said:
“The drug problem will continue and escalate if governments fail to recognise that the only way forward is to move towards nuanced regulatory models, thus removing the profit from criminals, and the motivation for their involvement.”
Francis Wilkinson, chief constable, said:
“The single greatest crime reduction measure the world could take would be to regulate the supply of cannabis, cocaine and heroin.”
Neil Woods, 14 years an undercover drugs cop, would say exactly the same things. Ron Hogg and Arfon Jones, both police and crime commissioners, say that drugs must be a health issue, not a criminal justice one.
Every time we lock up a criminal gang or announce to the media that we have seized a large quantity of drugs with a street value of so many millions, what they do not say is that that supply has been disrupted for an hour or so. Another gang will step into their shoes and maintain distribution. Often those takeovers involve a spate of violence, and such networks are always maintained by violence and the threat of violence. The fact is that after 30 years of locking people up, a bag of cocaine that cost £10 in 1980 will cost £10 today for the same weight. However, because cocaine is so plentiful, it is purer in the UK today than it has ever been. The damage being inflicted on people and communities will continue to increase if all we do is crack down on the criminal fraternity and those ensnared in problematic drug use. We can lock people up for longer, but it does not improve their situation one iota; in fact, it makes it worse. Will the Minister meet and listen to members of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership?
In July 2017 the UK Government published their drug strategy and announced that they would appoint a recovery champion, whose role was defined as someone who would
“be responsible for driving and supporting collaboration between local authorities, public employment services, housing providers and criminal justice partners, ensuring that these critical public services are able to contribute fully towards securing effective outcomes for individuals suffering drug dependence.”
Fifteen months later, there is still nobody in the role, so nobody is co-ordinating those aspects of the support and recovery programme. I find myself wondering whether there is a UK Government harm reduction recovery programme. When will the Minister appoint a recovery champion?
As legislators, we have a choice. We can change the law. In doing so, we can address the harm that drugs do. Before that, we have to take a constructive approach to our drugs policy. We need to accept that 90% of people who use recreational drugs do not live chaotic lives. We must acknowledge that of the 10% of users who become problematic users, the majority have suffered physical, psychological or sexual abuse. We must acknowledge that problematic use is higher in areas of social deprivation. We must accept responsibility for trying to find solutions and acknowledge our failures. We need to help people with problematic drug use through harm reduction, treatment and wraparound support. Criminalising users does not deal with the underlying issues that lead to drug use; it only makes things worse.
We should have a network of safe drug consumption rooms throughout the UK. They have proved to be a success in Switzerland, Canada, Spain and a growing number of other countries. We must be prepared to learn from other countries’ experiences. The emergency services should carry naloxone and be trained in its use. Will the Minister reconsider legalising safe drug consumption rooms and ensure that naloxone is provided for members of the emergency services? Most importantly, UK drugs policy should be a health issue, not a criminal justice one. Alternatively, we can continue to criminalise users and drive them into the hands of unscrupulous dealers, while ignoring the atmosphere of fear that they live in. All we do is marginalise, stigmatise and ostracise them.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman has just moved on from the subject of drug consumption rooms, but did he note that after his last debate on drug consumption rooms the International Narcotics Control Board produced a report effectively endorsing them. That came from the body responsible for the international enforcement of the relevant drugs conventions, which I know he and I think are outdated and dangerous, frankly, in the global consequences they deliver on drugs policy. If even the INCB is in that place, I hope our Government will take some notice.
Ronnie Cowan
I noticed a couple of things after that debate. In it, the Minister denied that Canada had kept its drug consumption rooms open because they are effective. She made a statement that the Canadian Supreme Court had ordered them to stay open. On the back of that, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy wrote a five-page letter to the Minister and I, detailing how the DCRs are working effectively in Canada and why they have been kept open. They described her statement as
“neither factually nor legally accurate.”
We have lost the war on drugs. Our drugs policy saw to that. We need to change our mindset and ensure that we are in a position to win the peace. Finally, when we see a problematic drug user, we are watching a person drowning. We should throw them a lifebelt, not push their heads further under the water.
Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing the debate. It will soon become apparent that I disagree with large parts of what he has said; in a democracy it is quite correct that we can take two sides of the same argument. However, I agree that the effects of drug use, and the deaths caused by it, have an impact on each and every one of our constituencies.
Drugs and drug addictions are among the worst scourges of our society today. According to the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, the cost to the UK economy of drug misuse is more than £15 billion a year. Far more importantly, drugs destroy lives and livelihoods, tear apart families and communities, and fuel crime and exploitation. Although the number of drug users is falling, the number of people dying or being admitted to hospital due to drug use is on the increase.
In Scotland, it is nothing short of a crisis. The rate of drug-related deaths in Scotland is considerably higher than in England and Wales. It is estimated to be the highest in Europe, yet every year the number of deaths hits a new record high. The same goes for hospital admissions. In 2016-17, the rate of people being admitted to Scottish hospitals in relation to opioids, cannabinoids, cocaine, and sedatives and hypnotics reached new records.
The crisis can and will get worse. The county lines operations, which the hon. Member for Inverclyde mentioned and which are spreading across the UK, bringing a supply of drugs to rural communities across the country, are particularly concerning for me as a Member of Parliament for a rural constituency. We know from examples abroad, most notably in America, how the supply of drugs to rural areas can bring devastation to those communities.
The challenge facing the Scottish Government, the UK Government, and all of us is not just to stop the problem spiralling out of control, but to turn the tide altogether and tackle the havoc that drugs are wreaking on so many lives. More certainly needs to be done to treat people who have become addicted to drugs.
Kelvin Hopkins
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the cost to society and to the Government of £15 billion a year. How much would it cost if the Government changed their policy, and heroin addicts went to their local NHS clinic to get their fix in the morning and evening and there was no drug crime at all because it was free at the point of need, administered by the national health service? How much would the Government save? The financial arguments might have greater appeal than other arguments.
Douglas Ross
To borrow the phrase of the hon. Member for Inverclyde, I did not realise that this was a quiz. I do not have those figures to hand.
Labour Members mentioned past cuts to alcohol and drug partnerships, and received some sympathy from the Scottish National party Member leading today’s debate. Yet the SNP-led Scottish Government have not helped, especially considering their cuts to alcohol and drug partnerships in Scotland. The money spent is being reduced not just here in England, but in Scotland under an SNP-led Government.
Likewise, the forthcoming revision of the Scottish Government’s national drug strategy cannot come a moment too soon. The current strategy is a decade old, but reflects a much older approach, where instead of helping people to defeat their addictions, they are put on, for example, endless methadone programmes. Is it any surprise that the proportion of people dying from drug overdoses who are on methadone has risen from 21% in 2009 to 37% in 2016? The new strategy, which comes out next month, must address that, and focus on beating addiction completely.
Ronnie Cowan
I wonder whether at some point the hon. Gentleman will offer some solutions, or is he just going to try to pick apart what we currently have? I have admitted that the current systems are damaging people. We are trying to build solutions—has he got any?
Douglas Ross
I am not sure that we heard any solutions from the hon. Gentleman. Normally in such debates we hear about how great things are in Scotland. As a Scottish Member of Parliament, I think it is appropriate, when we are discussing an issue that is of importance to the United Kingdom, that we put it into context.
I invite the hon. Gentleman and the Scottish Government to consider the “National Drug-Related Deaths Database (Scotland) Report”, from June this year, which said that the Scottish Government’s flagship take-home naloxone programme
“has not prevented substantial increases in opioid-related deaths in Scotland.”
That is a quote from a report in June this year. [Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman would like to question that report, I will give way again.
Ronnie Cowan
Absolutely. We are in the process of rolling out a naloxone project in Scotland that has been taken on board. I visited drug consumption rooms in Barcelona during the summer. Quite unsolicited, the staff mentioned to me the good work being done by the Scottish Drugs Forum and the naloxone programme. They have taken it on board in Barcelona, and it has been a terrific success.
Douglas Ross
I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is questioning me or the “National Drug-Related Deaths Database (Scotland) Report”. That report, which was issued in Scotland in June, said that the Scottish Government’s policies have not reduced the number of people dying from related illnesses.
Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
It makes good sense, and is soundly medically based, to give people who may take an overdose a way of correcting that overdose with a lifesaving intervention. That has to be a good thing to do. I understand that there are tensions with the SNP on this issue, but it is considered good medical practice to do exactly as is being recommended in Scotland and in England.
Douglas Ross
I know that my hon. Friend and I disagreed in our last debate on UK drugs policy in Westminster Hall. These are not my conclusions, but those of a national report that has looked into the policies of the Scottish Government and said that, however well-meant the policies are, they have
“not prevented substantial increases in opioid-related deaths in Scotland.”
Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Douglas Ross
I am sorry—I have given way a few times, and I know that a number of Members wish to speak.
We need an approach to addiction that is more ambitious than methadone and take-home naloxone, and certainly more ambitious than self-injection rooms. We need an approach that puts recovery first, but we need to tackle addiction and the drugs trade together, because there are no victimless crimes in drugs. We cannot simply separate it into matters of public health and criminal justice, because recreational use, addiction, exploitation by gangs and suppliers, and the supply chains of drugs into and across the country are all bound together.
If we want to give people the best chance of recovery from addiction, we have to tackle the supply chains. That means enforcing the law properly, not soft-touch sentencing and back-door decriminalisation. By making it harder to import, produce, supply and possess drugs, we make it easier to get off drugs and overcome addiction. From the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 to the new financial crime unit to seize the assets of drug lords, and to the recently announced review into the link between the drug market and violent crime, the UK Government have demonstrated that they recognise that. I only hope that the Scottish Government recognise it too, and act before the crisis gets any worse.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing this important debate.
I think the tide is turning in terms of people’s willingness to look at the evidence, whatever preconceived ideas they have. I must admit that I am a convert; I have looked at the evidence and realised that what we have been doing for the last 50 years is not working. I have been out with the police on drug raids in my constituency. I have seen the effects in older industrial areas where these problems are manifesting. We need a new approach.
I will focus my remarks on one issue, which the hon. Member for Inverclyde has already touched on, that I would like the Minister to consider: consumption rooms. I am looking for the Minister and the Home Office to empower and resource police and crime commissioners, and allow them to take some progressive actions and interventions. For example, in pilot areas, where there is support for such an initiative, there could be medically supervised consumption rooms to treat addicts and reduce crime.
For members of the public who may be alarmed at that prospect and are unsure what a drug consumption room is, it is a supervised clinical environment where people with a diagnosed drug addiction are provided with medical-grade heroin, clean equipment and facilities to safely dispose of used needles. In debates in public and in this place, they have been unfairly characterised by opponents and, more disappointingly, by organisations such as the BBC, which I would hope would take a more careful and considered view on the use of such terminology, as “shooting galleries”.
Mr Sweeney
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about the effectiveness of safe drug consumption rooms—a critical issue for my constituency, where the drug-related death rate is 1,000% higher than the EU average. Glasgow also has an HIV epidemic. Does he agree that there is a real concern that correlation may be confused with causation? Much of the evidence that has been cited to show that safe drug consumption rooms are not effective does not necessarily show that.
Grahame Morris
It is really important that policy be evidence-based. With all due respect to the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), many of whose concerns I share, shooting galleries do exist. We might not like it, but they exist, unauthorised and under no medical supervision, in our communities, in private dwellings, in derelict properties, in residential areas, near schools and behind shops. [Interruption.]
Mrs Madeleine Moon (in the Chair)
Order. There is a Division in the House. I shall suspend the sitting for 15 minutes if there is one vote, or 25 minutes if there are two. We shall resume as soon as hon. Members return and Grahame Morris is in his place.
Grahame Morris
Before we were summoned to vote we were talking about drug consumption rooms. If it is in order, Mrs Moon, I will remind the Minister that she pointed out that she believed that such drug consumption rooms were currently available. Perhaps she can clarify that in her closing remarks, but currently users buy drugs of unknown strength or quality and inject what is in many cases poison, with dirty or used needles, which can be discarded on the street for a child to pick up or a pet to stand on. Without any other option, that seems to be the Government’s preferred drugs model. It is a system that funds criminality, maximises harm for users and puts children and communities at risk.
Why have I changed my mind to support drug consumption rooms? Many Members may have had the same experience that I have had. Not a week goes by when I do not receive inquiries. Constituents send me photographs of used needles discarded in the street, at intolerable risk to public health. I firmly believe that consumption rooms would substantially reduce the public health risk, by closing down illicit shooting galleries and moving things to a clean, safe clinical environment away from residential areas, where needles can safely be discarded and those with addiction issues can engage with health services and move towards a drug-free life.
I understand that supervised heroin treatment costs about £15,000 per year per patient. However, that is three times less than the cost of keeping someone in prison—the most likely destination for someone committing crime to fund a drugs habit. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) asked about that. As has been mentioned, it will be no surprise that more than 80% of the adult prison population reported using illicit drugs at some point prior to entering prison, and almost two thirds admitted using them in the month before they entered prison. More than 40% of prisoners have used heroin.
Dealing with one problematic adult drugs user costs society about £45,000 a year, and estimates suggest that illegal drugs cost the UK taxpayer as much as £16.5 billion a year. So there are wider costs than the purely financial considerations of drug treatment. The Home Office suggested that about 45% of acquisitive offences are committed by regular drug users—heroin, crack and cocaine users. Crimes such as theft, burglary and robbery, which are common in many communities, can often be traced back to those who are trying to fund drugs habits, and it is those types of crime that the police struggle to investigate, to detect those responsible. That type of crime may be considered petty or low level, but it has a significant impact on the victims and on their confidence in the police, their personal safety, and their security in their homes.
Another cost to consider is the £7 billion drugs market that funds organised crime. The 50-year war on drugs is failing to resolve it. Treating drugs use as a health issue rather than a criminal justice matter will strangle the illegal market and take power away from the dealers. We have previously heard testimony or quotations from serving police officers. There is ample evidence from people at the sharp end, including a former police officer, Neil Woods, who worked in undercover drugs operations for 14 years and wrote a best-selling book called “Good Cop, Bad Cop”, which was recommended to me by a superintendent in my area.
Grahame Morris
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I apologise. The author said that, for all the users and dealers he helped to put behind bars, he disrupted the £7 billion British drugs trade for less than a day. Clearly, what we are doing is not helping. We are losing the war on drugs and failing to protect the public. I implore the Minister to accept that, after 47 years, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is not fit for purpose. The drugs mortality rate in the north-east is twice that of the west midlands and three times higher than that of London. The costs are simply too high. I hope that the Minister will facilitate a new approach to drugs and empower those who are in authority in my constituency.
Mary Glindon
As to those statistics, the fact that the north-east has a far higher rate of death from drug misuse compared with London shows that there must be a link between deprivation and drug use. I think Alex Boyt, of Blenheim, would like that to be looked at further. Does my hon. Friend agree?
Grahame Morris
I am not an expert, but it seems there is a correlation between areas of deprivation and areas with a high incidence of drug-related death. There is a lot of evidence out there, and from anecdotal experience it seems that an issue that was confined to the big cities is now commonplace in older industrial communities, such as the areas and villages that I represent.
Ronnie Cowan
I have seen a slide that shows the areas of greatest deprivation in the United Kingdom, and if a matching slide is put beside it that shows the areas where most harm is done by drugs, those maps pretty much match each other slide for slide.
Grahame Morris
Absolutely—I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarification. In conclusion, I implore the Minister to facilitate a new approach to drugs policy and to empower authorities in my constituency, such as our police and crime commissioner, Ron Hogg, and Chief Constable Mike Barton—in the only police force in the country rated outstanding by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary—who want to try a new approach. Will the Minister allow a pilot scheme so that we can at least evaluate the evidence and see whether it works, as many experts believe it will?
Several hon. Members rose—
Mrs Madeleine Moon (in the Chair)
Order. I now call Jim Shannon, but seven Members still wish to speak before I call the Front-Bench speakers at 3.54 pm. Could we please have restraint from hon. Members, so that we can hear from as many of those who put their name forward to speak as possible?
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I will adhere to your guidelines, Mrs Moon. I thank the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) for securing this important debate. He will be well aware that we approach this topic from different angles, but I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute.
I am deeply concerned about Canada’s recent decision to legalise cannabis—undoubtedly the driver behind today’s debate—and its potential impact in the UK. That said, my concern lies with the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use, rather than medicinal purposes—indeed, I am pleased that the Government are conducting a review into the use of cannabis on medical grounds, which I fully support. Today, however, I want to talk about the negative impacts and dangers of legalising cannabis for recreational use. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) referred to mortality rates in England, and the figures are clear. The number of deaths among both males and females continues to rise, and that is due to many things, including heroin and morphine abuse, but I want concentrate specifically on cannabis. I will come to the side effects and dangers of legalisation later, but first I will consider the rationale for legalising cannabis use—as a bid to reduce the number of criminals who make money from selling cannabis illegally.
Taking money from criminals and reducing the amount of goods on the black market sounds like a no-brainer, but will the policy of legalisation really make the fundamental changes that President Trudeau envisages? Under the new legislation, it will still be illegal to sell cannabis to under-18s—under-19s in some provinces—and illegal to buy it from anyone who is not a licensed dealer. To my mind, it is simple: the policy will not stop criminals making money. Minors will still have access to drugs, and it is they who are most at danger from the side effects of cannabis use.
Short-term effects of cannabis include confusion, anxiety, sleepiness, memory loss and feeling sick or faint. There are also effects on a person’s ability to learn or concentrate, as they become uninterested or demotivated. People begin to use the drug in their teens. In my constituency I am well aware of the problems caused by illegal drugs, which are usually peddled by paramilitaries and criminals to anyone who wants to buy them. Those who do not want to buy drugs are recruited, and my constituents have seen at first hand the detrimental effect on the health of those who became involved with drugs at an early age, and indeed on their families who have to pay back the debts. There is a spiral of drug use.
The figures speak for themselves. According to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, cannabis use in Canada is slowly on the rise. It tends to be younger people who use the drug and they are the ones most at risk, yet the new legislation does nothing to safeguard minors. We need to protect the poor, the needy and the vulnerable—that is the thrust of all our comments today. We just have different ways of doing that. Making a drug legal simply makes it more accessible and incentivises those who may not have used it previously—perhaps those in the slightly older age bracket—to buy it.
Criminals who were previously selling cannabis on the black market will continue to do so, and they will continue to supply minors, so minors may be at even greater risk than they were before the legalisation. Let us be frank: criminals will always find a way to sell drugs and supply them to minors, and I worry that the drug’s new status will inadvertently offer more protection to underage users. A young person could be walking between home and college with a brown paper bag clearly in hand, and although certain states have banned smoking cannabis in public spaces, it is not an offence to buy it or to carry the purchase home. Of course, I realise that if someone is obviously underage, they are likely to get stopped and asked for ID, but that will not happen in all cases. Lots of young people will simply be brazen enough to carry cannabis visibly and take the risk of getting stopped. According to the Canadian Paediatric Society, in 2010 Canadian youth ranked first for cannabis use among young people in 43 countries. Scientific research over the last 15 years has established that the human brain continues to develop into a person’s early 20s, and there is a strong association between daily cannabis use and depression in adolescents and young adults.
I have spoken many times in this place about legal highs or psychoactive substances. Their use by young people is a real concern. In my constituency of Strangford, I have seen at first hand the devastating impact that using those drugs can have on families. Many of the drugs produce a similar effect to cannabis, and it is the feeling of being “high” that makes them so attractive to people. Ultimately, if people want drugs and the demand is there, they will find ways to get them. That demand has led to products such as spice being added to the regular menu of illicit street dealers. Often, new legislation merely changes the way that a drug is sold or produced, rather than fundamentally changing the demand for drugs or the nature of drug taking.
I do not believe that legalising drugs for recreational use can ever be a good thing in practice, and neither will it work in principle. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. The Canadian legislation sends a message that buying and using cannabis has Government backing. That is dangerous in itself because it implies that using cannabis is completely safe and acceptable. It is not, and it never will be. As I said earlier, legalisation makes the drug more accessible and appealing to people who may not have previously been users, while at the same time doing nothing to safeguard minors. I am sorry that I have a different opinion from that of the hon. Member for Inverclyde, but all points of view must be heard.
Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing this debate, and I am sympathetic to many of the points he made. He rightly highlighted the links between the use of drugs, drug dependency and deprivation, the challenges that many people who are dependent on drugs face, such as in housing and employment, and the fact that the current criminal justice approach does not work as we would like. We should help people with drug dependency to access the appropriate health and care support they may need, and we must think seriously about whether the current prohibition on drugs is the right way forward.
My hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) made a factual point about naloxone and drug use. The policy is widely used in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and all over the world. He might be interested to read a 2017 review paper by McDonald, Campbell and Strang, entitled “Twenty years of take-home naloxone for the prevention of overdose deaths from heroin and other opioids—Conception and maturation”. That paper effectively concludes that take-home naloxone coverage is insufficient—that may chime with something my hon. Friend said—and that greater public investment in such schemes is necessary if we want them to succeed. Opioid deaths and their causes are multifactorial, and a considerable body of international evidence suggests that if naloxone is given to people who are at risk of an overdose, it can save lives; many review and study papers indicate that. I believe it is a step in the right direction for the Scottish Government to confront that issue and to say that there is a good body of evidence, but unfortunately dealing with opioid deaths is not as simple as just handing out naloxone, which we know is in itself an effective measure.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made the case against the end of prohibition on drugs. If we look at the wider public health issue, it is fair to say that if something is decriminalised or legalised, more people may well use that substance because it could be seen as something that is okay or acceptable to use, but I do not think anyone in this debate is suggesting that if there was a broader approach to the decriminalisation or legalisation of drugs, there would not be a public health campaign, just as there is with legal drugs such as alcohol and nicotine, to suggest that there are adverse health outcomes associated with use.
Many substances that are classified class C or even class A have a lower public health burden than alcohol—for example, MDMA or ecstasy. Alcohol, the legal drug that many people—not me—in Parliament and elsewhere consume, is the substance that causes the biggest public health burden. We must be realistic and recognise that if we move to a position where people are able to make a more informed choice about whether they want to consume drugs in the future, that informed choice involves telling people that taking certain substances has consequences, as we do with alcohol and cigarettes today.
On the current approach to drugs, I would like the Minister to pick up on a couple of points. First, there is the challenge of improving the care that we provide for people who are dependent on drugs. This is not an issue for this Minister, but it may be a conversation to be had with the Department of Health and Social Care. The current commissioning landscape in England for drug and alcohol services is fragmented and completely divorced from mental health. We have to recognise that mistake, which we made in the Health and Social Care Act 2012. That needs to be addressed if we want to improve the quality of care available to people who are dependent on opioids in particular, as well as alcohol or any other substance.
It is important to recognise that improving care for people who are dependent on substances is about taking a holistic approach. It is about law enforcement working together with healthcare, housing and social care, and about finding employment and retraining solutions for people. The way existing law is framed, alongside the criminal justice prism through which drug laws are seen and enforced, often drives a wedge between different agencies, preventing them from working together effectively for the benefit of people who are dependent on illicit or street drugs. I hope the Minister can look at that point. Many opioid users are struggling to get treatment. In recent years, there has been a rising trend in the number of opioid deaths, yet the number of people with addiction to heroin and opioids accessing treatment has fallen in the last 10 years or so. There is a problem here that needs to be addressed.
We often talk about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime—I think a former Prime Minister said that, and it is something we can all agree with. What good treatment for people affected by substance misuse is not about is being tough on crime and being tough on addicts. That does not work, it has not worked, and it is driving a wedge between the health system and the people it is trying to support. I hope that we can recognise in our broader discussions about prohibition that the current policies are a barrier to people with drug dependence receiving the care and support that they need.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (in the Chair)
I am keen to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak. I suggest that people have a self-imposed speaking time of three minutes. That will leave a little less time for the Front-Benchers, but I would like to make sure that everyone gets the chance to air their view. I call Jeff Smith.
Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)
I will be as brief as possible, Mrs Moon. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing this debate and on his long and strong advocacy on these issues. I am tempted to say only that I agree with everything that he said, because I do, but I have a few brief comments to add.
First, I want to say how disappointing it is to see the Minister and the shadow Minister in their places today, not because I have anything against either of them personally, but because I hope that one day we will have a debate on drug policy where a Health Minister and shadow Health Minister answer the debate. For too long, we have treated drug policy as a Home Office and criminal issue rather than the health issue that it should be.
My starting premise is that we will never stop people wanting to take drugs. Humans have taken psychoactive substances for thousands of years. Our brains like them—it is not our fault; they just do. If we are honest, people take drugs because, often, they are enjoyable, whether it is alcohol or one of the illegal drugs. Most people enjoy taking them. Most people take them without problems most of the time. Sometimes, however, use becomes problematic, whether it be of alcohol or illegal drugs. We do not tackle problematic alcohol use by banning alcohol. That would be absurd, so why is it any less absurd that we ban drugs that cause problems when used wrongly? We need to make a distinction between problematic use and recreational use that causes no harm. We have a drug policy that is not working, as has already been said.
Is the clock counting down the time for my speech?
Jeff Smith
It is counting up. Have I really had all that time? I cannot quite believe how long I have been speaking for.
Not only does our drug policy not work, but it causes problems, not least through unnecessary criminalisation. In 2017, nearly 38,000 people were unnecessarily criminalised, which leads to poorer life chances and a cycle of prison. Then there is the cost: if we include all the costs of policing, healthcare, the judiciary and so on, it costs £10.7 billion to deal with illegal drug use. The policy is not working. Drug supply is in the hands of organised criminal gangs and that leads to an arms race in violence, trafficking and organised crime. Then there is the stigma, which has already been referred to, which prevents people from seeking treatment.
We need a change. We need to base our drug policy on the evidence of what works. As the Home Office itself found, there is no evidence that tough law enforcement reduces drug use. Change will not to be easy and I will not pretend otherwise; we have had a war on drugs for 50 years and it is ingrained in the political narrative. For too long, though, we have treated this problem the wrong way. For too long, politicians have been part of the problem. It is time that politicians started being part of the solution.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing the debate. I recently went out with the police force in my constituency, and one of the first things we did was go to an accommodation block for young people, where we tested their rooms for drugs. The police had swabs that they pushed along surfaces in the whole block, and under examination they revealed whether the young people had taken drugs. It was not the first time those rooms had been tested. Many of the people had been tested before and many had come up positive before. This was retesting.
Members might ask why, if those young people had been caught once, they did not do something different the next time, but that is part of the problem. The police took the view that it was not something that needed to be enforced in law. They took the view that there was no point in making criminals out of these young people. The real check on what should happen to the young people was not taken by the police; it was taken by the people who run the building. If it was a small amount of drugs that was showing up, they would have a word with the young people and tell them that this was not encouraged. If there was repeatedly a large amount, they would lose their accommodation. That, more than anything, was a frightening prospect for many of those people, who had found the accommodation quite late. It provided them with a lot of security.
There is a real distinction between the policy that the Government have set out and are pursuing and the policy that the police are pursuing at the same time, and those two policies cannot live together. We cannot have people saying one thing and the other people, who are supposed to be a part of the organisation that delivers it, doing something completely different. The Government need to recognise what is actually happening on the ground, because the police are not implementing legislation in the way the Government think they are. They are doing that with a greater spirit of openness about what is good for those young people in the community, and I encourage the Minister to look at that carefully.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Last year in Scotland there were 934 drug-related deaths. Of those, 137 were in Lothian, which covers my constituency. People fear that in 2018 the figure could top 1,000, so they are right to regard this as a crisis that needs to be addressed. The compelling tragedy of those deaths is that most were avoidable. These people did not die because they overdosed; they died because they were using dirty needles or other paraphernalia and they contracted hepatitis C or HIV from other users. They died because the stuff they were taking was either cut with toxic substances or was far more powerful than they expected it to be. In some cases, they died because they had left treatment too early—the orthodoxy is that success is judged by how many people go through treatment rather than by the number of people who are kept in treatment.
I laud the work of agencies and of many sincere individuals on the ground at the frontline. I have spoken to many of them in recent months, and they all tell me that even without changing the law many drug-related deaths are preventable. As Members have said, we could certainly have safe consumption facilities. We could also have heroin-assisted treatment. The reality is that the best way to get somebody off an addiction is first to manage it so that they can regain some control over their lives and begin to make plans. We could also remove the stigma—there are far too many people in our society who react to these deaths by saying, “They’re only junkies; their lives don’t really matter.” We have to say that those people were once valued members of a community and that they could be again, and we need to reach out to them. Finally, we could shift the emphasis on to harm reduction through a massive publicity programme.
I do not have time to say what I wanted to say, so let me just make an appeal to the Minister. There are cross-party concerns about drugs policy, and there is cross-party support for a new initiative from the Home Office to review the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. We deal with no other area of public policy where the principal legislation has remained unchanged for nearly half a century. The problem has got dramatically worse and its character has changed. Far too many people are labouring under the misapprehension that prohibition means control, but it does not. There is no control over what substances come on to our streets, there is no control over how much is available, and there is no control over who is using them. There ought to be, and we have a responsibility as legislators to move forward and achieve that. A review is long overdue, and I implore the Minister at least to be receptive to these appeals.
Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing the debate. The UK does not operate alone, and neither do global drugs control policies. The UK Government, as a fully paid-up member of UN treaties, must acknowledge and take ownership of the failure of global drugs control policies and the harms that are done in its name—the so-called war on drugs. It is actually a war on the people who use drugs, because it is they who feel the sharp end of prohibition. Some 26 countries have made changes to domestic laws and policies concerning the possession of illicit drugs for personal use in order to protect their citizens, but the UK lags behind.
It is not really a war on drugs; it is a war on citizens’ behaviour, and it is most often delivered by the state against the poorest people and communities. We do not put drugs in prisons; we put people in prisons. We allow the market to regulate itself because we simply prohibit drugs. It is a market, and it will not go away or be managed by simply investing in more police or in border control efforts—it is like trying to make gravity illegal. We cannot be naive and seriously think that there is any way forward but to reform policies to make them fit for today.
That brings me to the long-standing issue of the Glasgow safer drug consumption facility and heroin-assisted treatment pilot project, which has cross-party support in the city, certainly from Labour and the Scottish National party. As hon. Members might be aware, the issue of drug use and drug-related mortality in Glasgow is particularly acute. It is a problem that necessitates radical and disruptive new approaches. Almost a third—267—of Scotland’s drug-related deaths in 2016 occurred in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board area. In Glasgow there are 283 drug-related deaths per 1 million people—an appalling 1,315% higher than the EU average. There are 13,600 people aged between 15 and 64 in the Glasgow City Council area who are problematic drug users, which is twice the national average in Scotland.
That is why the safe drug consumption and heroin-assisted treatment proposal is vital for our city, to improve its public health performance in this area. I met the Minister recently and we had a productive discussion about the issue of safe drug consumption rooms and heroin-assisted treatment. Although we disagree on the safe drug consumption room pilot, primarily over assurances about the safety of the substances that are brought into the facility, I propose that there are methods of testing the substances prior to their being used on the premises, but that is beside the point. I want to focus on where there is a possibility of moving forward in the short term to deal with this pressing issue in Glasgow.
I want to ask the Minister whether she can outline more robust measures to improve and expedite the heroin-assisted treatment pilot programme. How can we get that on the ground and move it forward? I want to see people being able to use drug-related equipment in a safe environment and in a way that can be controlled, and I want the substances that they are using to be assured. That is the only way that we will make an impact on the ground in Glasgow and the only way that we will be able to address the appalling level of drug-related deaths. I would like to focus on the heroin-assisted treatment side of the proposed pilot in Glasgow. Let us focus on delivering something on the ground within the next year—let us get it on the ground and do something as a starting point at least. Will the Minister elaborate on how she can do that?
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
Thank you for calling me to speak, Mrs Moon; I did not think that I would be called, because earlier I was chairing an all-party parliamentary group meeting. I am more than happy to speak in the debate and to represent my constituents on this really important issue. As other Members have said, the issue of drug consumption rooms in Glasgow has reached a public health crisis point. We absolutely need to do something. Glasgow has a well thought through and evidenced proposal for a drug consumption room in the city.
[Sir Edward Leigh in the Chair]
What frustrates me hugely is that all the Home Office Ministers are happy to sit behind their desks down here in London, but they are not happy to come to Glasgow to meet people from the Scottish Drugs Forum or the doctors and experts within the Glasgow health and social care partnership who have worked on this proposal and who know their field extremely well. They do not want to come and listen to the stories of the families in Glasgow whose lives have been blighted by drug misuse for many years. Some families have lost not just one child but two children, and there are grandchildren who now face the prospect of growing up without parents.
The Government are literally deaf to those people’s complaints. They are unwilling to come and listen to those who have come through recovery, who have used such a facility, and who have seen the difference it made to their lives. They have seen the difference, rather than injecting in dirty back lanes, in bin shelters and in tenement closes in the area I represent and beyond. The Minister will not come and listen to those who use drugs right now.
The Scottish Drugs Forum has done a huge amount of work on this. They have talked to people who inject drugs in the city centre of Glasgow and they have said to them, “What facility would help you to normalise your life and get into treatment?” A drug consumption room would enable people to come in at a lower level. They do not have to commit to a treatment programme, but they can take the first step towards treatment and a better, more stable life for themselves and their extended family.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) said, those people are not just junkies. We should get rid of that horrible term from our vocabulary, because it helps nobody. It stigmatises and is cruel, and it signals that we do not value those people in society. We need to turn that around and give those people the support they need to come back from the brink and give their lives some semblance of order. We cannot write anybody off in society. Doing so is not fair to those people or their families. It also costs us an absolute fortune, as people make repeated visits to accident and emergency departments, and we have to pick up the pieces of the chaos it causes. Housing associations have to pick up needles day in, day out, because this problem is not going away. The Minister can bury her head in the sand, but I challenge her to come to Glasgow, meet the people I meet, and not just make decisions from behind her desk in Westminster.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) for introducing this debate and illustrating yet again the expertise he has developed by getting involved in policy discussions not just here but in other jurisdictions, where he has obviously learned a lot.
As my hon. Friend and others have said, our starting point must be the dreadful impact that drug misuse has on too many people, directly and indirectly. We have heard about the statistics for Scotland: 934 drug-related deaths were registered in 2017, up by 66 from 2016. The hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) fairly pointed out that those numbers are particularly awful, but the causes are complex and some of them date back decades. There are economic costs associated with the problem—drug misuse costs £3.5 billion a year in Scotland, and alcohol misuse costs a further £3.6 billion—but they are nothing compared with the personal tragedies of each life affected. This debate has allowed hon. Members to focus on how we should respond to this huge challenge. I thank everyone for their contributions.
It is fair to say that the majority view is that the criminal justice approach is not working, as the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) said. Some hon. Members argued eloquently that the way we regulate drug use through criminal law needs not just reform but fundamental reform. We should be open-minded about that, and I agree that our response should be evidence-led.
Regardless of how we respond, we should first and foremost see this as a public health issue—almost everybody who spoke in the debate said that, and I agree—albeit one that requires input from many Departments, including on housing, mental health, employability, education and justice. In Edinburgh, the drugs policy unit has been moved out of the justice directorate and into the health directorate. Like the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith), I think that is exactly where it belongs. The 2008 drugs strategy, which has been referred to, received cross-party support, but it is being updated.
That first strategy, “The Road to Recovery”, helped to shift cultural attitudes and challenge stigma. It established a broad recovery network, delivered locally through 30 alcohol and drug partnerships. It brought together health boards, local authorities, policy and voluntary agencies in each part of the country. National leadership was provided by the Scottish Recovery Network, the Scottish Drugs Forum and Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs. It led to a new focus on harm reduction. For example, the pioneering naloxone programme was designed to reverse the effects of opioid overdoses. We have heard a bit of criticism of that programme, but a recent NHS Health Scotland literature review demonstrated that take-home naloxone programmes increase the odds of recovery from overdoses, and improve knowledge of overdose recognition and management in the community. We have also heard criticism of the substitution treatment that accompanied the strategy, but the NHS Health Scotland evidence review suggests that, overall, the health of opioid-dependent individuals is safeguarded while they are in substitution treatment.
The new strategy is set to be finalised imminently. We have not seen the final draft, but we know something of the direction of travel. We also know that it will be funded by an additional £20 million a year in each of the remaining three years of the Scottish parliamentary Session. It will contain policies that reflect a better understanding of the causes of addiction and substance abuse, including some that have been referred to today, such as deprivation, poverty and adverse childhood experiences. As has been highlighted, there will be a more holistic focus on the person, rather than simply on the addiction. Recovery remains the goal, but there will be a greater focus on tying that goal to work on homelessness, employability, mental health and family support. That is simply in recognition of the fact that, too often, the most vulnerable find it hardest to access the sustained support they need for those key issues.
The new focus will be on “seek, keep and treat”. It is acknowledged that the most vulnerable are sometimes the least likely to access the services that could support them. There will therefore be more proactive outreach and advocacy, and broader and more sustained attempts to keep people in treatment by responding to their broader needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) rightly highlighted that keeping people in treatment is problematic and that we need to do better on it. Treatment must be tailored carefully to the person. We must recognise that some will not be ready yet to start on the road to recovery or abstinence, while others will start on that road but relapse. Support must continue and be sustained throughout the process.
A measure that would fit with that approach, which a number of hon. Members have referred to, is the establishment of a drug consumption room. My party is keen on that, and there is almost, but not quite, unanimous support for it in the Scottish Parliament. Work on piloting a safe drug consumption room would be hugely welcome. It has been driven by the Glasgow City health and social care partnership. It could serve an estimated 400 to 500 people who would otherwise be injecting unsafely and publicly, and who would experience high levels of harm. Such a facility could significantly reduce the risk of further outbreaks of blood-borne viruses.
Evidence from elsewhere shows that drug consumption rooms can make a significant difference in reducing drug-related deaths. A Sydney study linked such facilities to fewer emergency service call-outs, an increased uptake of detoxification and drug-dependence treatments, a decrease in public injecting, and a reduction in the number of syringes discarded in the vicinity. Similar studies from Barcelona have found similar positive results.
The question is: why on earth does the Home Office not want to pilot a drug consumption room? The evidence shows that it is likely to achieve significant benefits. In the unlikely event that it does not work, the fall-back will not be on the Home Office; we will accept full responsibility. There is no justification for such intransigence. The Home Office’s failure to act is endangering lives. I echo calls from my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) for the Minister to meet the Public Health Minister in Scotland. She should visit Glasgow to hear from practitioners who are pursuing this cause.
Tackling drug addiction must be supported across portfolio areas. Ideally, we need education to try to help young people to become resilient to offers of drugs or pressure to take them in the first place. Where the criminal law is breached, diverting people—especially young people—from the criminal justice system can be effective if alternative interventions mean addressing the underlying causes of offending, including for drugs, with hugely beneficial lifetime implications. If drug users are in prison, a dedicated improvement fund is being used in Scotland to ensure that programmes there properly address health-related causes of offending, such as drug and alcohol misuse. Each of those drugs policies could be the subject of a separate debate in their own right.
Drug addiction is first and foremost a public health issue. Our key ask is for the Minister to look again at piloting a drug consumption room in Glasgow. She has absolutely nothing to lose with such a policy, and lots of people have lots to gain.
Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward—although I thought you were Mrs Moon.
Our policy on drug use should be regarded first and foremost as a national health issue. As hon. Members have emphasised, we need better legislation on drug use, with far greater intervention and education policies on drug abuse and addiction. The UK now has the highest recorded level of mortality from drug misuse since records began, and nothing is more important than preserving our citizens’ lives. Our approach to drugs is simply not doing that, so it is time to consider all options, based on what is most effective in reducing harm.
The war on drugs is failing. People are being exploited by drug dealers and traffickers on an industrial scale. The rising prevalence of county lines and sexual exploitation highlights the need for criminal action against the perpetrators. Greater training and funding for frontline services is essential to crack down on the gangs and individuals who treat people like commodities. They inflict pain and suffering on vulnerable people, and sexually abuse them.
Traffickers are targeting potential victims, including by “cuckooing”, whereby drug dealers befriend vulnerable addicts and supply them with narcotics before moving into their homes. They then threaten to withdraw the supply of drugs, or use threats and intimidation, to get their victims to sell the substances.
Homeless people are increasingly becoming the victims of modern slavery, lured by traffickers with promises of work, housing and narcotics. They are then used as forced labour to sell drugs or in other forms of criminal exploitation. This year the number of British people coming to statutory support services after being identified as victims of modern slavery has doubled. Many were homeless and had existing drug addictions, making them a target for traffickers, who used their addiction to coerce them into harmful activities. An increasing number of people have been identified as victims of slavery, ending up destitute, homeless and re-trafficked shortly after exiting safe houses.
Addiction is an illness. Young people sell themselves for their next fix and join dangerous and abusive gangs to ensure that their addiction is fed. Far more needs to be done to educate children in schools about drug use and the associated dangers that addiction brings. We are not talking about recreational drugs; we are talking about people who are dependent on a substance that dominates their ability to function.
Involvement in the criminal justice system often results from both illegal drug taking and the criminal activities to obtain those drugs. The destructive behaviours are often caused by brain changes triggered by drug use. Treating drug-involved offenders will provide us with an opportunity to decrease substance abuse and reduce associated criminal behaviour. Commitment to expand drug treatment facilities is essential to ensure a better way to cut the numbers of people who are addicted and keep them out of the criminal justice system.
We are failing people who are addicted to drugs. We have to look at where we have gone wrong. Drug addiction is not getting any better, so the existing system is clearly not working. It must be made much easier for people to get the treatment that they need. Facilities for treating people with drug issues must be improved and increased. Drug reform would be an opportunity to address the issues in the criminal justice system. It is time to think differently about punishment for drug-related offences, to increase the treatment budgets to prevent addiction and drug-related deaths, and to change drug policy so that police forces up and down the country have a uniform approach to drug addiction, allowing them to better tackle the drug battle that permeates all our towns and cities.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. As I have previously stated on the record, owing to the potential for a conflict of interest, with my husband’s business interests, I have recused myself on issues relating to cannabis and synthetic cannabinoids. I therefore will not respond to those points during this debate, but will ask the Policing Minister, who deals with these matters, to write to Members on those points.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing the debate. His debates on drugs always seem to be interrupted by numerous Divisions, so I am delighted to have reached the point where I have a little time to sum up.
This Government recognise the serious harm that drugs cause, not only to individual users but to their families, children and local communities. Drugs have been identified in the recent serious violence strategy as a major driver of the recent increases in serious violence. Drugs cost more than £10 billion a year to our society, over half of which is attributed to drug-related acquisitive crime such as burglary, robbery and shoplifting. We remain ambitious and committed in addressing these problems. That is why we committed to further action on drugs as part of the serious violence strategy.
Our policy on drugs is anchored in education to reduce demand, tough and intelligent enforcement to restrict supply, evidence-based treatment to aid recovery, and co-ordinated global action. I will deal with the global picture first. The UK is driving global action to tackle drug harms. Genuine international challenges include the increased production and purity of cocaine in Colombia, and the problems of fentanyl use in North America. International co-operation is key. We continue to strengthen controls at our borders, share information and understand global trends. Last week, I met people from the International Narcotics Control Board who had come to view our work on tackling drugs. We will continue to work closely with our international partners to share best practice and achieve the best possible outcomes for all those at risk of harm from drugs.
The national picture, Government are already delivering a range of action is that through the 2017 drugs strategy to prevent drug misuse in our communities, support people to recover from dependence on drugs, and support law enforcement to tackle the illicit drug trade.
Dr Poulter
On reducing drug dependency, is the Minister aware that generic buprenorphine is no longer available from the manufacturer? As a result, drug treatment uses the Subutex brand, which costs £3,000 per patient per year and is becoming increasingly expensive. Will she look into that? It is proving financially difficult to support patients with opioid-substitution therapy.
Victoria Atkins
I will of course look into that, and I will ask a Health Minister to write to my hon. Friend.
The drug strategy recognises that we must reduce demand by acting early to prevent people from using drugs in the first place and to prevent escalation to more harmful use. We are taking action to build resilience among young people, alongside a targeted approach for groups at particular risk. Well-off recreational drug users must also recognise the part that they play in funding the criminal networks that supply their drugs and the violence that those crime gangs use.
My shadow, the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), has already mentioned the issue of county lines. Yesterday, we had a meeting of the serious violence taskforce. It is absolutely clear that the illicit drug market is a major driver of the rise of serious violence, which is why the police must work with our health professionals to tackle it. Schools play a vital role in that, helping children to understand the risks of illicit drugs and build their resilience and ability to say no. The Government are making health education compulsory, as well as funding Mentor UK’s Alcohol and Drug Education and Prevention Information Service to provide practical advice to teachers.
Tough enforcement, however, is fundamental. We are restricting the supply of drugs, adapting our approach to changes in criminal activity, using innovative data and technology, and taking co-ordinated action to tackle drugs alongside other criminal activity. Through the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, we have choked off the supply of so-called legal highs. More than 300 retailers throughout the UK have closed down or are no longer selling psychoactive substances. Police have arrested suppliers, and the National Crime Agency has ensured the removal of psychoactive substances from sale on UK websites.
Ronnie Cowan
Yet those substances have been replaced by others, which are possibly more damaging, such as Spice and Mamba. We are not solving the problem; all we are doing is pushing it around the table.
Victoria Atkins
Interestingly, the hon. Gentleman raised the issue of decriminalisation, and I again note that no single body of opinion has formed about how such decriminalisation would work. Who would administer the drugs, presumably available on the NHS to users? Will that include recreational drugs such as MDMA, so that people can have fun at the weekend? Is the taxpayer paying for that?
I welcome the chance to discuss the issue, but the problem with such a debate is that “decriminalisation” is referred to, but not a body of opinion—certainly none described in this debate—to evidence of what would happen under such a policy. The police and others have to deal with precisely these issues day to day, to protect our communities from illicit drug use, because those drugs harm people.
Grahame Morris
The Minister is setting out the case for why there is an obstacle to change. In Durham, for example, the police and crime commissioner, a very experienced chief constable and all the agencies say, “Give this a try.” They believe that it will work, because the evidence suggests that. Why does she not pilot such a scheme?
Victoria Atkins
One or two police and crime commissioners may say that—I know, because they write to me regularly—but the majority of them do not share that view. That is not to say that we cannot have a debate about this, but let us please not pretend that that is the view of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners.
Recovery is a vital element of our approach. We are taking forward action to enhance treatment quality and outcomes. Here is perhaps where some colleagues have—inadvertently I am sure—fallen into error when talking about drug consumption rooms and heroin-assisted treatment. Sometimes, people may not understand the differences between the two programmes. We have run pilot heroin-assisted treatment programmes, where heroin users are put into an intensive support programme through their GPs or other medical professionals. They are prescribed diamorphine as part of an intensive programme of action. That is very different from drug consumption rooms, which support the illicit drug market.
Victoria Atkins
I will not, as I am conscious of time. People wander into drug consumption rooms, having bought their fixes on the street. We have no guarantees on the safety of those substances. The Government simply cannot condone that sort of behaviour, not least because it falls foul of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, but also because it would not be responsible to support the illegal market.
Crispin Blunt
The Government say they cannot condone that, but what lessons are they taking from the view of the International Narcotics Control Board?
Victoria Atkins
Interestingly, the view of the International Narcotics Control Board is very cautious. It says that drug consumption rooms must be operated
“within a framework that offers treatment and rehabilitation services”.
I would argue that its model is closer to heroin-assisted treatment.
Several hon. Members rose—
Victoria Atkins
I have one minute left, so I am afraid I will have to refuse more interventions.
We are helping users through needle and syringe programmes, to prevent infections, and opioid-substitution therapy, and widening the use of naloxone. The Home Secretary has commissioned an independent review of the drugs market in the 21st century—it is not quite the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, as the hon. Member for Inverclyde represented. We need to understand how the drugs market works today. That is why, as part of our drugs strategy and our serious violence strategy, working with health partners, we are convinced that this is the right approach.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
I sincerely thank everyone who has taken part in this afternoon’s debate. I mentioned that I had visited drug consumption rooms in Barcelona—I understand the difference between them and heroin-assisted treatment units. What impressed me most about those rooms were not just the facilities—they were attached to health clinics and psychiatric hospitals, and there was even a mobile unit being driven around the area—but the attitude of the people providing the service in those units. They looked upon the users of their clinics as human beings first and foremost. They had moved away from the idea of categorising and stigmatising people as junkies, crackheads and stoners. They did not see a problem but an opportunity to help people back into life.
It was summed up perfectly to me when it was explained that people living in Catalonia who have a medical card get free medical care; immigrants living in Catalonia are given a medical card, so they get free medical care; and illegal immigrants in Catalonia are given a medical card, so they get free medical care. They have taken the stance that this is about humanity and their approach to their fellow citizens. Only when we do that will we start to address the horrendous problems we have in our society through problematic drug use.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered drugs policy.
Dead Man’s Penny Memorial Plaque
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the dead man’s penny memorial plaque.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. A number of years ago, before I became a Member of Parliament, I went to a local car boot sale. Looking through all the bric-a-brac and things from days gone by, I came across a bronze plaque that was six inches in diameter. It looked to all the world like a huge Victorian penny. It had Britannia on the front, shadowed by a lion. There were two dolphins and, at the bottom, a smaller lion was ripping apart an eagle. The lion with Britannia was the lion of courage, and the other lion was ripping apart the German eagle, while the dolphins signified the dominance of the seas that Great Britain enjoyed at the time. There was writing around the edge because the plaque was intended to commemorate the life of a fallen soldier. Such a plaque was known—rather crudely, given that it was to commemorate the life of one of our fallen soldiers—as a dead man’s penny.
The service people were from the fledging Air Force of the first world war, the Navy, which dominated the seas, and those who had fallen on the battlefields. They were originally to be positioned in the war grave headstones, but that did not happen due to the fear of metal pilfering after the war. They were struck only for the first world war as they cost so much to produce. Each plaque was struck—not engraved—with the name of the fallen soldier or serviceman.
I remember looking at the plaque—I did not know what it was; I researched it later—and wondering what had happened to the family of the fallen soldier, why the plaque had ended up there, what was the story behind it and what was the story of the soldier’s life and the family he left behind. It struck me that, more often than not, such plaques reach the market—militaria shops and auction sites—because the family have died. I emphasise strongly that militaria shops do us a great service by helping to keep alive the spirit of campaigns and conflicts that we only read about in the history books. We in Morecambe are fortunate enough to have an excellent military memorabilia shop, along with a proud and distinguished military heritage in Lancaster.
I found out later that more than 1.3 million plaques were struck—the exact number is not known—and given out to the families of the fallen. They were struck from 450 tons of bronze. They arrived in a box, sometimes with the medals of the soldier, airman or seaman, and every one of them had a certificate signed by King George V. They were given out predominantly after the war, although some were given before its end.
What do they mean in our day and age, 100 years on? We have had other wars, but world war one was the only occasion on which these plaques were struck in honour of the fallen. As I said, each plaque was individually struck—not engraved—with the name of a serviceman, but with no mention of their rank. It was struck simply to commemorate the serviceman or woman who gave their life doing their duty in the service of their country. In fact, 1,500 were given to women service personnel. They were given out all across the Commonwealth, to everybody engaged in the conflict.
In the great war, we lost 22 Members of Parliament, 20 Lords and 98 sons of people who worked here or were Members. This debate therefore has meaning not just for the rest of the country, but for Parliament itself. The outside of the plaque reads:
“He died for freedom and honour”.
Some plaques say, “She died”, depending on the sex of the service person. I once acquired a plaque. The gentleman named on it was Charles Edward Woodward. It had a hole in the plaque, a fact that made me a little emotional in my last debate on this subject 12 months ago, because it meant that it would have been hung on the wall, over the mantelpiece in his parent’s home. It would have been all they had left of him. I recently found out that his two other brothers also perished in the first world war. I got this plaque from a militaria shop not far from here, and the staff were very helpful and honourable in the exchange. With it came this man’s history, which says that it is a great war memorial plaque issued in memory of Charles Edward Woodward, who served as Private Nm. 1,200 of the 1/5th Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, Territorial Force, and was killed in action at Ypres on 30 September 1915.
The local newspaper, the Lincolnshire Chronicle, reported Private Woodward’s death. A biographical note—bear with me, Sir Edward, because the type is quite small—states:
“News of the death of Pte. C. Woodward was recorded in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, he met his death while on duty in the trenches, the trench being struck by shells and he was buried. He was got out later, but only survived about an hour. The above was partly contradicted in a letter from Capt. Scorer to his parents, in which he stated ‘I have to inform you of the death of your son, Pte. C. W. Woodward, on the evening of 30th September. Our trenches were blown up by a German mine and about 60 yards destroyed. Your son was buried in the debris; we dug him out alive, and hoped he would recover, as from outward appearances he did not appear to be injured; but he died later from shock.’ Pte. Woodward was in his 21st year, and first in the village to lose his life.”
Private Woodward is commemorated by name on the Ypres Menin Gate memorial. He was only 20 at his death. He was the son of Parker and Mary Jane Woodward of Rose Cottage, Halton Fenside, Spilsby, Lincolnshire. This plaque was all that was left of him. He was a person. We should not forget that each one of these plaques signifies an individual—a person—who lost their life.
I want to raise awareness that each of these plaques signifies a person. I hope that one day they form a memorial—perhaps in the Imperial War Museum, although it will be difficult to find an area big enough to house more than 1.3 million of them—that demonstrates what they represent and commemorates those who died preserving the integrity of the democracy for which they fought proudly and gave their lives.
Sadly, however, over the years some of the plaques have been scrapped because no one knew what they were. Although I do not think many of them found their way into scrap yards, that nevertheless happened. The previous Member for Croydon South promoted a private Member’s Bill that resulted in legislation that prevents war memorials from being attacked and melted down. I would like these plaques to be covered by that legislation. They mean something. They are a memorial in themselves, especially in the centenary year of the end of the first world war.
What is the Government’s role? I know that they would like to do everything they can, but logistically that is impossible. It is up to us all in the community to recognise that these plaques really mean something. I would love to see some of them form a national memorial to the fallen or go to local regiments, local museums or even the Military Heritage Society.
I was honoured and fortunate enough to go to Spilsby, where I was accompanied by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who is present today. Private Charles Woodward’s plaque now hangs in the memorial hall in his own village. He has found his way home. I am proud to have done that. It did not matter where that gentleman was from or that he had no connection to me—none of that mattered at all. What mattered was that he was remembered.
It would be fitting for these plaques to be taken to church on Remembrance Sunday. My debate on this subject in the main Chamber was very emotional and eerie. I do not subscribe to the paranormal, but it really felt as though the man was standing at my side. I had never felt that before, and I doubt I will ever feel it again, but other Members who were in the Chamber at the time experienced the feeling that something else was there too. If we take these plaques to church with us on Remembrance Sunday, those soldiers will be there, too, and they will be remembered. That is all that really matters. Let us remember them, let us honour them 100 years on, and let us celebrate what they did for our freedom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Michael Ellis)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) for his remarks, for his work on this subject and for organising this important debate, which is poignant as we approach the centenary of the armistice in 1918. One of the fascinating aspects of the first world war is what is left behind. The sheer volume of artefacts—not just medals, memorials and plaques but letters, art and literature—serves to remind us of the monumental scale of that war. It was a global conflict of shocking magnitude.
My hon. Friend has spoken with great clarity about this subject, both today and previously. I commend his passion—a passion that is understandable when one considers that the prevalence of memorial plaques is due to the almost incomprehensible losses suffered by Britain and her Commonwealth allies. It is estimated that more than 1 million plaques and scrolls of the type he described were issued to the next of kin of those who died serving with British and imperial forces in the first world war for king and country. Each of those plaques represents the loss of a life and the devastation that inevitably followed for family members and friends. More than 600 such plaques were issued to the families of women who died, reminding us that the suffering was not confined to the battlefields. Many plaques were donated, used in memorials or displayed prominently and with pride in local museums, and many are still treasured by the descendants of those who fell, but it is thought that many British and empire war dead had no plaque or scroll issued due to the inability in 1919 and 1920 to trace the addresses of eligible next of kin—no doubt as a result of the high incidence of short-term rented addresses and remarriage, and of records that were not as good as they are today.
Over the past four years of commemorative events marking world war one, my Department has seen at first hand the depth of emotion that many people still feel about that war 100 years on, not only through direct family relationships but through associations in their local communities, school connections and regimental ties. My maternal great-grandfather, Jeremiah Mulcahy of the Royal Irish Regiment, was killed in action at Ypres on 31 May 1915. I know that his loss still resonates with my mother in her 81st year. There are people who felt the repercussions of the war directly—people who grew up in care following the collapse of a family unit, or with distant or disabled fathers or grandfathers, or in communities shattered by loss. There are also people whose only connection to their community’s involvement in the great war is a photograph album, a medal or a medallion of the sort to which my hon. Friend referred—a dead mans penny, as they were colloquially known. Frequently, those items are worth far more to people than their monetary value. They are the very heart of a family or community’s history, lore and identity.
During the centenary period, my Department has worked closely with the Imperial War Museum, which has proven itself a worthy guardian of the nation’s wartime history. Through the refurbishment of its first world war galleries, which are very much worth a visit, and its tireless dedication to education, it has been a key partner to Her Majesty’s Government during the centenary period. Like all museums, it has a strict acquisition and disposal policy—in fact, as Minister for the arts and heritage, I have to sign off when it wishes to dispose of items, even if they are duplicates or of very low value—which determines whether it can accept donations. I am sure my hon. Friend understands that, given their limited space and resources, museums have to make difficult decisions about what is of most value in the context of their collections. In this case, the Imperial War Museum feels that the collection of plaques does not meet the policy criteria, and the policy document states that acquisitions outside the current stated policy will be made only in exceptional circumstances.
When the families of fallen men and women were sent the plaques and the scrolls, the items became their property, in the same manner as medals or any other award. I am sure that hon. Members will agree with me that it would not be appropriate for Her Majesty’s Government or any other body to decide what should be done with items of private property, especially items that hold such emotional significance and value. I know that my hon. Friend will understand that, for those reasons, it is not considered either possible or practical for Her Majesty’s Government to attempt to acquire memorial plaques that are no longer in the possession of the families to whom they were issued.
For people in possession of plaques, or for those wishing to research or commemorate an individual, there are other options available. I humbly suggest that Members of this House recommend to any interested constituents that a good starting point would be to visit two excellent online resources that commemorate those who fell in the great war, provide useful information about the person commemorated, and give those in possession of a plaque the option to make that information publicly available. They may find it very rewarding if they can contribute to these sites.
The Royal British Legion’s “Every One Remembered” database aims to ensure that by the end of this year every man and woman from across the Commonwealth who fell during the first world war is remembered individually by those living today. It is a striking lesson that while the way in which people commemorate may have changed thanks to technology, the desire to remember the fallen remains undiminished. I hope that hon. Members will join me in congratulating the Royal British Legion, which we know does such excellent work, on the fact that that every person has now been remembered on the website—more than 1 million people.
A similar digital memorial is the Imperial War Museum’s “Lives of the First World War” project, which I also commend to the House. It records the stories of individuals from across Britain and the Commonwealth—the empire, as it was then—who served in uniform or worked on the home front. Users of the site can add information about medals and service record to an individual’s page if they have more information to add. The facility to add that information, and pictures of artefacts, allows descendants to create a permanent digital memorial of their family’s first world war story. “Lives of the First World War” currently has over 7.5 million individual life stories and over 120,000 registered members.
Her Majesty’s Government’s centenary programme has other programmes that are designed to aid commemorations, and many ways that communities can find out more about these plaques and the memorials on which their ancestors were recorded in the United Kingdom and around the world. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has made a £4.5 million fund available for the conservation and protection of war memorials, which I think my hon. Friend mentioned. In the first world war memorials programme, Historic England, in partnership with Civic Voice, the Imperial War Museum and the War Memorials Trust, work with the public on a programme of recording, research, conservation and listing, to ensure that war memorials across Britain are protected and the people they commemorate are remembered. To date, the War Memorials Trust has made over 360 repair grants, totalling some £1.4 million, to help repair war memorials across the country that are in a poor state and need some work.
I should also mention the work of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in the Victoria Cross commemorative paving stones project. This project commemorates each of the 627 men who were awarded the highest accolade, the Victoria Cross, during the first world war, placing a commemorative stone in the town or village of their birth or, in the case of those born overseas, at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. The stones are a visible reminder of the heroic contribution made by local people.
No debate on this subject would be complete without mentioning the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Many thousands of casualties from the British Empire are buried in some 23,000 immaculately maintained CWGC sites in more than 150 countries around the world. These moving and sensitively maintained sites are a permanent reminder of the enormous sacrifices made in war. Anyone visiting such a site cannot help but be deeply moved. Of course, the commission does far more than maintain the resting places of the fallen. In 2017 it founded the Commonwealth War Graves Foundation specifically to keep alive the memory and the stories of those who died in the two world wars for generations to come.
With the centenary of the armistice just days away, I am very pleased to have had this opportunity to publicise the options open to people who are in possession of memorial plaques; I reiterate my gratitude to my hon. Friend for bringing this debate to the House. Through the Government’s unique commemorative programme and the innovative work by our partners in developing ways of commemorating the first world war, we can ensure that future generations never forget those who fell. We can also ensure that they have tools at their disposal to allow them to research their ancestors and the many others who fought 100 years ago. The memorial plaques—the dead man’s pennies—and the many other memorials to the fallen of the first world war are a constant reminder of the huge sacrifice made by a whole generation 100 years ago, and I again thank my hon. Friend for proposing this debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Addictive Technology
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Ged Killen (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered addictive technology.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward, and to introduce a debate that I feel is of growing relevance. Our discussion could go in many different directions, but I will focus mainly on the use of smartphones, apps and social media. How often these days do we hear the phrase, “Get off your phone!”? It could be uttered between two strangers in a restaurant; it could be any one of us saying it to a partner or a child, or having them say it to us. We only have to get on a bus, walk down the street or sit in the House of Commons Chamber to see examples of how engrossed we have all become in devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Last September, the iPhone celebrated its 10th birthday. At the time, my first thought was, “Has it really only been 10 years?” I do not think that was a matter of misjudging the passage of time; instead, I was reflecting on the behavioural, social and cultural impact of the smartphone revolution that began with the iPhone, and wondering how all of these changes could have happened in the last 10 years. The urge to check our phone while we are waiting for a friend to arrive, or when we are bored, watching TV or even at dinner, is like a new muscle reflex for many—including me. When we forget our phone and sense the absence of its weight in our pocket or bag, it feels like much more than just a missing piece of technology. I cannot be the only one who has felt the panic of looking for my phone, only to realise that I am holding it in my hand.
In the run-up to this debate I asked Parliament’s Digital Outreach Service to collect the views of members of the public on whether they felt their own relationship with technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, social media and videogames was having a negative effect on their lives. One respondent, Keith, said:
“As I type I’m tapping on a cell phone waiting for my bus, so I suppose it passes time. On the other hand, I nearly missed it posting this message, so yes is the answer.”
That is probably a typical experience for many people. Let us be in no doubt that these devices are incredibly useful tools. They make day-to-day tasks more convenient and we get a lot of enjoyment out of them. They give us the power to connect to our friends and families, no matter where they are, all around the world. The question is: are they making us connect less with the people right in front of us?
From the 2016 US presidential election, Brexit and the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the increase in online abuse and bullying and the growing evidence that smartphones, their apps and social media are addictive and causing behavioural changes rather than adapting to demand, we are seeing a darker side to these technologies, which highlights how we may have misplaced our sense of control. I want to use this debate to discuss how to live well with the technology we use every day.
It is becoming clearer that there are features of smartphones, the apps that they run and social media that are inherently addictive. Recently, former technology designers for companies such as Facebook, Apple and Google have admitted that the technologies and apps they designed have contributed to technological addiction. Many designers are driven to create addictive app features by the business models of the big companies that employ them, and let us remember that many apps have in-app purchases, so in some cases there are financial consequences for users. Aza Raskin, a former technology developer for Mozilla, which makes the popular Firefox web browser, has described the way in which apps and interfaces are made as if the tech companies are
“taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface”.
He also said:
“Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally…a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.”
Mr Raskin helped to design the software function known as infinite scroll, which allows users to scroll through pages and pages of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram content without having to click “next page.” He is not alone. Leah Pearlman, the co-inventor of Facebook’s “like” button, raised concerns that the design of modern personal technology and digital interfaces are habit-forming, in some cases leading to addiction. She said:
“When I need validation, I go to check Facebook… I’m feeling lonely, let me check my phone. I’m feeling insecure, let me check my phone.”
Ms Pearlman tried to quit Facebook after resigning her role at the company, but she found it hard. She realised she was
“kind of addicted to the feedback.”
That is someone who worked for one of these companies.
We could be experiencing a temporary blip, such as when television was first introduced. Perhaps our relationships with these devices will normalise. However, many of us will recognise these concerns in our lives.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this important and timely debate. Does he agree with Arianna Huffington, who wrote the books “Thrive” and “The Sleep Revolution” in which she talks about technology and how in many cases we take better care of our smartphones than ourselves?
Ged Killen
That is right, and I will take up the hon. Lady’s reading recommendation. We all have experience of mindlessly scrolling through our Twitter feeds and finding that our mood is affected by what we see, but, as with many things, it is often young people who are affected the most. I know many parents who are very concerned about the digital world their children inhabit for much of the time. To a certain extent, that is a natural concern for parents of each new generation, but that does not mean it is unwarranted. The sheer rate of advancement in the technology now available means that young people are growing up in an environment that is completely alien even to relatively young parents, and we do not yet fully understand the consequences.
The impact on mental health for all of us is becoming clearer, with new studies emerging at increasing pace showing a link between technology overuse and poorer mental health. Large-scale studies in the US have shown that adolescents who spend more time on new media, including social media and electronic devices such as smartphones, are more likely to report mental health issues than those who spend less time on such platforms. By comparing those studies, researchers were able to point towards a relationship between depressive symptoms and overuse of technology, particularly among women and girls.
That is just one study of many, and the science is still evolving. Compared with our understanding of other negative health habits, the timeframe for research is relatively short. We have not been using these devices for long enough to fully understand their impact. It took decades for it to emerge that smoking was an addictive habit detrimental to our health. Of course, smoking and modern technology are not directly comparable, but technology is both an opportunity and a risk, and we must ensure we get more of the former and less of the latter.
I hope Members agree that tech companies have a duty of care to the consumers who use their products. I welcome Apple’s recent intervention to introduce a screen time function that allows consumers to monitor and restrict their time or use of certain apps. I hope that will be rolled out on a wider basis by other tech companies. I also hope that social media companies and app creators such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp will stop focusing on developing new ways to demand our attention and push constant notifications at us and start developing ways that make it easier for us to switch off.
In the US, we have seen the rise of the so-called “dumb phone” that can be used in conjunction with a smartphone, allowing users to leave their smartphone at home and go about their business for the day with a featureless phone that only makes and receives calls from the same number. Perhaps we need an easier method than deleting all of our apps to turn off our smartphones’ multiple features so that they operate just as phones.
The big tech companies could be doing much more both to help us mitigate the negative effects of their technology and to help us understand it. In much the same way as the gambling industry and the alcohol industry contribute funds from their profits to mitigate the negative effects of their products, I see no reason why the big technology companies could not contribute to some sort of fund that supports research into the health impact of their products and services and helps to promote healthy use of their technology. That could apply to everything from using a smartphone to combating online abuse and bullying. I hope the Chancellor will be willing to look at that further.
Many tech companies do conduct their own research, and that is good, but these products need to be scrutinised by independent research. No industry should be able to mark its own homework; that applies as much to Google, Apple and Facebook as it does to any other industry. What I am calling for is cross-party consensus that we have not necessarily got our approach right and that more needs to be done to understand the potential impact of technology on our lives. People need power and control over their use of these technologies, instead of feeling that they have become captured by them.
The conversation needs to continue. I am considering setting up an all-party parliamentary group to further these discussions, and if Members in the Chamber would be interested in joining such a group, perhaps they could let me know. The Government have asked the chief medical officer to look at guidance on technology use and they may be considering setting up an internet regulator. I would be interested to hear if the Minister has any update on that in the context of the debate as well as any other thoughts she has on this issue.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) on leading such an interesting debate. It seems that technology has been developing at such a fast rate in the last decade or so that politicians, parents, teachers and many others, as well as rules and legislation, are struggling to keep up. With mobile phones now an integral part of life for most people, it is easy to understand how some may have become addicted to, or at least over reliant on, their tech.
In our work as politicians, we are expected to have a constant presence online, processing thousands of emails and absorbing thousands of messages on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, to name just some of the platforms on which some of us operate. The same is true for those in many roles in the private and public sectors—and that is before we take into account how we use technology in our private lives or in education. Screen time is almost inevitable today, so I will focus my remarks on the effects of too much of it, regardless of whether we use the term “addiction.”
It is well known that social media has an effect on mental health. My right hon. friend the Health and Social Care Secretary highlighted that when he announced this month that the chief medical officer is reviewing the impact that excessive social media can have on children’s mental health. I very much look forward to reading Dame Sally Davies’s findings, and I hope they will help parents—especially those who do not have a good grasp of social media and the internet—to understand better how to manage its use. It is unfortunately not surprising that on platforms where we show only the best of ourselves, our young people find it ever harder to feel as though they are achieving and content with their lives.
It is important not to vilify technology and blame it for all our social ills. Phones helped to bring about revolution in the Arab spring and to document the atrocious use of chemical weapons in Syria, and they have provided us with access to information that our predecessors could only have dreamed about. Social media has brought us all closer together and enabled us to stay in touch with our families and friends in a way that otherwise would not have been possible. People are now much more engaged with their representatives and the political system, which no longer feel so out of reach. Those benefits should concentrate our minds on ensuring that addiction to tech does not get out of hand and that people are trained to help when it does. In my constituency in the Scottish borders, the council is training young people in mental health first aid, which I hope will become an exemplar policy to others and go some way towards reducing the risks of tech.
I welcome the debate. I am more than happy to support the bid from the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West for an all-party parliamentary group and I again congratulate him on securing this important debate.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I again congratulate the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) on initiating the debate. It is very timely, given how much discussion there has been recently about the impact of technology.
Let me give my own perspective. At home, my partner and I have instituted “no phones after 10 o’clock” and “no phones at the dinner table” rules. I have lost count of the number of times that I have been in restaurants and seen couples eating their dinner and then going on their phones and not even speaking to each other. I remember being particularly anxious about social media just before the summer recess. I was reflecting on it when I heard a BBC Radio Scotland programme in which the impact of social media was discussed. A guy whose name I have forgotten spoke about how he was starting to see his life through social media: we was looking at every experience he was having in the context of how it would be represented on his various feeds—Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. I thought, “Oh my goodness, I do exactly the same thing.” That really struck me and it made me stop and reflect, so when I was away on holiday in the Scottish highlands, I tried not to use my mobile phone and not to post online. I was not terribly successful. I even said in a post online that I was not going to be engaging with social media and I still failed, because I had a constituency issue that I needed to deal with.
Selkirk (John Lamont) made excellent points about the way in which people now engage with their elected representatives through social media. I think that it is a very positive thing, but I have to say that when we are on various platforms and getting messages in our personal accounts as well as our MP accounts, sometimes it can be overwhelming. More and more I have found that my staff are managing not only an email inbox but a Facebook account inbox and checking the personal messages on Twitter. On a few occasions, I have bumped into people and they have said, “Oh, I sent you a message about x or y issue and I haven’t had a response.” I say to them, “Did you email me?” and they say, “No, no. I sent you a message on Facebook,” so I have to go and search for that message and it has perhaps ended up in a different filter.
We can all reflect on the impact that technology has had on our lives. The World Health Organisation declared “gaming disorder” an addictive behaviour disorder in June 2018. It is interesting to note that 28 academics wrote to the WHO, protesting that that was poorly informed by science. That feeds into the point made by the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West about a lack of research. His proposal to make gaming companies feed into a fund that properly funds research is really important. We have to remember that many companies, particularly in Scotland, have developed games and make a significant contribution to the economy, but this is about balance. I was a gamer myself as a kid. I still have my Nintendo and my Sega Master System lying in a dusty heap in my mum’s loft. I remember having those very defined thumbs and playing old games such as California Games, but we have moved on a lot and now so much is on our phones. My four-year-old niece is champing at the bit to get a mobile phone, and her parents are resisting that, but she knows how to use every piece of technology in the house.
We have to face the reality that smartphones and smart technology are part of our everyday lives. The question is how we ensure that there is a balance. The world of play has been diminished by technology. People’s fears about letting their children out have increased, although I am not sure that there is really any more threat than there was when I was a kid and did not have a mobile phone. I would go to the local park and be out for hours, and my mother would phone round all the houses to find out where I was. We are now in a very different world, in which parents can contact their children 24/7. That is good in many respects, but we have to look at the wider issue of childhood obesity and children perhaps not going out to play in the same way as they did before.
The debate has been very interesting. I like the hon. Gentleman’s idea of setting up an all-party parliamentary group. I hope that the tech companies will come and discuss that with him. He made a point about what people see now on social media. It was interesting to see the report from the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It is not getting as good a response from the Government as it should be, and it would be good to hear the Minister address some of the issues around fake news—the issues that we saw during the EU referendum. It would be good to hear those being properly addressed, because there is a real risk as people move away from traditional media outlets, away from newspapers, on to social media. We must ensure that the news and information that people get online and on their social media platforms is absolutely accurate and not fake.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) on securing the debate and on making a brilliant opening speech; he set out the issues with clarity and great purpose.
My hon. Friend started with the fact that it is just 10 years since Steve Jobs gave the world the iPhone. I was intrigued to discover, when researching for this debate, that when he introduced that new technology, he made extremely sure that he did not give it to his children. We now face a period in which we will be having this debate with increasing frequency. Statistics that I have seen show that some 40% of people now have some kind of internet-based addiction, whether that involves checking emails, scrolling through Facebook or Twitter, or online gambling. Indeed, figures that I came across this morning show that Generation Z—just slightly younger than yourself, Sir Edward—are now exposed to some 13 hours of media every single day.
We have to recognise that the technology companies that now pervade everyday life will need a very different kind of regulation in the years to come. I was delighted to meet representatives of the Centre for Humane Technology, from the United States, earlier this afternoon. They had a very good analogy. They were looking at various tech scandals around the world and made the point that sometimes, when we look at those symptoms, they are hurricanes, but the addictive technology at the centre is actually more akin to climate change. What we need to do as a legislature is figure out how to introduce a new regulatory regime that will control that climate change. As Tim Berners-Lee said,
“social networks—they are manmade. If they are not serving humanity, they can and should be changed.”
Nearly 30% of children who spend more than three hours on social network sites show symptoms of poor mental health; that is compared with just 12% of children who spend no time on social network sites. It is becoming increasingly obvious to all of us that there is some link between the use of social media, the overuse of social media and, frankly, the mental illness epidemic among many of our young people.
We are also beginning to see significant differences in the ways in which people from different income groups relate to social media. I think that it was Ipsos that this week published research showing that children from better-off families use social media for three and a bit hours less than those from poorer families, and of course there are differences in the way it is used.
With regard to the most dangerous end of the spectrum, we have The Telegraph to thank for a very compelling campaign in which it showed how, at its worst, social media and addictive technology are used to hook children on gambling, particularly casino-style gambling, and to engage children in suicide games, such as the Blue Whale challenge, which has been linked to 100 teenage deaths in Russia. It is no surprise that earlier this year 50 psychologists in America wrote an open letter accusing many of their colleagues of unethical behaviour in advising technology companies on the misuse of addictive tech. If we compare that problem, which is becoming increasingly well defined, with the sort of social contract that we expect from social media firms, we start to see a gulf emerge.
I looked at figures for the taxes paid by social media firms, prepared for me by the Library. It is remarkable how most of the big tech firms in this country are paying very low rates of tax—1.5%, 5%, 6% or 10% at best. That is a long way below even our low levels of corporation tax. We are beginning to see with some clarity the externalities—as economists would call them—or pollution that is created by social media firms, and the taxpayer is expected to clear it up. Unless we begin to change the tax regime and the regulatory regime, this problem will become more pronounced.
The Government need to step up to their responsibilities. The Minister’s former boss, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and others have made a splash in the newspapers, wringing their hands in big interviews, but their concern has not translated into Government action. The Foreign Secretary recently told the newspapers that he thinks there should be safeguards, and that the failure of technology companies to provide these safeguards is “morally wrong” and “unfair on parents”. The chief medical officer has a review in hand and we are waiting with bated breath for the White Paper on internet safety, but I call on the Government to step up.
I have three pleas for the Minister. First, she should look closely at the recommendations that have been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West and by those on the Labour Front Bench who have called for a duty of care to be placed on social media companies. If I bought a chunk of land, built a stadium and put loads of people in it, I would quite rightly be held to some pretty rigorous health and safety legislation. If I build a virtual forum, where I put loads of people, there are no obligations on me whatsoever. We need to ensure that there is a duty of care, which is rooted in some tried and tested legislation that goes back to the early 1970s. We need to ensure that the social media firms are understanding and analysing the dangers that their work can pose to their customers. We need them proactively to put in place measures to ameliorate that risk. That needs to be auditable and punishable with significant fines if these firms fall short of their obligations.
Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
I am not at all unsympathetic to what the right hon. Gentleman is saying. There is a concern here that social media may be associated with poor mental health if it is overused, but there is a second issue to do with potentially addictive behaviour in gaming and social media use. It is very difficult to put in place mechanisms to fine the international companies responsible, or to make them adhere to good behaviour in recognising the risks.
Liam Byrne
That is an important point. The duty of care framework, which has been tried and tested in case law since the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974, is a useful, very British and pragmatic solution to these kinds of problems, because it puts the locus on the company to identify the harm it may cause and then take reasonable steps to prevent it.
I think that it is possible for an individual nation state to take action against these companies. That is what we see with the “NetzDG” law in Germany. One in six Facebook moderators work in Germany, which should not surprise any of us. There is a €50m fine if companies in Germany do not take down hate speech within 24 hours and wipe out all illegal content within seven days. I think it is possible for individual countries to introduce domestic regulations that can have a material effect, both on the safety of our fellow citizens and on the behaviour of some of these big companies. If the Government do not do it, we parliamentarians will have to try to build an international coalition for responsible tech. I hope that my hon. Friend’s all-party parliamentary group can make strides towards not only a cross-party consensus in this Parliament, but brokering an international consensus.
Hannah Bardell
The right hon. Gentleman brings to the debate huge knowledge of the matter. Does he agree that one of the issues with content and responsibility online is pornography? The rise of online pornography has had a huge impact on behaviour, particularly that of young men. I commend to him the book “Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism” by Laura Bates. I went to the Edinburgh international book festival, where she spoke about the rise of incidents in playgrounds, which schools do not necessarily have the tools to deal with, as well as young men becoming addicted to online porn, which is having an effect on their behaviour towards women. Does he agree that that is a serious issue, which we must work together, across parties, the UK and beyond, to tackle?
Liam Byrne
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I have bored the Minister endlessly with this point, but during the 19th century there was not one Factory Act, but 17. As business, technology and marketplaces change, we have to update the legislation.
The Minister knows that if we are to maximise the degree of predictability and certainty for the business world and others, there is a good case for setting out a bill of digital rights for the 21st century. That would include all sorts of useful things, for example enshrining the right to privacy—enshrined in article 8 of the European charter of fundamental rights—and action on algorithmic justice. It could also include some of the initiatives, devices, techniques and legislative approaches, such as the duty of care legislation. I hope that is something that my hon. Friend’s all-party parliamentary group will be able to discuss. If we want a set of principles that can with- stand the test of time, and underpin the reform and re-reform of this sector over the course of the 21st century, we will have to work hard to build that cross-party consensus not only in this country, but around the world.
The Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries (Margot James)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk.
Margot James
What a bad start! I do apologise to the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) and to my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont). Of course, I meant to thank the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West. I share his amazement that it has only been 10 years since the advent of the Apple iPhone. He made an excellent speech, and I identified, as I am sure other hon. Members did, with the examples he gave of the intensity of the relationship that so many of us have with our devices, and how that is—in his view and mine—tipping over to the point where we question whether it is healthy.
The shadow Minister mentioned the Centre for Humane Technology, an excellent organisation, which was founded by scientists and researchers employed by the large social media platforms. One of them, an ethicist working for one of the major platforms, was tasked with trying to bring a more ethical framework to the development of apps and activity on that particular platform. He bowed out with the rather depressing realisation that change was not possible from within and that he would have more effect from outside, so he founded this organisation.
That is a powerful reminder that there is a difficulty in the perceived conflict in companies’ need for more and more of our attention. It really is a competition for attention and, for the companies that get it, the question then is how to keep it. That is the driving force behind the algorithms that are constantly developing and furthering the reach of these platforms into our lives. It is very important that we monitor usage and that we expect more from technology companies in terms of putting right some of the things that are alleged to have gone wrong, as the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West said.
My hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk made the point that although the debate is about addiction, we are also talking more broadly about excessive screen time. There is a scale, running from what might be called a healthy amount of screen time, which might tip over into dependency, over-involvement and straightforward addiction.
Hannah Bardell
Is the Minister aware that some health research has shown that we hold our breath when we are checking our emails and our phones, which denies the brain oxygen?
Margot James
I always learn something new when I am answering debates. I did not know that. I am not sure that I look forward to finding out more about it, but I certainly will.
We are undoubtedly living in an age where mobile devices mean that people feel compelled to be connected at any time. The hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) clearly made that point when she talked about her desire for some off-screen time in her personal time in the countryside, which proved difficult. We have dwelt on the darker side of those devices and platforms during the debate, because we are talking about addiction, but it is incumbent on us to recognise that a great deal of positivity has come forth from those devices.
We are looking at the impact on children and young people, to whom we have a particular responsibility. Youth policy is one of my Department’s responsibilities, so that is close to our hearts. The chief medical officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, is reviewing the impact that internet use can have on children’s mental health. There are no results from that yet, because it was requested only about a month ago by the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who, I am delighted to inform hon. Members, shares the concerns that we have heard and is in a position to do more about them in the Department of Health and Social Care.
Liam Byrne
As the Minister knows, the national health service is under tremendous strain. What arguments is she making to Her Majesty’s Treasury to do something about the low rates of tax paid by those companies, so that there is money to do something about the problem?
Margot James
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, tax is a matter for the Treasury. The Chancellor indicated that he was looking at a digital services tax in his speech a few weeks ago. His first priority is to gain international agreement for the fairer taxation of technology companies, particularly these platforms. Actually, I should retract that; I do not think that he said particularly these platforms, but he did say that he wanted an international agreement for the fairer taxation of technology companies as his first priority. If he does not get that, I am told that he will introduce a tax unilaterally in the United Kingdom.
The health review will cover important and diverse issues, including cyber-bullying, online gaming, sleep problems and problematic internet use. I gather that the chief medical officer’s report will be published next year, and I will try to get a handle on when within that 12-month period we can expect it.
The Department of Health and Social Care has also reviewed evidence on the impact that social media can have on children, which showed that those who spend more than three hours using social media on school days are twice as likely to report high or very high scores for mental ill-health. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) said that he had seen research showing a socio-economic difference in the amount of screen time, which, along with the research I have mentioned about some sort of causal link in the time spent, shows that digital technology is in danger of widening the social gaps in society, although it has the potential to bring people together. We obviously need to work to ensure that the latter prevails. The Government have made children and young people’s mental health a top priority for the NHS, and a major programme to improve access to specialist services is supported by £1.4 billion of new funding.
We are also looking at the use of smartphones in schools, which I know inspires strong passions. I have seen some initial results from that analysis, and most schools have rules in place that require that smartphones are not visible during school hours. We need to see more research on whether that is universally applied.
The Government believe that schools are best placed to make decisions about how best to use technology. Headteachers are empowered to manage mobile phone usage. Many schools and parents would appreciate more guidance, however, which we are working on across Government, inspired by the commission of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to the chief medical officer to advise on the mental health impact of social media and smartphone usage.
On internet safety in the wider sense, the overuse of technology and concerns about online harms are not limited to young people. Our forthcoming joint Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Home Office White Paper will be published in the winter. It will set out a range of legislative and non-legislative measures and will detail how we propose to tackle online harms. It will set clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep citizens safer.
The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill asked whether we would look to place a duty of care on social media platforms. That route is certainly worthy of consideration. It is a proven method in other areas, and we will look at its relevance to the online world. Working with the Department of Health and Social Care and across Government, we will develop proposals targeted at improving the ability of users. We are also reforming the UK council for child internet safety so that it no longer focuses exclusively on children. Children will continue to be a top priority, but its remit will be widened.
In response to the hon. Member for Livingston, video games are indeed enjoyed by a large number of people across the UK. For the majority of people, that is a recreational activity, but research shows that, for a minority, their gaming can become excessive, to the extent that they prioritise it over other activities and experience negative effects from it. In recognition of that, as the hon. Lady mentioned, the World Health Organisation has recognised the potential to diagnose gaming disorder in some circumstances. It has not reached a conclusion yet, but I gather that it is working on it. Through its internet safety strategy, my Department is working to improve online safety in games, including by promoting healthy and responsible gaming. To do that, we will work closely with the gaming industry and organisations such as the Video Standards Council. Gaming will also be an important part of our internet safety White Paper.
On isolation and loneliness, I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society, my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch). She has taken responsibility for tackling loneliness, which affects between 5% and 18% of the UK population, and social media is often highlighted as a cause. The strategy includes how Government can set a framework to enable local authorities, the third sector and businesses to support people’s social health.
Research suggests that the reality of social media and its connection to people’s relationships is nuanced and that how negative or positive the impact is depends on which social media service is being used and whether it is substituting for or complementing real-life interactions. For example, there are applications that help new mothers to stay more connected through difficult early stages of parenthood and products that use artificial intelligence to provide real-life experiences for those unable to leave their homes. If used correctly, the technology has real potential to break down barriers and improve the situation that isolated people might be exposed to. That is why social media companies are a core part of initiatives to tackle isolation. Digital means of bringing people together can be especially important to people with mobility problems and families separated by distance.
Technology can be and largely is a powerful force for good. It serves humanity, spreads ideas, and enhances freedom and opportunity across the world. However, what we have heard today gives us great pause for thought. It is informing our deliberations on online safety and I look forward to the continued debate with colleagues here in this Chamber and beyond as we develop our White Paper. We look forward to hearing their further thoughts on the various actions that we might take.
Ged Killen
I see that the Division bells have just rung, and I know that proceedings are running late, so I do not intend to use my full time this afternoon.
We have had an excellent debate and I have learned a lot of new things, particularly from the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) about my breathing and using technology, which I look forward to looking into further, and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who has given me much to think about in my new APPG. I thank the Minister for coming here today. There is a lot of agreement on this issue and I look forward to working with her and other Members on it.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered addictive technology.
Written Statements
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Mutual Deferred Shares
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)
The Government have decided not to lay the secondary legislation required to give effect to the provisions in the Mutuals’ Deferred Shares Act 2015, which enable mutual insurers to raise equity by issuing mutual deferred shares (MDS). The Government have consulted widely with industry representatives in reaching their decision. During that consultation, industry representatives informed the Government that mutual insurers would only issue MDS if they qualified as tier 1 regulatory capital and would not alter the tax status of any mutual that issued MDS. It has not been possible to design MDS which meet both these criteria. The Government have, therefore, decided not to lay the regulations. The Government would reconsider their position if any material factors changed in the future.
[HCWS1026]
Prison Service Pay Review Body: Interim Chair
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I am pleased to announce that the Prime Minister has appointed Mr Jerry Cope as interim chair of the Prison Service Pay Review Body for a period of one year which commenced on 10 September 2018 and which ends on 9 September 2019. The appointment has been made in accordance with the governance code on public appointments.
Mr Cope will ensure that the Pay Review Body has the necessary leadership while a recruitment campaign takes place to identify a permanent chair.
[HCWS1025]
Independent Reporting Commission
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Karen Bradley)
I have received the first substantive report from the Independent Reporting Commission (IRC).
The IRC was established by the UK Government and the Irish Government by way of an international treaty to report on progress towards ending paramilitary activity connected with Northern Ireland. This emanated from the Fresh Start agreement of November 2015. The agreement set out the Northern Ireland Executive’s responsibility for tackling paramilitary activity and associated criminality. This work is being taken forward through a Northern Ireland Executive action plan which contains 43 recommendations.
This is a significant report which benchmarks the progress which has been achieved to date and reminds us of the challenging work still to be done to ensure that communities are freed from the threat of paramilitarism.
The absence of a functioning Executive has obviously had an impact on this important work. Despite intensive efforts it has not yet been possible for the parties in Northern Ireland to reach political agreement. I remain resolute in finding a way forward in relation to that. This is why I am taking legislation through this House to provide for a limited period in which the parties can engage in talks and form an Executive.
I have today presented this report, along with the IRC’s annual report and accounts for 2017-18, to Parliament.
I would like to thank the commissioners for all of their work to date.
[HCWS1027]
House of Lords
Introduction: The Lord Bishop of Bristol
Child Citizenship Fees
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on children of the £1,012 fee to apply to register their entitlement to British citizenship.
Baroness Manzoor (Con)
My Lords, the Home Office duty to have regard to a child’s best interest is considered when developing immigration and nationality fees policy, and is met through the waivers and exceptions in place. This position is reviewed in the policy equality statements that accompany each year’s fee charges. The Home Office will consider representations made on child citizenship fees in this year’s fees review.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister, but no child rights impact assessment has been published. How can the Government meet their duty under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to give primary consideration to the best interests of the child when they fail to provide that assessment of the “huge” registration fee, to quote the Home Secretary? It effectively denies children born in this country their statutory right to citizenship, thereby undermining their sense of security, identity and belonging, and potentially creating a new Windrush generation.
Baroness Manzoor
My Lords, we understand the need that children and young people have to establish a secure status for their future when they have been in the UK for most of their lives. The published impact assessment considers the overall impact of immigration and nationality fee changes and estimates the overall costs and benefits to the UK economy. It assesses the impact of fee changes not on the individual applicant, but rather on the UK as a whole. Given the large number of fees included, results are presented at an aggregated level.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, on Thursday, in response to a question from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, the noble Baroness said,
“the Government believe that it is right for those who use and benefit directly from the UK immigration system to make an appropriate contribution towards meeting the costs”.—[Official Report, 18/10/18; col. 564.]
I understand that of the £1,012 fee that is the subject of this Question, £372 represents the administrative cost. Is the £640 profit—almost two-thirds—“appropriate”, to use the noble Baroness’s term, or are the rights of the child under international law trumped by Home Office profit?
Baroness Manzoor
No, my Lords, it is not, because we have to take a whole-system approach to fees, immigration and citizenship. I totally take on board that compelling points have been persuasively made in both Houses, including in our June debate. I have sought a commitment that the Home Office will look at the issue of charges. It genuinely understands why these points are being made and the importance attached to them, and will consider them as part of its annual review of immigration and nationality fees.
The Lord Bishop of Ely
My Lords, has the Minister been in contact with the many school leaders who say that there are issues not only around identity, but around the economic harm done to children through food insecurity and their basic needs not being met? I wonder whether, even ahead of the review, an undertaking might be given to waive fees for the poorest children, particularly those who are looked after.
Baroness Manzoor
The right reverend Prelate has made an important point. Of course the Home Office uses fee waivers in compassionate cases and will take compelling financial circumstances into consideration.
Lord Cormack (Con)
Why are the individual circumstances of people on whom this fee has a great impact not taken into account? Surely that is a very simple question.
Baroness Manzoor
My Lords, people’s individual circumstances are looked at and taken into account where necessary and appropriate.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister used the expression “whole-system approach” in answer to a question asking why the Home Office was making a profit out of these children. I am puzzled by what that term means. Could she explain? To me it is complete gobbledegook.
Baroness Manzoor
My Lords, it is not gobbledegook because any changes to the charging structure have financial consequences that the Home Office must consider alongside other pressures. It is important to look at where the charges impact. Where fees are set above costs, the additional income is used to help fund and maintain the function of an effective wider immigration system.
Baroness Manzoor
If I may, I will give two examples. Fees for EEA nationals have been set below cost to reflect the agreements in place with the EU. Fees for short-term visas, our largest volume application route, reflect the importance to our economy of visitors to the UK.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister has missed the entire point of this Question—that these children are already UK citizens and are just trying to regularise their position to get the paperwork that they need. I gather that the Government are making a profit of around 800% out of these applications. Does she really think it is fair to charge that amount of money to children who are already UK citizens?
Baroness Manzoor
My Lords, I understand the Question, as does the Home Office, and I believe that I have answered the questions that have been put to me. It is understandable that children have to pay higher fees. The principle of charging above the cost for children to register as British citizens has been in place for more than a decade and has been approved by Parliament. We are reviewing all our fees and will look at the regulations in March 2019. I understand that those regulations will come before the House before they can take effect.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, the Minister will be painfully aware of the sentiments of a lot of people in this House on this subject, including a great many people sitting on the Benches behind her, as was evident in June. In the light of that, we are grateful that the Chief Inspector of Immigration is undertaking a review. Can the Minister give an indication of when that review will be complete and what options the Government are considering to mitigate this very unfortunate situation?
Baroness Manzoor
As I said, any changes will need to be set in new secondary legislation before they can come into effect, and the next planned date for new immigration fee legislation is March 2019.
Brexit: Food Security
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of food security following Brexit.
The Lord Bishop of Salisbury
I beg leave to ask the Question in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who has been detained on other business.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)
My Lords, Defra regularly assesses the security of food supply and has well-established relationships with industry on supply chain resilience. The UK has a high degree of food security, as shown by the UK Food Security Assessment. This is built on access to diverse sources of supply, including our domestic production. I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. Consumers will continue to have a wide choice of food after we leave the EU.
The Lord Bishop of Salisbury
I thank the Minister for his Answer. We used to think that the expansion of food production in Britain was in the national interest, but UK self-sufficiency in food has declined steadily for more than 30 years, with only about 62% of food produced by British farmers. Given the environmental impact of importing food, how will the Government gain political, economic and environmental benefits in terms of food after Brexit?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
Obviously, your Lordships are awaiting the arrival of the Agriculture Bill in this House. We currently have a production-to-supply ratio of 60% for all food and 75% for indigenous-type foods. We certainly want self-reliant agriculture; it is essential that we produce food sustainably both at home and abroad. That is why we are working with technology and increasing productivity to increase our production at home and abroad.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lords, the cost of the Government’s “eatwell plate” for a healthy diet is already completely unaffordable for the poorest 20% of our population. What measures do the Government have in place so that, if prices go up after Brexit, we do not make a bad situation worse? Does the Minister agree that it is shocking that in this morning’s meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee, not one of the four Ministers present has responsibility for hunger in the UK? The Ministers represented the Cabinet Office, DfID, Defra and the DWP.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
That is why £95 billion a year is spent on working-age welfare benefits, for instance. It is absolutely essential that we have good food standards—that is, healthy and affordable food. I agree that it is important that the Government keep these matters under review, which is why part of the assessment covers the very points drawn out by the noble Baroness.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, the UK sources 30% of its food from the EU and a further 11% from deals negotiated by the EU. Does the Minister accept that whatever the outcome of negotiations, the UK will be obliged to conduct more border checks on food supplies than is currently the case? Can he say with confidence that sufficient border staff, vets and food safety inspectors have been recruited to ensure that there are no delays and therefore no further food shortages as a result of a no-deal Brexit?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, there will not be food shortages because of Brexit. Our food industry in this country is very sophisticated, with plenty of experience and mechanisms around the world to source foods. I am surprised by the noble Baroness’s question. In truth, that is why we have, and are recorded to have, this resilience in food supply. We will not have food shortages. We already produce a very large amount of food; the rest of our food will come from sources around the world.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, at the Mayor of London’s Food Board, we produced a strategy for sustainable food for London; I wonder whether the Government would like a copy of it. Frankly, the idea that we will have American produce that none of us wants to eat is horrifying to most of us. Would the Minister like a copy of that sustainable strategy?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
I am always interested in any material the noble Baroness wishes to supply me with, but all of the standards—whether on chlorinated chicken or hormone-induced beef—are already in the EU withdrawal Bill. All these things are on our statute books, so the idea that we are going to start trade arrangements which compromise the very high standards we have in this country will not take place.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the board of WRAP, which has helped considerably to reduce the amount of good food thrown away in this country. I remind the noble Lord we are signatories to the SDGs, and SDG 12 commits us to halving our food waste by 2030. May I ask my noble friend the Minister how he thinks we might be able to do that?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
There are a number of ways in which we must address food waste. Each household is wasting a huge amount of food, on average something like £700 a year. The Government have set up a pilot scheme which they are supporting with £15 million of additional funding. This is because already 43,000 tonnes of surplus food is redistributed from retailers and food manufactures every year. We think a further 100,000 tonnes of food, equating to 250 million meals a year, is edible and should be redistributed. Wasting food is an unconscionable thing, and we want this pilot scheme to work in order to reduce it.
Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)
My Lords, would it not be possible for the Government to set themselves a target bracket of nutritional self-sufficiency which ensures we are neither too dependent on imports nor, at the other end of the scale, too dependent on our own productive capabilities and our own unpredictable weather? Such a bracket would be very useful as a target for the Government.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
I think there is a distinction between food security and self-sufficiency. Clearly, given the weather in our country, and indeed disease, I think the most important thing is that we have a wide range of sources for food, because that is how we will get food security. With 75% of indigenous-type foods produced in this country, we produce excellent food and drink—it is one of the largest sectors—and we should be proud of it, and of course I encourage the consumption of British food and drink.
Online Anonymity
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Balfe
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to legislate to prevent anonymous social media accounts and anonymous online forum posts.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)
My Lords, online anonymity is an important part of a free and open internet, but being anonymous online does not give anyone the right to abuse others. The Government have made it clear that social media companies should have processes in place to tackle anonymous abuse on their platforms. The joint DCMS/Home Office White Paper will be published in the winter, detailing legislative and non-legislative measures to tackle online harms and setting clear responsibilities for tech companies.
Lord Balfe (Con)
I thank the Minister for his reply. I am sure that, like me, he is appalled at the way electronic media has been used to send threats of death as well as physical and often sexual violence to people, and disproportionately to women. We know the possibility now exists to track down the senders of such messages. Can the Minister assure me that in the review currently being undertaken, serious consideration will be given to legislation providing for the unmasking and criminal prosecution of those sending hate messages?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, my noble friend raises an important point, and of course we all agree that online abuse is distressing and unacceptable. The issue is where this abuse becomes criminal and unacceptable. There is a balance to be struck. As far as anonymity is concerned, when it becomes criminal behaviour there are means by which people who do this anonymously can be traced. In fact, the vast majority of people who think they are doing these things anonymously are actually traceable. It is only the most devious and malevolent people who use technology to avoid being traced, but they are a very small minority. As far as the online harm review is concerned, we will be looking at a number of online harms, including abuse, and looking at where legislation or other non-legislative measures are necessary.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, I want to be helpful for a change, and I hope that I shall get a positive response from the Minister. Can I pass on a suggestion that I picked up, along with the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe? Will the Minister consider following the example of some other countries in Europe and appoint an internet ombudsman?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I am grateful for that positive suggestion, which we will certainly consider. I do not know what our position on that is; I am not completely clear about what the role of an internet ombudsman would be. Normally where questions about how to regulate the internet are concerned, they become much more complicated than they first appear.
Lord Addington (LD)
Will the Minister take this chance to confirm that the liberal principle, that you can do what you like until it affects somebody else, will be written into any further legislation? Will the Government make sure that that is a key consideration? If they do, much of the concern will go away and reassurance will be given.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
“Do as you would be done by” is a sensible basis for progressing. However, there are people who would not subscribe to that—I think “evil” is the correct word for them—and we have to take those into account. The Law Commission is looking at the body of law which allows the authorities to trace people to make sure that it is effective. It will publish its first report at the beginning of November. We will make sure that the law is capable of pursuing those who will not follow the precept mentioned by the noble Lord.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, in such instances as we are imagining in a Question like this, there are the individuals who, under the cloak of anonymity, use the internet for purposes that may be legitimate or not, but there are also the platforms that host those messages. I believe that in Germany a mechanism is used to make it mandatory on the part of platforms to shut down harmful messages within a certain time beyond which fines are imposed and measures taken. Might the Minister and Government consider such a device?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
The noble Lord is right. I believe that the law in Germany is that one has to take down abusive content within eight hours once the host has been informed of it. There is some doubt whether that complies with EU law. Nevertheless, it is something we will look at, because the social media code of practice also includes such measures, which at the moment are voluntary. Many of the large and well-known media sites try to comply with such things; the problem is that new sites appear and gain huge scale very quickly and do not always behave in the same way. The whole point of the White Paper which will be published in the winter is to look at areas where we might need legislation.
Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, we seem to take it as read that anonymity is a necessary and virtuous element of the web. Should we not question that assumption? It seems the only real necessity for it is to allow people in a totalitarian state to challenge their Government; otherwise, I cannot see why in a free and open society we should not have free and open communication. People would then be shamed out of the terrible conduct that is now going on.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I say with all due respect that I do not think that it is quite as simple as my noble friend suggests. For example, in an abusive relationship, should a woman—it is usually but not always women—not be able to ask for advice and have discussions with other people anonymously? Similarly, people could report crime anonymously. There are occasions where being able to go online anonymously may be a good thing.
Health: Flu Vaccines
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Naseby
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether there is any shortage of flu vaccines; and if so, what steps they are taking to rectify this.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord O’Shaughnessy) (Con)
My Lords, there is no overall shortage of flu vaccines. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended that the newly available adjuvanted trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine, or aTIV, is the most effective vaccine for the over-65s. To enable the vaccine to be available this year, it has been necessary for the manufacturer to stagger deliveries between September and November. Everybody who wants to be vaccinated should be able to do so before December.
Lord Naseby (Con)
I thank my noble friend for that Answer, but how is it, given the statement from NHS England that last year was the worst for deaths for seven years at 15,000, that here we are with a new vaccine geared to those most at risk—I happen to be one and I declare an interest—yet I go into my GP, a brilliant practice in Potton, Greensands, and there are no vaccines available and no notice of exactly when those vaccines will come? Can my noble friend tell me and other patients whether those vaccines are actually going to be available in sufficient time for all patients at risk to be vaccinated before 1 December? Unless that is done, they will be useless to us in the older age group.
Lord O’Shaughnessy
I take my noble friend’s point very seriously. It is worth stating that the reason for moving to this new vaccine is precisely because it is more effective. Unfortunately, the response rates for the vaccine that was used in the over-65s last year were not as high as hoped. Indeed, there were quite a number of admissions to intensive care units of that age group. That is the reason for moving to the vaccine, but because it is the first year it has been available, it has been necessary, because of global demand, to stagger the delivery, as I said. GPs and pharmacies were informed of this staggering of deliveries at the beginning of the year. I can tell my noble friend that 8.2 million doses have already been ordered for this age group, of which 4.9 million have already been delivered, against around 7.6 million used last year. So there is adequate supply, and it will be delivered to all GPs and pharmacies as necessary to meet the demand by the end of November, so that by the beginning of December anybody who wants that vaccination should be able to access it.
Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister appreciate that by delaying the availability of a vaccine for the over-65s, the Department of Health is increasing the risk of that group of people contracting flu? Can he explain to the House why it has taken the decision not to have it available until early December?
Lord O’Shaughnessy
I am very happy to tell the House: it was on the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which is precisely where we get expert advice on how to act. The reason for moving to this new vaccine is the one I set out. The reason that the delivery is staggered, but to be completed by the end of November, is because it is from December into January that we have the peak of influenza in this country. The Deputy Chief Medical Officer said:
“Based on many years of surveillance in the UK it is highly unusual for widespread community flu activity to become significant or substantial before the start of September”.
It is on that clinical advice that this decision has been taken.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, high-street pharmacies are offering flu jab appointments to the public, as are pharmacies in larger supermarkets. This morning I was able to book several dummy appointments online with several—just for research, noble Lords will understand. It would appear that all of those were successful, so those particular retail pharmacies have no problem providing vaccine for older people. Can the Minister tell the House whether the market for vaccines is an open market, or do GPs and the NHS get preferential treatment? We know that CCGs commission pharmacies for some of the work that they do. Is the flu vaccine included in that CCG commission? Would that tell us what proportion of the population would choose the retail route rather than the GP route?
Lord O’Shaughnessy
First, let me just clarify that the quotation from my last answer should have ended,
“before the start of December”.
It would be terribly alarming if it was September: it was December and I am happy to write to noble Lords with those details.
As for how the vaccine is secured, it is done on the open market. GPs and pharmacies buy it directly from the manufacturer, which in this case is Seqirus. As I have said, we have checked with the manufacturer, which has confirmed that there is adequate supply available for this country. Seqirus has, indeed, made extra supply available in response to the demand we have heard discussed today.
Lord Geddes (Con)
Could my noble friend advise the House why the flu vaccination parliamentary day on 9 October was cancelled at the last minute?
Baroness Thornton (Lab)
I think the answer to the noble Lord, Lord Geddes, is actually that they ran out of jabs. I declare an interest as a member of a CCG. It is true that there has been some confusion about when people could get their flu jabs. How will the Minister ensure that a significant number of the most vulnerable people actually get their flu jabs? He said in his first Answer that the take-up was not as good as it should have been last year, so that seems very important. Secondly, how are we to ensure that NHS staff take up the flu jab as they should, too?
Lord O'Shaughnessy
First, take-up was actually at its highest level ever last year. The issue was the effectiveness of the vaccine, which is why the committee’s recommendation was to move to this new vaccine. In terms of confusion about who can get the flu jab, it is clear that we have the most comprehensive flu vaccination programme in Europe. Anybody who has gone to a GP’s surgery or pharmacy and has not been able to access it up to now will—or should—have been told when they can come back and when new supplies will be available. As I said, it is about making sure that can happen before the end of November. We had a fantastic take-up among NHS staff this year; the jab is freely available to NHS staff, social care staff and, for the first time this year, hospice staff.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, the reason why the vaccine last year was not as effective was that in the majority of older people, the immune response was poor. The enhanced vaccination, although effective for only three strains of viruses—as opposed to four, before it was enhanced—is better to wait for because it will be more effective in older people. It is the older people that the flu kills so because there is a shortage of supply, Scotland took the view that it will be available only to the over-75s. Does the Minister agree that it is worth waiting for?
Lord O'Shaughnessy
I thank the noble Lord for that point but it is important to point out that the over-65s will not have long to wait and that anybody who wants to have it will be able to do so by the end of November, in time for the flu season.
Draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill Committee
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
That it is expedient that a joint committee of Lords and Commons be appointed to consider and report on the Draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill presented to both Houses on 23 July (Cm 9635).
Draft Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill Committee
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
That it is expedient that a joint committee of Lords and Commons be appointed to consider and report on the Draft Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill presented to both Houses on 18 October (Cm 9710).
Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Bill
Tuesday 23rd October 2018
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)
My Lords, I understand that no amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment be discharged.
Jamal Khashoggi
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in the other place yesterday evening by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The Statement is as follows:
“Mr Speaker, with your permission, I will make a Statement on the death of Jamal Khashoggi. From the moment that he was reported missing after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October, extremely disturbing reports emerged about his fate. On Friday, we received confirmation that Mr Khashoggi had indeed suffered a violent death, and the Saudi Foreign Minister has since described it as murder. The Government condemn his killing in the strongest possible terms. Today, the thoughts and prayers of the whole House are with his fiancée, his family and his friends, who were left to worry for more than two weeks, only to have their worst fears confirmed. After his disappearance, the Government made it clear that Saudi Arabia must co-operate with Turkey and conduct a full and credible investigation. Anyone found responsible for any offence must be held fully accountable.
On top of our concerns about the appalling brutality involved lie two other points. First, Mr Khashoggi’s horrific treatment was inflicted by people who work for a Government with whom we have close relations; and secondly, as well as being a critic of the Saudi Government, he was a journalist. At the time of his death, Mr Khashoggi wrote for the Washington Post and had contributed to the Guardian. Because in this country we believe in freedom of expression and a free media, the protection of journalists who are simply doing their job is of paramount concern. On 9 October, I conveyed this message to the Saudi ambassador in person and to the Saudi Foreign Minister by telephone. I instructed the British ambassador in Riyadh to emphasise our strength of feeling to the Saudi Government at every level. Last week, my right honourable friend the International Trade Secretary cancelled his attendance at a forthcoming conference in Riyadh. On 17 October, I met Fred Ryan, the chief executive of the Washington Post, and I spoke again to the Saudi Foreign Minister this weekend.
On Friday, the Saudi Government released the preliminary findings of their investigation. They later announced the arrest of 18 people and the sacking of two senior officials, which is an important start to the process of accountability. But I will say frankly to this House that the claim that Mr Khashoggi died in a fight does not amount to a credible explanation. There remains an urgent need to establish exactly what happened on 2 October and thereafter.
The incident happened on Turkish soil, so it is right that the investigation is being led by the Government of Turkey. They now need to establish who authorised the dispatch of 15 officials from Saudi Arabia to Turkey; when the Government in Riyadh first learned of Mr Khashoggi’s death; why there was a delay in allowing Turkish investigators to enter the consulate; and why it took until 19 October to disclose that Mr Khashoggi had died 17 days earlier. This matters because only after a full investigation will it be possible to apportion responsibility and ensure that any crimes are punished following proper process.
Last week, I spoke to both my French and German counterparts, and the House will have noticed the strong statement jointly released by Britain, France and Germany. The actions Britain and our allies take will depend on two things: first, the credibility of the final explanation given by Saudi Arabia; and secondly, our confidence that such an appalling episode cannot—indeed, will not—be repeated. We will, of course, wait for the final outcome of the investigation before making any decisions.
Honourable Members know that we have an important strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, involving defence and security co-operation, which has saved lives on the streets of Britain. We also have a trading partnership that supports thousands of jobs. While we have been thoughtful and considered in our response, I have also been clear that, if the appalling stories we are reading turn out to be true, they are fundamentally incompatible with our values, and we will act accordingly. Indeed, such reports are also incompatible with Saudi Arabia’s own stated goal of progress and renewal. That is why the extent to which Saudi Arabia is able to convince us that it remains committed to that progress will ultimately determine the response of the United Kingdom and its allies, and we will continue to convey our strength of feeling on this issue to every level of the Saudi leadership.
In his final column, published in the Washington Post after his death, Jamal Khashoggi lamented the lack of freedom of expression in the Arab world. Let us make sure that the lessons learned and actions taken following his death at least progress and honour his life’s work. I commend this Statement to the House”.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating yesterday’s Statement. I start by expressing my and my colleagues’ deeply felt condolences to Mr Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice, and all his family.
The one thing that has been absolutely clear from the beginning of this horrific episode is that a crime was committed. There was never any doubt about that. The Saudi kingdom has provided conflicting accounts of what happened, and after weeks of maintaining that he was alive the Saudis now say that the 59 year-old was killed in a rogue operation. I suspect that the only thing we can be certain of is that President Trump will find that answer credible.
The fact is that an investigation is being conducted, and yesterday the Foreign Secretary said he would not decide what actions to take until that investigation, conducted by the Government of Turkey, had been completed. The Foreign Secretary also reminded us what was at stake, including counterterrorism and the jobs of people in this country; he said we were dependent on trade with Saudi Arabia. However, we also need to understand that the failure to act has consequences—consequences for the international rule of law.
This morning President Erdoğan of Turkey told MPs from his ruling party that the killing of Jamal al-Khashoggi was planned days in advance. He confirmed that Turkey had strong evidence that he was killed in a premeditated and savage murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October. What is the Government’s assessment of the conclusions reached by Turkey in the report made this morning? What is the Government’s opinion of Turkey’s call for the suspects to be tried in Istanbul? Are the Government backing Turkey’s demand that Saudi Arabia provide answers about where Mr Khashoggi’s body is or was and who ordered the operation?
We on these Benches have consistently raised our concern over Saudi actions, including its strategy in Yemen, the doubling of the rate of executions, the kidnap of the Lebanese Prime Minister, the jailing of women and the threats to behead them simply for protesting for their human rights, and the freezing of trade with Canada when it had the temerity to criticise that policy. All these things show a Crown Prince with no respect for the rule of law or for international boundaries, and no tolerance of dissent.
Now that we have the conclusions of Turkey’s investigation, what are the consequences that were promised by the Foreign Secretary? What further steps will the Government take with our allies to help bring those responsible for this murder to account? Will the Government accept that the UK arms sales for use in the war in Yemen must be suspended pending a comprehensive UN-led investigation? This is not a matter that we can leave any longer to the Saudi authorities. More than two years since the UK presented its draft resolution to the UN demanding a ceasefire in Yemen, will the Government now ignore the informal Saudi veto that has applied to that resolution and submit it to the Security Council?
These events have shown us how important it is to act. We must show Saudi Arabia that there are consequences from its actions. As my right honourable friend Emily Thornberry said yesterday, that is the way,
“to end its impunity and persuade it to change its ways”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/10/18; col. 81.]
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I join in the condemnation of what has happened and the way it has been covered up by the Saudis for the first two weeks. I congratulate the Government on the withdrawal of Liam Fox’s participation in the forthcoming investment conference—although it seemed unfortunate that it was not announced earlier. We waited until a number of other Governments and companies had announced their withdrawal before finally we withdrew too.
We on these Benches recognise the importance of our relationship with Saudi Arabia and with the other Gulf states, although I recall that one of the many tensions inside the coalition was that many of us on the Liberal Democrat side felt that some of our Conservative colleagues were too close, personally and politically, to the Gulf autocracies and the Saudi royal family, and too hostile to Iran. We need as a Government to maintain a balance in Middle East politics which does not entirely follow the hard Saudi line and cut the Iranian Government out, complicated although that is.
I join the Lord, Lord Collins, in remarking that indirect involvement in the Yemen war by supporting Saudi armed forces and supplying weapons for delivery in Yemen has to some extent compromised our position in international relations. We talk about the importance of our economic relationship, but that relationship is overwhelmingly dependent on arms sales. The long-term question hanging over that is: who is dependent on whom when you have that sort of one-sided relationship?
I welcome and support the Government’s announcement of their joint position with the French and German Governments. Clearly, British influence is maximised when we work with others. I see from the Financial Times this morning that the German Government have announced a suspension of arms sales. Have we discussed parallel action with them, and have the British Government yet considered whether they should join the Germans in suspending arms sales until this is sorted out?
There is a slightly surreal element in hearing day by day, as we did yesterday in the Prime Minister’s Statement, the Government reporting with strong approval that we have achieved a joint agreement with our French and German allies on this, that or the other—the Prime Minister’s Statement did that in two places—while at the same time the Foreign Secretary describes the European Union as like the Soviet Union, from which we must escape, and a number of Conservative Ministers, and more Conservative MPs, regard the European Union as fundamentally hostile to Britain.
How one has a foreign policy with any degree of coherence when such contradictions are deeply embedded is a little beyond my understanding. The incoherence of British policy on the Middle East is only part of the incoherence of British foreign policy as a whole. The alternative—following the US lead, rather than co-operating with our European partners—seems to us on these Benches even more doubtful under President Trump, in particular given some of the close links between the Trump family and the Saudi Arabian royal family.
This was an attack on a journalist, as the Minister said. There are many other attacks on journalists in the world and, sadly, there have been three murderous attacks on journalists that I can think of in three different European Union member countries in the past two years. I hope that the Government, in their commitment to a free media and a free press, will attempt to maintain our standards on issues arising from other attacks on journalists around the world. I remind the Minister—I am sure that he is aware—that in a campaign speech in the west of the United States last week, President Trump praised a Congressman who had violently assaulted a British Guardian journalist at one of his meetings. Encouragement of violence against journalists by the American President is extremely dangerous to democracy. Are the British Government considering making that point at the highest possible level in the US Administration?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I thank both noble Lords for their statements. I appreciate that Members of this House, and of the other place, stand together in solidarity to ensure that the tragic victim of this murder ultimately sees true justice, and in condolence and support for his family and friends. Noble Lords will appreciate that recent events are moving very quickly. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, referred to the statement made earlier today by President Erdogan of Turkey, in which he revealed some further information about their investigation. The full report has yet to be released, but I assure the noble Lord and your Lordships’ House that we fully support the Turkish investigation into this case. In the representations made by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary, our ambassador to Riyadh and others, we have consistently reminded the Saudi administration—at the highest level—of the need for their full co-operation with the investigation by the Turkish authorities. We continue to follow that very closely.
Having heard and read the statement this morning, I share the deep concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Collins—and, I am sure, felt by every Member of your Lordships’ House—about the detail of what is unravelling. There has to be credibility in the Saudi statement. Looking back at the accounts over recent weeks, what started as a denial translated into an accidental attack when a fight ensued. The Saudi Foreign Minister has now admitted that it was a “murder”—that is his word. It is appropriate that we see the Turkish investigation present its full results.
In response to the points made about the UK’s position, I reiterate the point made by the Foreign Secretary. We are looking carefully at the full outcomes and there will be consequences once the report is released. The noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Wallace, rightly raised the issue of arms sales. In my capacity as Human Rights Minister, I have spoken from the Dispatch Box about the situation in Yemen. I am taking a close look at arms sales generally and drawing the attention of colleagues in the Foreign Office to the issue. The United Kingdom Government will look at all the response options currently available. Members in the other place raised the issue of the Magnitsky clauses in the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill. Noble Lords will know why we cannot enact these mechanisms until we leave the European Union. Both noble Lords mentioned sanctions policy and working with our European partners. I assure them that this is under discussion.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, raised the issue of working with EU partners. I reiterate the point made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. Practical progress is being made with our EU partners on our leaving the EU, but it is important to underline the importance of that relationship. Notwithstanding our differences in certain parts of the negotiation, we have stood firm when it matters. The noble Lord—and all noble Lords—will recall the time of the Iran nuclear deal, when Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister May and President Macron issued a joint statement. It was entirely appropriate on the grave matter of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and we have again stood firm with Germany and France and issued a joint statement. That underlines the strength of our relationship with our European Union partners, notwithstanding our withdrawal from the EU.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, also rightly raised the issue of strategic partnership. We share much with Saudi Arabia: trade, defence and security, and intelligence. Much of that has also helped us to maintain a level of safety and security on our streets. However, the UK takes great pride in human rights, particularly the defence of journalists and their right to report freely and to criticise Governments and individuals within Governments. It is right that we stand up for those rights wherever they may be usurped. I assure noble Lords that that remains a key priority in my portfolio as Minister for Human Rights.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
Will my noble friend press the Saudi Government to produce the body for independent examination? They must know where it is, and once it has been inspected, we will all have a much clearer view as to how he died.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My noble friend raises an important point. I talked earlier about the situation of Jamal Khashoggi’s family, who for several weeks did not know what his fate was. I assure my noble friend that, with Turkey, we continue to press on this important issue. Indeed, President Erdogan also made this point during his statement earlier today. It is important now to ensure that the full facts of the murder can be brought to the fore. But equally, for the family’s sake more than anyone else’s, we appeal to whoever knows so that good common sense will prevail in this terrible affair and at least some closure can be brought to the family by the body being presented, so that Jamal Khashoggi can at least be given an appropriate funeral.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, why do we not follow the German Government and suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
As the noble Lord will know, the stated position from Germany is not a new one: it is a restatement by Chancellor Merkel of the statement she made earlier. Angela Merkel has been clear in reiterating that she will keep to that approach. As I said earlier in response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Collins, we await the full outcome of the Turkish investigation and once we have all the facts in front of us, we will act accordingly.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
My Lords, the Minister said that it is important that a situation like this does not arise again. Does he recall that in quite a long BBC documentary, it was alleged that there were several other cases—not quite as dreadful as this—of people who were critical of the Saudi Arabian Government being kidnapped, taken back to Saudi Arabia and disappearing? Secondly, is the point the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made not a good one? We talk about our close relationship, but as he said, who is dependent on whom depends on which way you look at it. Is there not a strong case that we ought to diversify our arms sales so that they are not so dependent—40%—on one country?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
To take my noble friend’s second point first, I believe that the bilateral trade between our Governments stands at £9 billion. However, as he says, on the overall position of the UK and our trading relationships, notwithstanding the nature of the case we are discussing, it is important that we have a diversified view.
On his point about this never happening again, he is right to raise the tragic consequences of this. We repeatedly return to the issue of journalists and press freedom in your Lordships’ House, in the context not just of Saudi Arabia but of other countries as well. The important point in this case is what further steps we can take in this respect. The international condemnation which has followed this crime is clear for all to see. On the other steps we are taking that I can share with my noble friend, I mentioned earlier my capacity as Human Rights Minister, and we are reviewing the exact statements we will make and the questions we will raise in the universal periodic review of Saudi Arabia, which is due on 5 November in Geneva. I assure my noble friend that as a priority, we will raise with the Saudis in international fora the issue of press freedom and the freedom of journalists to criticise a country and an Administration. As to whether we can ensure that this will never happen again, that would be a tall claim for anyone to make. The tragic nature of these issues means that we must be strong in our condemnation, and when the full facts are presented, we must act accordingly.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister will be aware that we have some of the strictest rules about selling arms to any nations that apply to any countries in the world. Germany’s virtue signalling is all very good, but it would be selling almost no arms there anyway, and when one looks at some of the other sales they have made to other places, I would not get too excited about the virtue signalling.
This is a very difficult area. We have to be wary once we have made a decision to sell arms, having gone through all the hoops, about starting to tell people how they should use them. However, it is very important that there is transparency about exactly what we are doing in terms of support and training for Saudi Arabia. We have been rather secretive about this—for example, the Paras teaching them how to use mortars and so on. Does the Minister agree that we should be very open about exactly what we provide and then we can look at this in the round and make some sensible decisions in due course, rather than knee-jerk ones, about exactly how we go?
There is no doubt that this was a horrible crime. I have no doubt at all that there was advice from the very highest levels in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, it has form on this, as has been mentioned before. But we need to be really careful not to make knee-jerk reactions and to be transparent on what we actually provide.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Lord speaks from wide experience in this respect and I agree with him on principle. I fully support his position but what Germany exports and what is does is really a matter for the German Chancellor and Government. I have looked at the structure and support of arms sales. This was put in place by the very respected Robin Cook when he was Foreign Secretary. There are quite strict procedures in place to ensure that these weapons comply with international humanitarian law.
Notwithstanding that, the noble Lord will also be aware that our export licensing system also builds in flexibility to allow us to respond quickly to changing circumstances. Since 2015 we have suspended more than 331 licences. This is not a case of once agreed, never suspended. I agree with the noble Lord that we must be very careful to ensure that our response is considered, clear and unequivocal. We should act only, I stress again, once the full facts have been presented. As I said, we await the full facts from the Turkish investigation.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, following up the noble Lord’s Statement, we brought in legislation on arms sales, which this Government profess to comply with, saying that arms could not be sold to be used for external aggression or internal repression. External aggression is what the Saudis are doing in Yemen on a massive scale. We need to reset our relationship with Saudi Arabia, particularly in light of this barbaric murder. By the way, President Erdoğan championing journalistic freedom is something else.
Will the Minister consider the case for resetting the relationship with Saudi Arabia without turning our backs on an important strategic relationship in intelligence and defence terms? I understand that, having been a Middle East Minister. We should adopt a much more even-handed attitude in that region, especially between Riyadh and Tehran. We treat Iran as a pariah state but we treat the Saudis as brothers in arms. Maybe the Crown Prince took that and the signals from President Trump as giving him a blank cheque, as it were, to operate with impunity in a lawless way, as has clearly happened in Istanbul.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, the noble Lord mentioned how Saudi Arabia has been acting and this crime in particular. The reaction to it and the changing position from the Saudi Government reflect the strength of opinion and representations made not just by the United Kingdom but others. It has resulted in the admittance that a crime—indeed, a murder—took place in the consulate in Istanbul. As I said, we await the full facts of what will be determined from the investigation by Turkey, which we fully support.
Picking up a thread from the earlier questions from the noble Lord, Lord West, about training and support, it is right that we provide support in terms of training to militaries across the world, as we do to the Saudi military. There is an advantage in doing this because we share elsewhere the values and the strong sense of training deployed by our troops, which stress the importance of international humanitarian law.
As for resetting relationships, the noble Lord acknowledged the importance of the strategic partnership, but lessons will be learned from this incident, which resulted in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. As I said, once all the facts have been presented, the United Kingdom Government will consider them very carefully and act accordingly.
Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Thomson Reuters supervisory board. Does the Minister agree that many journalists around the world operate constantly in extremely difficult and dangerous circumstances? Will he confirm that, not just in multilateral organisations but in our regular contacts with the Governments of countries that do not treat journalists as they should, he and his colleagues will emphasise the need for journalists to be treated properly and safely?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
Let me assure the noble Lord and the whole of your Lordships’ House that we do—and will continue to do—exactly that. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, mentioned Turkey. It is because of the equity of our relationship with Turkey and the strength of our strategic partnership—which I am sure noble Lords will have followed in the broader context of defending human rights—that we have seen some dividend from our representations through the channels we have, including the release, albeit on bail, of several members of Amnesty International in particular. We continue to raise these issues, including in private. But there is a time, and you have to strike that balance. Many noble Lords will know exactly the point I am making: you have to strike that balance between private diplomacy, on which the United Kingdom prides itself, and public accountability. The case of Jamal Khashoggi is a time for public accountability.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, it is difficult to think of a more difficult foreign policy issue that the Government must now face. I cannot think of anything as serious from all my time as either a Member of Parliament or a Member of your Lordships’ House. Difficult circumstances and challenges often give rise to opportunities, however. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, put his finger on it when he said that this is an opportunity to reset our relationship, not just with Saudi Arabia but with other countries in the Middle East to which we have for many years adopted approximately the same attitudes and positions.
I shall make two other, perhaps unrelated, points. What could be more sinister than the fact that among the 15 who came to the consulate was a forensic pathologist? What possible purpose was he meant to serve by being part of the 15? I think we could all make a pretty good guess.
On the other hand, the Minister rightly referred to the intelligence relationship. When he was Prime Minister, David Cameron publicly—surprisingly but, in the circumstances, he thought necessarily—acknowledged that information provided by the Saudi Arabian Government directly prevented an enormously difficult and potentially very damaging terrorist outrage in this country. It is the balancing of these two issues that gives rise to the Government’s difficulty. However, I take the view that as soon as all the necessary information is available a judgment must be made—but I would in no way support the notion that we should conduct a running commentary or offer a step-by-step approach. We need to deal with this matter as a whole, once a proper judgment has been reached.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I agree with much, if not all, that the noble Lord has raised. It is important to look at the strength of our relationship. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hain. As I mentioned in my closing remarks in repeating the Statement, this is also an opportunity for defining. We must take seriously our responsibilities as an international player on the global stage when our friends—and Saudi Arabia is a friend—commit actions by which we are all appalled, as we have seen in the case of Jamal Khashoggi. Families have suffered the tragic consequences of the actions of these individuals. It is important that, as a friend, we consider the full facts as they emerge and once they have been given. It is also appropriate, because of the influence that we have with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that we seek to influence that relationship in a positive way.
This situation is a step back, I fear, from the visit of the Crown Prince, which heralded Vision 2030 and new beginnings. As the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief, I was heartened by the fact that the Crown Prince visited the Coptic Cathedral on his way to London and had a meeting at Lambeth Palace. These were the beginnings of positive signs. It is tragic that we see this situation emerging, but it is important that we take stock. The noble Lord also raised the importance of our influence in countries such as Egypt, Kuwait, Oman and elsewhere in the Middle East. The United Kingdom not only has a voice, it has a strong influencing voice, and we should seek to leverage that, particularly in the context of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, in the Statement the Government emphasised heavily that what happened was totally irreconcilable with British values and principles. Does the Minister not agree that there is a real credibility problem—again—for us in this context? Must we not be very careful that throughout all the deliberations that may now ensue we do not begin to water down and rationalise away the need sometimes for firm and decisive action? This deed, as we all agree, was horrific— but all over the world, as we have heard, brave journalists are standing up for freedom, democracy, enlightenment and truth. When this is jeopardised it is a fundamental challenge to everything we stand for in this society. Surely this has happened in this situation and we must be determined to take whatever action is necessary, even at some cost to ourselves.
On the arms point specifically, is it not madness to see the arms industry as part of our general export drive? We should export arms only to close allies or those who really do demonstrate—on controversial and important issues—a total commitment to our values; otherwise, we are playing with fire in the end-use situation, to which reference has already been made, which has shown over and again that we are not in control of the situation.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Lord makes powerful points. On the general point about arms exports, it is right that when we look at our relationships—we have all been clear that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an ally; it has been an important ally in terms of security co-operation in the Middle East and it continues to be so—we set the criteria when it comes to arms sales and ensure that they are adhered to, and that issues of international humanitarian law are upheld. I will be frank: we have seen appalling situations and occasions during the war in Yemen, which have resulted in the loss of many innocent lives. I am appalled when I see buses of young children being blown up as a consequence of that war. It is important that we strengthen our voice in ensuring that the values we share are also shared by our allies, and we will continue to make that case. But the structures that have been set up for those arms sales are an important check and balance in ensuring that those important principles are sustained.
When it comes to acting accordingly, I assure noble Lords that our Government—and I have been in close contact with my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary on this issue—are not taking this in any way lightly. The Statement detailed the number of engagements we have had directly—and continue to have—with Saudi counterparts. It is appropriate. I am sure that when they reflect on this noble Lords will agree that it is important that we have all the facts in front of us so that, once the investigation has been completed, we can consider what appropriate action can be taken.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, when the full facts are known, would it not be appropriate that we act not just as the United Kingdom working with our friend and ally—as the Minister called Saudi Arabia—but with France and Germany, as we have done previously in negotiations with Iran? We work better as a threesome than individually, and that would enable us to be more influential than if we were simply to act alone.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I will answer the noble Baroness’s question in two parts. Yes, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a friend and ally. It is because of the strength of the relationship we have that we can make the representations that we do. That bilateral relationship is important and will continue to be so, whatever decisions we choose to make. The noble Baroness’s second point was on working together with European allies. As I have already demonstrated, notwithstanding the stance taken by the United States on Iran, the Foreign Secretary issued his first statement on this very issue in line with, and after consulting, France and Germany.
Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill
Tuesday 23rd October 2018
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019 View all Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 5 September 2018 - (5 Sep 2018)
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)
My Lords, the Bill addresses a small but important gap in the current law which means that not all circumstances in which upskirting occurs can be prosecuted. Under the current law, there is a risk that an instance of upskirting which takes place somewhere which is neither private nor fully accessible to the public—for example, a school or office building—would not be treated as an offence. Equally, an instance of upskirting which occurs in a place where there are not two or more people capable of witnessing it—for example, an empty train carriage—would also not be covered by the existing offence of outraging public decency. The Bill ensures that this unpleasant behaviour will now be an offence in such circumstances and that those who upskirt for sexual reasons will be made subject to notification requirements—more commonly known as being placed on the sex offenders register, subject to certain thresholds. This strengthens the existing law and ensures that the consequences are proportionate and effective.
The Bill is not designed to address wider issues that have implications beyond its scope and that require more detailed analysis and cross-government work. Instead, it is intended to be narrow, clear and focused on the issue of upskirting, on which there is clear cross-party agreement.
The Bill will insert two new offences into the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to make the practice of upskirting a specific criminal offence. It will capture instances where, without consent, a person operates equipment beneath someone’s clothing to observe, or to allow someone else to observe, their genitals or buttocks, whether exposed or covered by underwear. It will also capture instances where, without consent, a person records an image beneath someone’s clothing in circumstances where the genitals, buttocks or underwear would not otherwise be visible. The offences will apply where the offender had a motive of either obtaining sexual gratification or causing humiliation, alarm or distress to the victim. This will capture all whose conduct should be criminalised. Those who commit upskirting for reasons of sexual gratification will be made subject to notification requirements in line with the sentencing thresholds which apply to existing voyeurism offences.
As I have said, this is a narrow Bill designed to address a small gap in the existing law. A number of issues were raised in the other place: the sharing of non-consensual intimate images; the purposes for which an upskirting image is taken; making all offenders over 18 subject to notification requirements regardless of purpose; and consideration of hostility towards a victim due to their gender being treated as an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes. I am pleased to say that all amendments on these issues were withdrawn following the Government’s response at Report, and the Bill passed through the other place without any amendments. I hope that we can do the same here. However, I thought it would be helpful to set out the Government’s position on these issues.
First, a number of Members in the other place raised concerns about the distribution of non-consensual intimate images, and amendments were tabled to criminalise the distribution of upskirt images. This is clearly an important issue for the Government to consider. But this Bill is not the place to legislate on this particular issue. It cannot be right that we change the law on sharing and distribution in such a narrow area. We must take our time to consider and tackle this issue in the most appropriate way, looking closely at all the related issues that arise and working collectively across government. That is why we announced that we will work with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Law Commission to review the law around the taking and sharing of non-consensual intimate images, building on the existing Law Commission review of online harm.
There was also active debate in the other place around the purposes requirement in the Bill, and in particular whether the purposes are sufficiently broad to capture most situations in which people choose to upskirt. We have been clear that the offences in this Bill capture those who commit this unpleasant crime in a wide range of circumstances, whether for sexual gratification, or to humiliate, alarm or distress an individual. We are confident that this will include cases where someone takes an upskirting photo for what is sometimes termed “a laugh” or for financial advantage, because it is highly likely that, by doing so, they intended to humiliate, distress or alarm their victim. We must remind ourselves that the Bill was drafted to address a gap in the law in relation to the circumstances in which an act of upskirting takes place—to ensure that this behaviour is covered wherever it takes place, be it in public or in private—with effective and proportionate consequences.
I am confident that the two purposes for which an offence can be committed are appropriate, straightforward and familiar to criminal justice agencies. Removing these purposes risks making the law less clear, leading to potential inconsistencies in how this law is to be applied within the criminal justice system. We must also remember that the new offences will work alongside existing offences, such as outraging public decency, to complement and strengthen the criminal law. We know that there have been successful prosecutions for upskirting under that offence where a person commits an act of such a lewd, obscene and disgusting nature, in public, and with at least two people capable of seeing it that is capable of outraging public decency. As with the new upskirting offences, there are no exceptions under the OPD offence in relation to actions of the paparazzi.
It is of course important that we continue to keep the law under review, which is why we committed in the other place to undertake a post-legislative review in two years’ time to assess how the proposed new offences are working in practice.
Some questions were raised as to whether notification requirements should apply to those aged under 18 years. It is important to recognise that notification requirements are used to assist the police with the management of sex offenders in the community. They are not intended as an additional punishment or penalty. The Bill as drafted will make offenders subject to notification requirements if they have committed an act of upskirting to obtain sexual gratification and the sentence given by the court reaches the relevant sentencing thresholds. These are set at a level which will ensure that they capture only those who are likely to pose an ongoing sexual risk to the community, such that they should be monitored by the police accordingly. Certainly, we must be careful not to overcriminalise children. But we believe that the Bill is correct and proportionate in how it deals with those under the age of 18 who commit this offence for reasons of sexual gratification. The sentencing threshold will mean that only the most serious offenders under 18, who also have a sexual motive, are made subject to notification requirements.
We also saw debate on whether to create an aggravating factor for sentencing where the commission of the offence was motivated by hostility towards the victim based on their gender. I reassure noble Lords that there is a range of aggravating factors that a court can take into account when considering the seriousness of an offence for the purposes of sentencing. This includes aggravating factors set out in sentencing guidelines, such as the location of the offence, the deliberate targeting of a vulnerable victim and the physical or psychological effect on the victim. It also includes those aggravating factors set out in statute—race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and transgender identity.
In relation to gender specifically, as noble Lords may be aware, this topic garnered a lot of attention and stirred up a debate about whether misogyny and, indeed, misandry should be treated as hate crimes. It is important to highlight the issue and recognise that, while this offence is not specific to women, it is likely that women will most often be the victims of this behaviour. But this narrow Bill is not the right place to make that amendment because statutory aggravating factors do not usually apply to only one or two offences, as would be the effect of such an amendment. It would make the new offences inconsistent with all other sexual offences, and there is no convincing rationale for this proposed amendment to apply specifically and only to these offences.
We are of course concerned about ensuring that our hate crime legislation is up to date and consistent. We have therefore asked the Law Commission to undertake a review of the coverage and approach to hate crime legislation and to consider whether there should be an expansion of protected characteristics including, for example, in relation to gender. This will build on the Law Commission’s previous work to ensure that all aspects of hate crime are properly considered and that our courts deal with them in the most appropriate and indeed the most consistent way.
There is clearly considerable interest in this Bill and the important issue which it seeks to address. But let me be clear: the Bill is specifically targeted at addressing a narrow gap in the law and is not the vehicle to legislate for other wider issues. While it is important to discuss and debate these wider issues, we must do so when the right opportunity arises. I would be grateful for the support of noble Lords in ensuring that the Bill passes through the House quickly so that we are able to begin punishing those who commit this type of crime as soon as possible. I commend the Bill to the House, and I beg to move.
Baroness Gale (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his opening remarks and for bringing this Bill before us today. As he has said, it is a narrow Bill, but it does have the support of the Government. I am sure that we will support everything that is in it, but while it has been welcomed in many quarters, it is not entirely without criticism. Nevertheless, it is a step forward in protecting women and girls from this unwanted behaviour which can be humiliating and degrading to the victim.
Women’s Aid has given the Bill a warm welcome. Its chief executive has said:
“By condemning this form of abuse, we can send out the powerful message that upskirting is unacceptable and perpetrators of this crime will be held to account”.
Upskirting may not be something new, but today with practically everyone owning and carrying a camera in their pocket, and with the rapid spread of mobile technology, the reach of the internet and the use of social media, it is easy to take images and distribute them. That is no doubt why there has been such a rise in this appalling behaviour, and it is time that the taking of such images without the knowledge or consent of the person concerned is made an offence. Victims say that image-based sexual abuse causes shame, humiliation and significant distress. It can have a severe impact on mental health which can be long lasting. I believe that the Bill will be a big step forward in tackling a loophole in the law.
Concerns have been expressed that the Bill will criminalise upskirting only if the perpetrator does so to obtain either sexual gratification for himself or others, causes humiliation and distress, or alarms the victim. This does cover some but not all motivations as the perpetrator may commit the crime for financial gain or, as the Minister said, for “having a laugh”. One can imagine how that can happen when such images are shown around a group of male friends.
Cross-party amendments were tabled in another place to criminalise the distribution of upskirting images. This Bill would criminalise only the taking of such images but not their further distribution, which often happens. Perpetrators share these images with friends or on social networks, causing further humiliation and distress to victims. By not criminalising the distribution of such images, I believe that we fail to recognise victims’ experiences, which adds to their distress and embarrassment. I know that the Minister has talked about this, but I would ask him to look at this again when we move on to the Committee stage.
The excellent briefing from Women’s Aid points that out. It feels that the focus on the perpetrator’s motivation should be removed to ensure that all victims of this crime are treated consistently and believes that the legislation needs to recognise that non-consensual images are created, distributed and shared in many ways. I understand that the Government have concerns that this could risk unintentionally criminalising people. Again, Women’s Aid said that defences would remain for those accused who may have taken the image by accident or for law enforcement reasons.
I welcome the fact that the victims will be granted anonymity. This is essential to ensure reporting of the crime and should encourage women and girls to come forward. It is well known that victims of sexual offences can be reluctant to come forward. I hope that this will go some way to helping them to do so, and that the police and other bodies will have the necessary training and resources to deal with this new offence.
In its briefing on the Bill, the Equality and Human Rights Commission mentions the Istanbul convention, urging the Government to ratify it. In fact, it states:
“We urge the UK Government to urgently ratify, fully resource and implement the Istanbul Convention”.
I wholeheartedly agree. Article 40 of the Istanbul convention requires,
“the necessary legislative or other measures to ensure that any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment, is subject to criminal or other legal sanction”.
When ratified, Article 40 would certainly cover the measures in the Bill before us.
The preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence Act 2017, which I took through your Lordships’ House, requires the Government to publish an annual report, which is due by 1 November each year. The first report was published on 1 November 2017. It said:
“The Government will set out a timetable for ratification in line with the requirement of section 1 of the Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Act 2017 in due course”.
Can the Minister say when that will be? When does he expect the second annual report to be published? It is due by 1 November, which is in nine days’ time.
I mention the Istanbul convention because it is so relevant to our debate. I am pleased to hear the Minister say that the Government will keep the law under review and are committed to undertaking post-legislative scrutiny in the next two years to assess how the offences are working in practice. Everyone would welcome that as it would give us an opportunity to see how well the Bill is working and whether it needs any amendment. I look forward to the Minister’s response and to taking part as the Bill progresses towards becoming law.
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, I am absolutely delighted to welcome the Second Reading of what has become colloquially known as the “upskirting Bill”. It was introduced in the Commons in June through a Private Member’s Bill by my friend and colleague Wera Hobhouse following an enormously successful campaign by Gina Martin, who obtained over 100,000 signatures in her bid to amend the current law. That Bill was objected to by Sir Christopher Chope —a practice he undertakes with monotonous regularity in the Commons. Many an excellent Bill has fallen because of his demand to see what he regards as proper due process. However, on this occasion he inadvertently did us all a favour. The outcry was so great that the Government agreed to bring in the Bill themselves—hence our all being here today.
Upskirting has been an offence in Scotland since 2009, so it is high time the offence was introduced in England and Wales. Of course, Northern Ireland goes its own way—or it would if Members of its Assembly could agree to work together, put the people first and get on with some legislative work.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission welcomes the Bill—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, has been reading the same briefings as me—and comments that it is a further step towards meeting our commitments under the Istanbul convention. Like the noble Baroness, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain in his remarks what is holding up the ratification process.
But why is the Bill necessary? Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University put it thus:
“Sexual offences are about power and control, punishment, sexual entitlement, anger, entertainment, as well as sexual gratification”.
A number of speakers at the Commons stage, as well as Professor McGlynn, recommended that the Government remove the motivation requirement from the Bill. They say—and I agree—that we need to concentrate instead on the harm caused to victims. And the harm is real: shame, humiliation, distress, fear and anxiety, paranoia, depression, trauma, panic attacks—the damage is endless. What does motivation matter when the outcome is one of the above?
The qualifying motivations in subsection (3) seem to me and others a little thin. The Government’s point—which I do see—is that the type of motivation is relevant to whether the perpetrator should be on the sex offender register. Anyone doing this for sexual gratification should be recorded on it. But the question remains about whether the motivations covered in the Bill leave room for sneaky defence barristers, seeking a legal loophole, to argue that their clients’ actions are not within the scope of the law.
The EHRC prefers to see motivation out of the Bill altogether, but argues that there is a question mark over two important areas which should at least be recorded as motivations on the face of the Bill. These are “financial gain” and “entertainment or amusement”. The Minister may well see amendments on this coming his way during the course of the Bill, but I am sure that the House would be grateful if he would comment in his final remarks today. “Lads having a laugh” might cut no ice with most judges—but why take the risk?
Financial gain is very real. One website hosting and exchanging images is reportedly worth £30 million. Let no one profit from this kind of humiliation and distress. Distribution of these images is an area called into question by Women’s Aid. As I understand it, the legislation criminalises the taking of an image but not the further distribution of it, which is a common occurrence. So if we fail to criminalise distribution, we fail to recognise the further distress and humiliation that victims suffer. Any possible amendments also need to include threats to distribute— a mechanism of coercive control. Women’s Aid points out the terrible damage this could cause to women of BME origin, where cultural norms may lead to their being disowned, ostracised and even killed. For the victim, this is about as far away from “having a laugh” as you can get.
I welcome the fact that upskirting will come under the Sexual Offences Act, which will give victims the right to anonymity. Studies have shown that without this right, in cases of rape, the vast majority of victims would not report. One area where this right is not given—because it does not come under the Sexual Offences Act—is for so-called revenge porn. A BBC investigation found that in about one-third of revenge porn cases where victims withdrew from prosecution, lack of anonymity was a key factor. So an amendment could be coming the Minister’s way that would give the right to anonymity to victims of all image-based sexual violence, particularly revenge porn, Photoshopped images and sextortion—which is sexual extortion. Why should not all of the above be treated as sexual offences? Perhaps the Minister could comment on this.
Women today suffer from a vast array of forms of sexual harassment. During research for this debate, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about sexual cybercrime. One in 10 women has experienced some form of cybercrime since the age of 15, including cyber harassment and stalking, use of GPS to track their movements, online rape and death threats, and doxing—which I learned is disclosing private or identifying information to the world. Only this morning, the Women and Equalities Select Committee recommended government action on street harassment and on watching porn in public places. It is sickening, and it all serves to promote the continuing unequal relationship between men and women.
We on these Benches greatly welcome the Bill. We thank the Government for taking prompt action after the attempted sabotage of the original Private Member’s Bill by Sir Christopher Chope. We also welcome the Law Commission review of whether misogyny should be included alongside other protected characteristics in law. I personally would welcome misandry also being included. After all, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I speak in this debate with mixed feelings. While it is a great honour to be part of the Second Reading of a Bill which seeks to limit the impact of violence against women and girls, it is also a sadness that we need this legislation, since it reflects the way in which gender-based violence is evolving, with new technology and social media in particular. Like others, I want to acknowledge the commitment of the honourable Member for Bath, my home town, in campaigning for this law, and of Gina Martin for her courage in bringing this issue forward.
As we have heard today, and in the evidence given to the Bill Committee in the other place, the Government are seeking to close a loophole in the current legislation in relation to where an offence of upskirting takes place; namely, a place that is neither private nor public, such as a school, festival or, as we have heard, public transport. There has been considerable debate about whether the motives of sexual gratification and humiliation of the victim are appropriate, with strong arguments made—including by the noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Burt, and by the highly respected Professor Clare McGlynn from Durham University—that these should be extended or removed, focusing rather on the impact of the crime on the victim.
Perhaps I may commend one approach to the Minister for consideration which, without broadening the specific list of motives, would bring greater attention to the impact on the victim. It applies particularly in relation to the motive of humiliation and would be to use language in the Bill that mirrors that in the Protection from Harassment Act. To paraphrase that Act, it states that the person whose conduct is in question ought to know that it will cause, in this case, humiliation or distress if a reasonable person in possession of the same information would think that the conduct would cause humiliation and distress. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister would comment on this approach, because I think it would really reflect, quite simply, the impact on the victim.
I am also sympathetic to those who have sought greater clarity in relation to the distribution of images secured via upskirting. Arguably, we can all agree that this is where the greatest harm is wrought. As has been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, where the revenge porn legislation would have some applicability in relation to distribution, it would help if the Minister could confirm that the anonymity of the victim as it would apply under the sexual offences legislation would still apply in the event of a further prosecution under that law. Along with other noble Lords, I look forward to further debate on that issue in future.
I want to say one word about vulnerability. We know, particularly from research by Professor Betsy Stanko, that most sexual offences happen to women who are already vulnerable in some way, so I hope that great care will be taken to establish, in those cases where it is alleged that consent has been given, that this has not been extorted through threats or coercion, particularly of a vulnerable victim.
Returning to the scope of the Bill, I suggest to noble Lords that part of the unease that has been expressed on all sides of this House and by those who have already debated it in the other place simply reflects the size of the gap between the scale of abuse, using images without consent, and the number of convictions that are expected to arise as a result of passing this Bill—which, if I have understood correctly, is about 30 a year. We have seen that in Scotland there have been only a handful of cases convicted annually. So, along with my noble friend the Minister, I look forward very much to the publication of the Law Commission’s recommendations about online abuse and to future legislation on the use of images without consent. I welcome very much, with other noble Lords, the Women and Equalities Committee’s recommendations this morning in that regard.
I also want to reflect on the fragmented nature of the legislation in this area, which in some ways mirrors that in the field of domestic abuse, with which I am particularly familiar. It has been argued that many of the different permutations of abuse in this category of offending are covered by existing legislation, but we know from domestic abuse that where the legislation is very fragmented, it is often poorly understood and inconsistently implemented. It would be very helpful at some point if we could bring the offences together in one place, both for police and prosecutors and, equally importantly, for the general public, so that it is clear and easy to understand.
Finally, beyond the specifics of the Bill we face a tremendous task, which is to work out how we can change public attitudes, which continue to be so accepting of violence against women and girls, of which voyeurism is simply one example. I found the evidence from Lisa Hallgarten of Brook a helpful reality check in this regard. We need to be realistic about what is happening on the ground and as she pointed out, schools are not even equipped to deal with sexual bullying, sexual assault or domestic abuse among their pupils, let alone upskirting. I recently heard from Plan International UK about the extent of sexual harassment of young girls in this country. Its survey showed that two-thirds of girls aged between 14 and 21 have experienced unwanted sexual attention or harassment in a public place, with 15% of them having been touched, groped or grabbed. This is happening every day, on every street and on every bus.
We are also all very familiar in this House with the extent of wider sexual and domestic violence and its prevalence. So we all look forward, I am sure, to hearing more about how this will be tackled in the forthcoming domestic abuse Bill and the updated violence against women and girls strategy. In the meantime, in common with other noble Lords, I feel that this Bill to address upskirting is definitely a helpful step forward, but I hope that my noble friend the Minister agrees that there is still much to do beyond this to address the full spectrum of violence against women and girls, particularly in the area of prevention and public attitudes.
Baroness Barker (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, for the clear way in which he introduced this legislation. I too congratulate my colleague in another place, Wera Hobhouse, on taking the opportunity to legislate on an offence which is at the moment rarely prosecuted—yet the behaviour seems to be growing. She has given us the opportunity to put together legislation which, if we get it right, will create a deterrent. That will be an important thing for us to do.
Before turning to the specifics of the Bill, I want to commend the Government for taking up this matter when Wera Hobhouse’s Bill was hijacked in another place. I simply make this observation: by their nature, Private Members’ Bills often deal with matters which are of high significance to very few people. There is a group of Conservative MPs, mostly white men, who take pride in shooting down Private Members’ Bills like some Friday morning sport. That is nasty. The Prime Minister’s swift response is welcome but it really should not be necessary.
I have been discussing this Bill in my office, like many other Members of your Lordships’ House, I imagine—particularly the women Members. My noble friend Lady Hamwee told me that she remembered being shocked while she was a student at Girton, which is three miles outside Cambridge, when female students were warned that someone who was giving lifts to hitchhikers was using a mirror on his car floor to look up the skirts of passengers. There are many reasons not to hitchhike but that was another one, so this is not a new issue. It is just that the role of technology has made a qualitative difference. Today, this crime has the potential to cause much greater harm to victims because images can be taken more easily and shared more widely than in the past. That compounds the violation of privacy that takes place at first. The points made by my noble friend Lady Burt on behalf of Women’s Aid were striking and to the point.
This is not a political Bill; we all share the ambition to draw up legislation which offers the greatest possible deterrence. Within that, I think it is agreed that we need legislation which is sufficiently robust in the punishments it includes but also has the flexibility to enable law enforcement agencies and so on to make it work in practice. The Bill comes to your Lordships’ House having been debated in another place under its Public Bill Committee procedure. If only for the ease of reading its discussions in Hansard, I prefer the way that is done in another place. I found it very helpful to hear people such as Gina Martin, who was a victim of this vile behaviour, set out in some detail the reasons why she and her legal team came up with their draft legislation, and the assumptions that they put behind it. That having been done, your Lordships will have the opportunity to test during our deliberations whether the definition—the technical specification—of this offence of voyeurism, as set out in Clause 1(2), is, first, sufficiently comprehensive now and, secondly, whether it will stand the test of time. We live in an age when technology changes very rapidly.
In the Public Bill Committee, it was also helpful to understand the context in which the Bill sits and the work of the Law Commission in looking at changes to definitions of hate crime, but particularly to understand the difference between this Bill and the Bill on revenge porn. I was involved in a minor way in the passage of the revenge porn legislation, along with my noble friend Lord Marks. It was interesting to read that victims of that offence do not have a right to anonymity whereas this offence will be a sexual offence and therefore victims will have an automatic right to anonymity. It is somewhat difficult for some of us who are not lawyers to understand quite why two offences which appear to be very similar in perpetration and effect should be treated so differently. Revenge pornography was made an offence in 2014 and about 500 cases a year are successfully prosecuted but hundreds more are not. I am sure the Minister will explain to us why that is not a sexual offence but upskirting will, under the Bill before us, be a sexual offence. Given the difference, I hope that over the coming years the Government will pay close attention to the rates of charges and successful prosecutions which are brought under the different pieces of legislation to see whether there is evidence for anonymity for victims.
I too was interested in the words of Lisa Hallgarten, the head of policy and public affairs at Brook. A lot of what she had to say was about the way young people are unsure about their right to privacy and about what invasion of privacy is and the implications of that not only for prosecutions under the Bill but for schools when handling instances that may happen. Teaching young women what their rights to privacy are and young men what constitutes an invasion of privacy is important.
This Bill comes to us today when the Women and Equalities Committee has produced its report on sexual harassment. It said:
“Laws alone cannot address the cultural acceptability of sexual harassment, most of which is unreported, but they have an important part to play, including in responding to new forms of public sexual harassment facilitated by technology. We welcome legislation on ‘upskirting’ and ‘revenge porn’, but at present, the Government is too often racing to catch up with these developments”.
I congratulate the Government on taking one more step and I hope we will make this legislation get to the statute book with some alacrity so that fewer women are victims of this horrible crime.
Lord Judge (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to be allowed to intervene at this stage of debate. I apologise for not putting my name down. As noble Lords have allowed me to speak, I shall do so briefly.
I welcome the Bill. It addresses a problem created by the availability of modern technology. It is a good Bill: we know exactly what action is being criminalised; we know exactly what the intention of the perpetrator is. There is no messing about. It is a specific intention. We also know that it must be done—again no messing about—without the consent of the victim and without a reasonable belief in that consent.
I listened with care to some of the observations that have been made, and I shall make this point: any crime of this kind has to be dealt with by way of sentence. It has been an aggravating feature of any kind of sexual offence that the motivation is revenge. It has been a serious aggravating feature of any kind of sexual offence that the objective is money, gain or pressure. It is perfectly obviously an aggravating feature of any sexual crime that the victim has been chosen for whatever reason, whether sexual orientation, trans- genderism or whatever. Those features can be taken into account by the sentencing judge, assuming that it can be established that the offence is to obtain sexual gratification or to humiliate, alarm or distress. Those are very wide words. It would be difficult to think of many situations in which, we will say, a man decided to upskirt without having the purpose of humiliating his victim, probably alarming her and almost certainly distressing her.
There is a gap here that I would like the Minister at least to consider: the Bill does not cover distribution. The purpose of the taker of the upskirt may be to distribute it but the Bill does not cover the consequences if he and others do so. There is no distribution for fun—that cannot be so—but let us just call it “harmless fun” in the sense of what we mean by humiliation. That ought to be an offence by someone else who did not commit the act of obtaining the upskirt image. Certainly there should be an offence that covers the distribution of the image for financial gain. To close that gap, there needs to be consideration of all the matters that have been raised in the speeches today but also a specific offence relating to those who choose to distribute the results of someone else’s foul work.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, upskirting is nasty, predatory, degrading and invasive behaviour. It inflicts significant emotional damage upon its victims, as described by my noble friend Lady Burt and others. While, as my noble friend Lady Barker pointed out, it has similarities to revenge porn, which we rightly and successfully criminalised in 2015, upskirting is markedly different from revenge porn in that its victims are generally unknown to the perpetrators and suffer this appalling unpleasantness, which may leave them with serious emotional scars for years to come, just because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It is significant and welcome that there has been absolutely no dissent in this short but excellent debate on criminalising upskirting. I too pay tribute to my honourable friend Wera Hobhouse MP for the skill and determination with which she pioneered her Private Member’s Bill and secured the Government’s support that has led to this Bill. I thank the Government for taking it on and the Minister for the clarity of his introduction.
I also pay tribute to Gina Martin. She was enjoying a visit to the British Summertime Festival, a 26 year-old woman with no political or legal experience, when a man who was with a friend took a photo up her skirt on his phone and then very publicly texted it to all his friends in the surrounding crowd, causing her considerable distress. The police attended and told her there was nothing that she or they could do because upskirting was not an offence in England and Wales, unlike in Scotland, where it was criminalised in 2009. That prompted Gina Martin to launch and champion a very successful petition and to campaign vigorously to make upskirting an offence. She has been an example to us all of what individual campaigning can do to secure real change.
What has horrified many has been not just that upskirting has become so widespread but that it has been accompanied by the development of large numbers of websites where upskirting images have been publicly displayed. This was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Burt, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and others, while the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, talked about dealing with the question of distribution. We must be absolutely sure that legislation captures this type of behaviour.
I turn to the detail of the Bill. The first issue for consideration has been raised by all noble Lords: whether it is necessary to specify that to constitute an offence the upskirting must be carried out either for the sexual gratification of the perpetrator or another, or in order to humiliate, alarm or distress the victim. The Government maintain that, given the lack of consent requirement in the Bill, all non-consensual upskirting is likely to be committed for one or other of those specified purposes. I acknowledge, and on this I share the view of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that it is quite difficult to see circumstances where upskirting will be committed without one of those specified purposes in mind. However, I remain to be convinced that there will never be such circumstances or that the specified purposes will always be capable of proof to the criminal standard.
As one might expect, I do not share my noble friend Lady Burt’s distrust of sneaky defence barristers. Defence counsel have a duty to advance all defences available to their clients. For my part, I would not want to offer those who ought to be convicted a gratuitous and undeserved route to acquittal by erecting artificial hurdles for the prosecution to surmount.
My concern is that there may be incidents of upskirting where the perpetrator could argue that he had no view to his own sexual gratification or that of anyone else, no intention of humiliating, alarming or distressing the victim and that his interest was mere entertainment or banter with friends.
We should remember the important fact that any victim who is aware of the upskirting and of the distribution of the resulting images, or even of the risk of distribution, will inevitably suffer humiliation, alarm and distress. But intention to cause it may be difficult to prove. Should we be requiring the prosecution to prove it, allowing a defendant to argue, for example, that his victim was entirely unaware of the incident? For my part, I would regard any such defence as of absolutely no merit, but I can foresee such defences being run and doubt that they should be available.
The question of financial gain arises in this context also. If the perpetrator’s purpose is financial gain from distributing images on websites, will the prosecution always be able to prove that it follows that his purpose was the sexual gratification of another person or persons looking at the websites? That is apparently the Government’s argument, but I remain to be convinced that it is right, or, even if it is right, that it is necessary to import that somewhat complicated and convoluted logic into the Bill. If the purposes provision is to remain in the Bill, the question arises why financial gain and entertainment should not be added to the purposes specified in the Bill.
Viewing the question from the opposite point of view to that of the Government, if all non-consensual upskirting would fall within the specified purposes, what is the point of specifying them? The Minister argues that only upskirting for sexual gratification should lead to notification—that is, entry on the sex offender register—so that purpose and others must be distinguished. I can see that. However, the Bill could be simply amended to provide that notification followed only where the offence was committed for the purpose of sexual gratification of the offender. We will explore this in Committee.
Having carefully considered the Government’s position, I agree with other noble Lords who believe that recording upskirting images without the actual or believed consent of the victim should be enough to constitute an offence and the prosecution should not have to prove one of the specified purposes. I will listen, of course, to the Minister’s response, but I invite the Government to think again on this point.
My noble friend Lady Burt also raised the question of misogyny and whether there should be aggravating factors in the offence under the Bill. I can quite see the argument that an offence that is accompanied by hostile and misogynistic behaviour should be treated particularly seriously by judges when sentencing offenders. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, pointed out that that is precisely what sentencing judges do. Whether or not that should be mentioned specifically in the Bill is open to question and may be considered in Committee.
However, I have no doubt that the House welcomes the commitment by Lucy Frazer, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Justice, a commitment mentioned by the Minister, that she will be asking the Law Commission to review whether and how far existing hate crime law should be broadened to give greater protection against hostility based on sex and gender-protected characteristics.
We enthusiastically welcome this Bill; we are proud that it was introduced as a Private Member’s Bill by a Liberal Democrat MP; we applaud the Government for adopting it; and we look forward to considering it further as it passes through the House.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, as someone who has spent most of her adult life resisting unnecessary criminal offences, I know a genuine and serious gap in the criminal statute book when I see it. I therefore join the chorus of congratulations for those who campaigned for the Bill, in particular Gina Martin and the Member of Parliament for Bath, Wera Hobhouse, who supported campaigners and worked so diligently on the introduction of the Private Member’s Bill that was so notoriously hijacked and wrecked in the other place. I welcome the Government’s decision finally to own and introduce this legislation.
At first blush at least, I rather agree with the Minister and, in particular, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, in their analysis of the offence. The Minister will, no doubt, say more in response to recent contributions about purposes. On my recent reading of the Bill, my first thought is that person C, as they appear in the construction of the offence, may help to take care of the distribution issue.
Secondly, the Bill creates a serious criminal offence and it is in the best traditions of the criminal statute book for such offences—particularly those that attract custody—to have some kind of mental element. On first analysis, I find the offence tight and the penalties proportionate. As other noble Lords have said, it is difficult to imagine those two purposes not being met by those who deliberately upskirt someone, who will usually be a woman. I was grateful to noble Lords around the Chamber for pointing out that, while people may have kilts and so on, it would be surprising if this did not operate for the most part as a very misogynistic criminal offence.
I welcome the Government’s recent approach to this. The delay in getting to where we are is unfortunate and, to some extent, inexplicable. Upskirting may be a crime of the modern era—notwithstanding comments made about more archaic technology—and technology has made a difference. None the less, as your Lordships have heard, upskirting has been an offence in Scotland since 2009, and that nine-year delay is inexplicable. It is almost a year since the shadow Justice Secretary asked his counterpart to act. It was the embarrassment of the actions of the Member of Parliament for Christchurch that led the Government, and the Prime Minister herself, rightly to intervene. We are all grateful for that.
All noble Lords should be clear that upskirting is a very serious violation of the privacy and dignity of the victim. It is an urgent problem that there is no specific criminal offence in England and Wales to cover all the scenarios, and this should be borne in mind in hoping for a swift passage for this legislation. As it stands, the law maintains a focus on protecting the public from potential exposure to lewd acts et cetera, rather than protecting the individual from this indignity which is very disturbing, particularly when exacerbated by publication online.
A number of cases have highlighted the failings of the current law. In 2007, for example, Simon Hamilton—a barrister, no less—was convicted after secretly filming up the skirts of women in supermarkets. However, he was able successfully to appeal on the basis that, as none of the victims had been aware of the filming and no one else had seen it, public decency could not have been outraged. Guy Knight, another professional man—a former chartered accountant—took photographs up women’s skirts on trains over a period of five months while commuting to work. He was caught after suspicious passengers reported him to the police. More than 200 illicit images were found on his phone and laptop, and 10 of the women in the pictures were traced by the police. None of them was aware in that moment that they had been photographed. Last year, he was convicted but fined only £500 and asked to pay a further £500 in costs. That is not a proportionate reflection of the gravity of this offence.
It is therefore important that women, and in particular Gina Martin, have been speaking up; the facts of her case have already been set out. Colleagues in different parties have worked closely with her and her lawyer, Ryan Whelan, since last year. It is a wonderful campaigning achievement to have garnered 100,000 signatures for their petition. It is an important recognition that women across the United Kingdom have been affected by this practice, the ease with which technology facilitates it and the exacerbation of publication. It is almost impossible to know how many victims have been affected.
It is therefore important that, notwithstanding wider concerns about other matters, we give the speediest passage to this tightly crafted criminal offence. No doubt, the Minister will respond to any concerns about the offence itself and will consider them if they are real. However, I urge noble Lords around this House to resist using the Bill for our numerous other concerns around misogyny and misogynistic crimes. During the Bill’s passage through the other place, several Back-Benchers, understandably, tabled amendments to the Bill, looking at issues such as street harassment, anonymity for victims of revenge porn, the cross-examination of victims of abuse in civil courts, and the distribution and sharing of images, and so on—which are all important matters that need to be looked at, but not so as to slow the passage of the Bill and this particular offence, which must be got right. Other matters ought to be dealt with in another vehicle.
I am therefore incredibly heartened to hear the commitment from the Government with regard to the Law Commission review of this area of law. The Law Commission is a wonderful body, designed to do just that work. There are too many crimes of misogyny and too much misogyny in the culture. In this country and all around the world, from Riyadh to Rotherham, certainly in numerical terms, gender injustice may be the greatest abuse on the planet.
I was conscious both in this important debate and in the earlier Question and exchange between the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, that the cowardice of anonymity, when degrading or, to use the language of the Bill, “humiliating, alarming or distressing” women does not just happen online but via other vehicles as well. I take this opportunity to say in your Lordships’ House that I was reminded of this over the weekend by some of the language directed at the Prime Minister by a man—I believe—who is allegedly her colleague. That violent language was humiliating, distressing and alarming, if not to the Prime Minister herself, to every decent Member of either House of Parliament. Yes, we must legislate in many respects, but legislation is not the only way that leadership should be shown by people in political life. Forgive me for going off at that tangent, but I think that it is important.
In the meantime, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply and I hope we have speedy and unanimous support for the passage of this Bill.
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, this Bill is intended to address what is generally acknowledged to be obnoxious and degrading behaviour. I welcome the contributions from all sides of the House with regard to the proposed legislation. I also underline the point just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, about the need to ensure that we take this forward effectively and speedily and therefore keep it within the compass set within the terms of the Bill. If we seek to grow arms and legs on this legislation, I fear it may come to grief.
I will address a number of the issues raised across the House. There are certain common themes to the points and I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I address them on a thematic basis, rather than indulge in repetition. I begin with the observations made by the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, and I will touch on a number of them. We do not consider that the purposes as set out in the Bill are narrow or that they are incapable of addressing all relevant motivations. I note the observation made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that the subsection on purposes uses very wide words. I believe that that was echoed in other parts of the House. That certainly is our view.
On the question of financial gain, where someone takes these images and then posts them, it is generally recognised and easily identified that it is for the purposes of someone else’s sexual gratification. There is potentially no financial gain otherwise. Therefore, that area, we consider, is covered.
In addition, the sharing of an image for somebody else’s sexual gratification would also be an offence, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, observed. The noble Baroness, Lady Gale, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, raised the question of other forms of distribution—where, for example, somebody comes across an image and decides to distribute it. That raises particular issues of its own. First, if you find that someone is distributing such an image you do not know whether it has been taken consensually. Furthermore, such distribution may engage Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. It may engage Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. It may indeed engage the Obscene Publications Act 1959 in some cases. That is why we have asked the Law Commission to look at the issue of distribution on a wider basis. I hear what noble Lords have said in that regard, but this is not the Bill in which we should attempt to address the wider issues of distribution, and nor would it be appropriate to try to address them merely in the very narrow confines of this Bill. My understanding is that the Law Commission is on the cusp of making its first report in this area and we will, of course, look at it.
The issue of revenge porn, as it is sometimes termed, arises because of the change in the law made pursuant to, I think, Section 33 of the 2015 Act. At that time, revenge porn was not designated as a sexual offence because very often the act is not sexually motivated. Therefore, it would not easily fall within the category of sexual offences otherwise provided for in the context of notification, for example. So, again, one has to approach that issue with some care.
A number of your Lordships, in particular my noble friend Lady Barran, pointed out that there was an apparent anomaly in that when you are dealing with an offence under the Bill, there will be anonymity for the victim. That arises because it is designated as a sexual offence. If you are dealing with a victim of revenge porn, there is no automatic anonymity because it is not designated as a sexual offence. However, I stress no “automatic” anonymity; of course, it is always open to apply to the court for anonymity to be granted. To take the example touched on by my noble friend Lady Barran, in a situation in which somebody has taken an image that would be an offence under the Bill and has been prosecuted, and thereafter there is further distribution in the context of revenge porn, you would be in a position to apply to the court for anonymity to be applied to the second prosecution. It would be rather surprising to discover in such a situation that the court was not inclined to grant anonymity. There are, however, particular reasons why anonymity is not automatic in the context of what is generically referred to as revenge porn or an offence under Section 33 of the 2015 Act.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Burt, touched on the provisions of the Istanbul convention. The present position is that this year we have consulted on domestic abuse and the consultation closed in May. Consideration has since been given to domestic abuse legislation and, in particular, a Bill that would cover domestic abuse in a wider context. That will also address the question of extraterritorial effect for such an offence. Once that is done, we will be in a position to ratify the Istanbul convention. Until that is done, however, I understand that we cannot fully ratify the convention, which is why the matter is being taken forward at present. I hope that that meets the noble Baroness’s query about the convention.
On the wider issues raised, again, I come back to one point. I hope I have touched on distribution. I do not believe that there is a gap in this piece of legislation, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, suggested. It is an issue that will have to be addressed more widely because it touches on other legislation and would be a distraction from the intended effect of the Bill to fill in a gap in the present criminal law.
On the question of those taking such images for a laugh, as it has been termed—let us be clear that it is certainly not a laugh for the victim—it is perfectly clear that in circumstances where they are taken for “a laugh”, that is bound to cause distress and humiliation to the victim and is therefore covered by the very wide-ranging purposes set out in the Bill.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
I just wonder whether the noble and learned Lord would consider, between now and Committee, the position in cases such as those mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, where the victim is unaware of the images being taken and is intended to be unaware by the perpetrator. In those circumstances, the intention to provide sexual gratification may be very difficult to prove.
Lord Keen of Elie
With respect to the noble Lord, in such circumstances it would also be impossible to prove whether the image had been taken consensually. That would be a further, more fundamental bar to prosecution in such circumstances. That is why we and the Law Commission are looking more widely at the distribution of images.
I come back to one point: the mental element in a criminal offence. Being a Scots lawyer, I am rather hot on the topic of mens rea, if I might term it as such. It certainly seems to me unusual—indeed, wholly exceptional—to bring forward a new criminal offence without allowing for the mental element that we regard as mens rea. That is why I consider it appropriate to maintain our present position with regard to purposes. We do not bring forward offences of strict liability except in the most exceptional and compelling circumstances, and that should remain our position so far as the amendment of the criminal law is concerned.
I have heard the submissions made by noble Lords across the House and I am conscious of the wider concerns that arise in the context of aggravating features, although, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said, those can be dealt with in the context of sentencing. I urge noble Lords to bear in mind the observation made a number of times about the need to ensure that this remains a simple, straightforward Bill that can be passed and brought into force as quickly and effectively as possible in order to address this obnoxious behaviour. I commend the Bill to your Lordships.
Life Sciences Industrial Strategy (Science and Technology Committee Report)
(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Patel
That this House takes note of the Report from the Science and Technology Committee Life Sciences Industrial Strategy: Who’s driving the bus? (1st Report, HL Paper 115).
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, it is a privilege and a pleasure to open this debate on the Science and Technology Committee report, Life Sciences Industrial Strategy: Who’s Driving the Bus? The strapline is not intended to cause offence and I will explain its origins later. I begin with a sincere thank you to all who helped with the report: our specialist adviser, Professor Graeme Reid, professor of science and research policy at University College London; our clerk, Anna Murphy; our policy analyst, Dr Daniel Rathbone; and the committee assistant, Cerise Burnett-Stuart. I also thank all the hard-working committee Members who constantly attended the meetings and contributed. I thank the Francis Crick Institute, particularly Sir Paul Nurse, for arranging a visit to the institute and allowing us to use the place for evidence sessions. I thank the 127 people who sent in written evidence, amounting to hundreds of pages, and the 66 who gave oral evidence. I thank the Minister of State for BEIS, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, and the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, from the Department of Health, for giving oral evidence. We were disappointed that neither the Secretary of State for BEIS nor the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care was available to give evidence, particularly as their role in driving the delivery of the strategy will be crucial, and because we do not get opportunities in the Lords to hear from Secretaries of State—certainly not in the Chamber.
Our report is a distillation of the views and evidence that we received—a genuine attempt to help inform the delivery of the life sciences industrial strategy and to make it a success. The UK’s life sciences sector is high-tech, research-intensive, scientifically diverse and innovative. It is a global leader. It contributes more than £30 billion per year to the economy and employs more than 480,000 people. It is because of this that this and previous Governments have recognised its importance. In January 2017, as part of the industrial strategy, the Government announced that they had asked Sir John Bell to produce a report on a strategy for life sciences. With this as a background, we launched our inquiry in July 2017. Sir John Bell published his report for the Government in August 2017; it was widely welcomed, including by us. It is comprehensive and thorough, with a long-term vision. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses in the system if the strategy is to be successful.
The Government published their sector deal in December 2017. Our report was published in April 2018 and the Government responded in a timely fashion in June 2018. The Government response, almost 28 pages long, is comprehensive and detailed, but it is not much of an approval of our recommendations. In fact, much of it showed disapproval—there was not much that they liked. I am pleased, however, that since then some of our messages and recommendations have been, or are being, progressed; perhaps the Government were simply shy at the time of responding to our report. I have no doubt that the Minister will have more to say—maybe he will accept some of our recommendations.
Our report covered five main areas: the challenges of implementing the strategy; the role of the NHS; the availability of finance for innovative companies, particularly those commercialising innovations; access to a skilled, trained workforce; and, lastly, scientific excellence. I will now briefly cover some of the issues that came up in these areas, and I have no doubt that others will pick up the details later.
Lack of a clear plan for implementing the strategy was a theme that came across over and over again. Evidence also highlighted the need for independent monitoring and scrutiny of the strategy. Without a clear implementation plan, it is difficult to see how the strategy can succeed. In the light of this evidence, we made several recommendations, including the establishment of a statutory body—the office for industrial strategy—to scrutinise, monitor and report regularly on how well the strategy is being implemented.
The Government did not think that this was a good idea and did not accept the recommendation. However, in their response they said that the life sciences industrial strategy board will,
“review the detailed … plan … with milestones, key metrics”,
clear lines of accountability and,
“a report on progress”.
As yet, there is no such implementation plan. Perhaps the Minister can answer my questions. When will this plan be published? How often will the board report? Will the report be published and will Parliament have an opportunity to discuss it?
While the Government did not find favour with our recommendation, I am pleased to note that they have appointed Mr Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, to chair the Industrial Strategy Council, which will provide independent scrutiny and monitor performance. Will the Minister say how often it will report? Will these reports be published and in the public domain?
I am pleased too that there will be a representative from the Treasury on the board, which was one of the recommendations that we made.
Let me now briefly turn to the NHS and its role in the delivery of the life sciences industrial strategy. Much was said about the vital role the NHS will have to play if the strategy is to be successful, but many commented that it is currently unable to do this and questioned its ability to deliver. It is in this context that, when asked, Sir John Bell said:
“Whoever is driving the bus, the windscreen wipers do not work and the exhaust is falling off”.
That is why we included the strapline in the title: who is driving the bus?
In his evidence, the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, said that,
“the NHS part is critical”,
to the strategy. One often-repeated comment was that the NHS is poor at adopting innovation and poor at being innovative. Acknowledging that, the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, said that,
“one of the concerns is not that innovations cannot get a foothold but that they do not often get beyond that”.
I recognise that much progress has been made since our report, and in line with our proposals. Planning is going on, and the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, is personally leading on that. That is good news. The NHS and Simon Stevens will now be represented on the implementation board, together with other senior managers. That is also something that we asked for and that we welcome. The government response says that a review is under way to simplify the innovation landscape under the NHS. My question to the Minister is: when will the outcome of the review be published, and will it be in the public domain? I understand that, as a BEIS Minister, he may not be able to answer that, but I hope that the question will be answered by the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, in a written reply and be put in the Library.
Importantly, much was said about the NHS as the sole provider of healthcare in the UK. It has a huge amount of health-related data—data that is relevant for research and innovation. We as a country lead globally on that. However, while it is true that the NHS is data rich, much of the data is not collected in a standardised way, nor is it easy to access. That is a problem, but not a problem that cannot be solved. It can be solved by cleaning up the data. That will make the data enormously important for both research and innovation in the future. In their response, the Government made it clear that they have an important role in supporting the NHS to lay the foundations for maintaining a secure and trusted data environment that will support a flourishing data-driven health economy in the life sciences. The recent development of six or seven digital hubs based at the Wellcome Trust is welcome.
In the light of all that, the recent development whereby individual trusts are signing data-sharing arrangements with the private sector, with varying levels and terms of data access, has to be a concern. Individual trusts are making individual contracts which include terms of data exclusivity. I have experience of this and know that the same data can be used by several researchers for different reasons. If there is data exclusivity, other researchers will not be able to access it. My own feeling is that such a development has to be stopped now. It must be stopped until we are able to work out, after debate, who is the owner of NHS data, and who is the guardian of that data and decides who can use it. There is no suggestion that industry will not be able to use it, but the ownership is important. I hope the Minister will comment on that.
The recent Department of Health publication, The Future of Healthcare: Our Vision for Digital Data and Technology in Health and Care, is welcome. It is an extensive, well-rehearsed document. The NHS has a vital role to play in terms of data if we are going to develop the use of artificial intelligence for new drugs and diagnostics, in particular in the diagnosis of cancer. However, there is an important issue around who owns the data. By the way, we have in this House the chairman-designate of NHS England and the chairman of NHS Improvement, along with several board members of both of those institutions. It is a pity that we cannot hear what their views might be. However, I understand that they have difficult jobs to do and that they are busy people.
Let me touch briefly on the issue of a skilled and well-trained workforce. The UK’s strength in biomedical science has made us a destination of first choice for scientists at all grades and from all parts of the world. I could give the numbers, but rather than bore noble Lords with those, let me just say that, for instance, in the past some 50% of postdocs at the Wellcome Sanger Institute came from the EU. However, the percentage has now begun to decline. It is important that we maintain our ability to attract scientists from abroad for our strong science base. We heard how important it is to the science sector that it should be able to access talented and skilled people from around the world. It is good that the Government have acknowledged that in their response to our report. Whatever the outcome of Brexit, it is vital that universities, businesses and the NHS can recruit people with the necessary talent and skills both from within the EU and outside it. Without the ability to do this, the life sciences sector will suffer and the strategy will not succeed.
Given that, I am very concerned that the Migration Advisory Committee has recommended that after Brexit, the Government should extend the existing migration visa system for non-EEA nationals to EEA nationals. Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, told us that the system is,
“expensive, tedious and it puts people off”.
We were also told that without a simple system for talented individuals to come to the UK, we will lose out to other countries and make it easier for people to move to them. Today’s report of a letter signed by 29 Nobel Prize winners from the UK and the EU to the Prime Minister and the President of the EU Commission suggests exactly that—that the EU-UK relationship in science must be maintained. The key reason is that in science, Europe is currently the only credible challenger to developments being made, particularly in biomedical science, in the USA and China. Europe alone or the UK alone may not be as strong. I hope that the Government will not agree with the report of the Migration Advisory Committee.
In the time I have to speak, I have not been able to cover the issues related to the need for finance, in particular for the development of innovations on to commercialisation. We have made some important recommendations and I know that in their response, the Government are in favour of some of them. However, it will be the Treasury that ultimately decides, particularly on the proposal for whether pension funds could be used for risk investment. I hope that other contributors to the debate will pick up on that point. Equally, I have not been able to cover the need for science excellence, which is an important issue, and I hope that some colleagues will deal with it.
Some of my questions clearly relate to the Department of Health and therefore a different Minister. I hope that I can receive a written response if the noble Lord, Lord Henley, is not able to answer all my points. In conclusion, I thank all those who have put their names down to speak in the debate and I look forward to hearing their contributions. I beg to move.
Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow our chairman in discussing our report on the life sciences strategy. I echo his thanks to our witnesses and to the clerks and advisers to the committee. I suppose that it is proper to say that all activities that one engages in when serving on a committee are interesting, but the reality may not always fulfil that. However, on this occasion I can say with pleasure and honesty that this was a particularly interesting subject to tackle, and one that is of importance.
The chairman has outlined the reasons why the strategy needs to be taken seriously. Before discussing some of the issues he mentioned, I want to say a word about the strategy’s place in the industrial strategy as a whole. We need to bear in mind that when taken as a whole, the industrial strategy is the centrepiece of the Government’s approach to the fourth industrial revolution, which is vital to this Government’s future prosperity. The industrial strategy and the various sector deals that will be published within its scope will be the main vehicle for collaboration with business and academia, which are the Government’s essential partners in the strategy. Obviously, the strategy will be the primary framework for public funding. The backdrop of Brexit only increases the importance of this national undertaking.
The Life Sciences Industrial Strategy is an excellent document, I have to say, for which we are indebted to Sir John Bell. It is one of the main strands of the industrial strategy and one where, as he rightly says, the UK has many of the assets needed to make this a leading element in its future prosperity and welfare. Sir John notes that,
“gains in health outcomes … will depend on … new scientific platforms … These will include digital tools, robotics, artificial intelligence … and gene therapy”,
and other therapies. He also said, rightly—the chairman also made this point—that transformation of the NHS is,
“a crucial objective over the next twenty years”.
Several people, including the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, have used the word “crucial”.
There is no doubting the opportunity that lies before us. It is one where doing good for mankind can go hand in hand with wealth creation, which is not always the case. Sir John says that the UK is “powerfully positioned” for this, but in my view, that is only the case if we get organised. Having the necessary assets is not the same as using them to good purpose or maximising their potential.
The fourth industrial revolution, where data is key, demands integration. One of the themes that emerges from discussion of the strategy is that integration of the various elements in it is crucial to its success. You need to integrate the resources, the organisation and the outputs. It will not work unless you do that. It demands funding to underpin the science and technology. All of these things succeeding necessitates real partnership between government and business and the creation of a business-friendly environment. It obviously requires new skills in quantity and quality that have hitherto been highly desirable but are now absolutely essential.
This is a huge undertaking since its scope involves most, if not all, departments of central government and the active involvement of local authorities. Industry and government will have to work much more closely together than has historically been the case. We must also get regulation right. All those things are intertwined; they depend on each other. Finally, our education system will need to change in fundamental ways both to meet the demands of something like the life sciences strategy and, more generally, for the industrial strategy as a whole.
The life sciences strategy, coming early and being so important, is something of a test case of our ability as a nation to turn a good strategy into a comprehensive implementation plan. In their reply, the Government were keen to demonstrate how much progress had already been made since the strategy was announced and since the committee wrote its report. It is fair to say that their reply contained a large number of initiatives. However, I do not understand why Ministers maintain a refusal to adopt the strategy as their own. In official documents, they appear to accept it as the blueprint to which they will work, but they still refer to it as “Sir John Bell’s strategy”. I hope that they regard it as the Government’s strategy as well because it matters whether people consider that they have ownership, which means responsibility for success. Psychologically, the notion of ownership of this is quite important.
Sir John says in his report that the UK has considerable strengths in the life sciences. Thanks to the NHS, we have unparalleled longitudinal data to which we must organise properly controlled access. The chairman is absolutely right to say that we must take preventive action immediately to prevent the wrong things being done at the moment. We underspend on R&D by international standards but we get a good bang for our buck precisely because we have for some time been well and intelligently organised through the research councils, and now UKRI. That is an example of how we can maximise our assets if we are well organised, and the reverse is also true. Given the importance of technology, we need to continue to strengthen the research relationship with business, turning it into a strong triangle with academia. They seem to be key partners for the future.
On the skills front, although an important start has been made in recognising the importance at school of STEM subjects and revising parts of the curriculum, there is still a long way to go. It would be good to hear more from the Department for Education about its plans and how it will contribute to this country’s ability to respond to the scientific and technical skills we will need. Finally, as the chairman said, we must get immigration policy right.
The translation and commercialisation of innovation has historically been one of our weaknesses. They are being addressed in a number of ways including, with Treasury support, a focus on patient capital. As said by the chairman, in their reply welcoming the committee’s conclusions on this subject, the Government sadly misunderstood what we said. Increasing entrepreneurship skills is undoubtedly important; the Government made that point but the committee was making a slightly different one. We meant that in a country with developed capital markets of the sort in the United States, in the UK, unlike in the United States, there are too few investors—that is who we were talking about—with sufficient understanding of science and technology to have the confidence to invest at early stages so that a start-up can become a scale company and remain in this country. Our point is that we are not bad at start-ups but we are still quite poor at getting from start-ups to scale companies. That is where investment in this country is very important so that companies remain here instead of going abroad or being bought up. That is an important part of the long-term future of the life sciences strategy. I cannot help feeling that although Sir John Bell’s vision of several British unicorns is very enticing, it remains distant.
So what about NHS transformation, which Sir John says is crucial? Like the chairman, it is here that my anxieties begin. The Government’s reply announces various strategies and initiatives aimed at increasing the capacity of the NHS to innovate. It is very good news that they understand that getting the NHS to increase its capacity to innovate is at the heart of things. For instance, there is the creation of a single NHS Innovation and Life Sciences Group, as well as that of something called the AAC under the noble Lord, Lord Darzi. I gather that the AAC is committed to helping with the Accelerated Access Review. I could mention a number of other acronyms that are cited as having contributions to make to better and faster innovation take-up in the NHS, all of which are welcome. However, the Government have rejected mandating take-up and it is hard to see how the myriad initiatives proposed will do better at removing the blockages in the system than has been the case in the past. The problem is that the NHS trusts are becoming ever more financially strapped and lack the time and financial headroom to give priority to new ways of doing things at the expense of existing contracts and obligations. One can understand and sympathise with the task of the trust manager. He does not want to be put into special measures, so of course he is going to go for his contractual obligations of the day. That is very hard to reconcile with the demand to innovate and do things differently when you do not have the resources.
The committee spent a good deal of time taking evidence on governance issues. Those were related to the implementation of the strategy as a whole and within the NHS. What our witnesses said left me— and I think many other noble Lords—feeling worried, and unconvinced that those who spoke felt confident about their role. Sadly, I do not think that the Government’s reply provides enough comfort in this area.
This is what is proposed for implementation. The Government are setting up two huge committees. The Life Sciences Council, with no fewer than 27 members, appears largely advisory, although it does not say in the reply to whom the advice will actually go—presumably it must be somewhere in government as well as somewhere in industry. Then there is the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy Implementation Board, on which my noble friend the Minister sits as co-chair. That, as its title implies, is charged with implementation and delivery of the strategy via—it would seem—a series of sector deals. This body has 24 members and it will meet quarterly; the membership is axed towards Government and the NHS, which I think is right, but I wonder about some of the other detail.
I would not claim that the committees’ recommendations—we made a number which the Government’s reply does not discuss—were the only possible governance structures. But we did try to suggest ones that had a chance of driving the bus. The Government have not taken them up and have gone ahead with what they intended to do in the first place. I have been inside government and on boards long enough to know that boards of over 20 people, which is well above the Government’s own recommendations for good governance, meeting only intermittently will find it very difficult to generate the necessary sense of ownership, focus and cohesion to drive implementation, and this really worries me.
Moreover, it is not clear how this big board will direct those below it. To deliver its central role, the NHS needs something more than lots of initiatives at varying levels of seniority and influence. The numerous NHS witnesses the committee spoke to had only part of the picture under their personal control, or, if they had a bigger part, were often not clear on the extent to which the strategy would affect their responsibilities. The practical difficulties they faced on a daily basis loomed very large with them. I also worry that the lack of metrics in the Government’s approach reduces the incentives to adapt.
I have been quite critical but I think this is a very good and important strategy which I hope will not, through lack of drive and delivery, fall below its potential and our expectations. In so complex a landscape it is easy to lose the thread, and in my view a small senior committee—largely but not exclusively a government steering committee—is needed to get on with the job on a day-to-day basis, and I hope something like that will evolve. Such big projects cannot be treated as business as usual—they have to be driven.
So I have a plea to put to my noble friend the Minister, to which I hope he will reply in terms when he comes to respond. In his capacity as co-chair of the implementation board, I hope he sees to it that the milestones mentioned and which the Government are going to engage—a road map, a timetable and a plan—will be set by the committee, against which progress can be measured. This will go a long way towards ensuring there is a measured tread. I hope he will also take a view after a period of time as to whether the governance system is delivering, and advise accordingly. He will be in a unique position to take on this task, and I hope he does, because the UK cannot afford to fail to seize the opportunity of becoming a world beater in life sciences.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I too served on the life sciences and industrial strategy Select Committee, and I commend the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I am not going to talk about buses. I am going to talk about the NHS.
The Government’s ambition to make the UK the most attractive place for national and international investment is highly commendable, particularly in life sciences, where we are already a global leader, though as an aside to the main question for debate, I would recommend to the House as obligatory viewing the appearances last night and this morning of Sir Paul Nurse, Director of the Francis Crick Institute. Sir Paul has, with his great authority, laid out clearly that we are in imminent and real risk of squandering this position of global leadership in life sciences research and innovation as a result of Brexit and particularly the lack of clarity about the negotiations and process.
One of the reasons we should be a global leader in life sciences is that we have the NHS, which provides increasing access to large-scale, long-term databases and a testbed for innovation on a national scale. The UK biobank is an example, with half a million participants across the country and a growing resource for medical research. There are many other future opportunities for capitalising on the NHS in this way. I am going to focus particularly on recommendations 16 to 20 from the report, which are about the role of the NHS.
The Government’s response outlined an additional £500 million in government funding for the life sciences sector as part of the sector deal and that,
“our globally renowned NHS will be a key partner in delivering the deal”.
But when taking evidence from a range of research and NHS bodies, it became clear to the committee—focused by the NHS on the adoption and spread of life sciences—that innovations in support of research and improved patient care were simply not happening either at pace or at scale. The Government have put in place actions to encourage adoption of life sciences innovation by the NHS. They have relicensed the Academic Health Science Networks for a further five years and given them a more explicit focus on the nationwide adoption of proven innovations. AHSNs have committed to nationwide adoption spread goals, but only for seven programmes over the next two years. This seems to me too little, too slowly. Indeed, the view of some witnesses was that the AHSNs were trivial in scale and lacked oomph. Throughout their response the Government list how NHS England, NHS Improvement and the AHSNs figure in some individual programmes for innovation adoption, but the response fails to focus on how the NHS can be developed as a fundamentally innovative organisation and system.
So let me turn to the relevant committee recommendations, what we heard from witnesses and what the Government said in response. Recommendation 16 is particularly germane: it says that the current structure of the NHS stifles innovation and that a focus on cost control and lack of co-ordination between NHS bodies means adoption and the spread of innovations are not given the priority they require.
The Government in response to this issue have set up yet another new group, called the NHS life sciences and innovation group. In common with the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, I was concerned that we were seeing yet another group. It reminded me of the old story of the politician who when he identifies a problem makes a speech, and when he identifies a serious problem makes a series of speeches. We seem here to have a series of committees, the one layered on the other. What is needed is not another committee or a range of small-scale initiatives, but a concerted, integrated approach to changing the whole culture of the NHS away from cost reduction and risk avoidance to one embracing innovation.
I recognise that the Government have outlined their response—again, I quote:
“Working with clinicians, managers, policy makers, industry and charities we are developing plans to expand the pipeline of innovations proven to be effective, and their subsequent adoption at pace and scale”.
I recognise that progress has been made on implementing NHS England’s published 12 actions to support and apply research across the NHS. I recognise that NHS England,
“is exploring additional financial incentives for increasing the adoption of innovation, for example through the development of CQUIN indicators, and linkage to best practice tariffs”.
However, it was clear from across the evidence that we received from NHS England, NHS Improvement and others that the NHS sees new things as cost and not opportunity, and that its objective is not to spend money. NHS Improvement told us that innovation,
“is not the centrepiece of what the NHS is trying to do … securing productivity is”.
We had much discussion about the more abstruse definitions of innovation. There were “additive innovations” and “substitutive innovations”. Additive innovation is where the innovation provides higher levels of care but costs more; substitutive innovations provide higher standards of care and save money. There seems to be a notional commitment from the NHS to adopt the substitutive innovations but not the additive ones, since those would cost more and cannot square with pressurised NHS budgets. Yet we are clear that the additive innovations could be some of the most promising and profitable for UK plc.
Even the substitutive innovations, which improve standards and save money, are not being adopted by the NHS nationwide at pace. I therefore commend wholeheartedly to the House the committee’s recommendation 20, which urges mandation,
“of those innovations that have been shown to improve patient outcomes and provide good value for money”.
A small start on this has been made in the past. Medicines approved by NICE are allegedly mandated to the NHS, but local CCGs do not always approve local adoption. It is interesting that the Accelerated Access Review did not address non-adoption by local clinicians or CCGs. CCGs can decide what to do individually. We appear to have lost the N from NHS, in that decisions are now made in such a delegated way that any central mandation simply does not happen.
Let me illustrate the lack of co-ordinated effort in making one national decision on best practice which could then swiftly be adopted across the whole system. When I was chief executive of Diabetes UK, we developed innovative best practice care pathways which would improve care for people with diabetes and save substantial sums of money. We first offered them to the NHS, but there was no real mechanism for introducing standardised best practice across the system. In desperation, I offered them to the then Chancellor, George Osborne, and told him that I could save him £1 billion from the NHS budget on the basis of them. I am still waiting for a reply. In the end, we as a charity had to hike a dedicated change team around every CCG and trust, persuading them one by one to adopt best practice which would save them money. We did not charge them; we simply took our costs from the money they saved.
I commend an initiative by NHS Improvement which also uses boots on the ground to persuade trusts and CCGs one by one. It is called Getting It Right First Time, a programme which has now expanded to cover more than 90 specialties working with local clinical networks. However, mandation of best practice, validated once at national level and then mandated across this allegedly “National” Health Service, would be so much more immediate. It should not have to be this difficult to get these things to happen.
The USA does not have the national test bed for innovation that the NHS represents, except perhaps on a smaller scale in the veterans administration hospitals. Oversight by the medical insurance companies, by managed healthcare organisations and by commercial and not-for-profit hospital chains shows how innovation and best practice standardisation can be mandated and backed up by local key performance indicators.
Why is mandation of innovation which improves patient outcomes and saves money not supported by the Government as an easy way forward? We can no longer as a nation afford an NHS which is highly variable in terms of innovation and value for money at the whim of local CCGs, trusts and individual clinicians.
I have one last challenge for the Government. As yet, we do not have a strategy for developing and exploiting innovation to meet the real future challenges of the NHS: ageing, multiple complex conditions, resistant infections, antibiotic resistance and general immune system compromise—to name but a few. How do we fill the “somebody needs to” gap? What does government plan in this respect to really anticipate the future in our innovation and research strategy as part of the industrial strategy? It is a vital strategy; we are a global leader and are in danger of losing that position. The Government need to show more bottle over this strategy.
Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, I had the pleasure of serving on the Select Committee during this inquiry and join the noble Lord, Lord Patel, in thanking the advisers, clerks and assistants for the sterling work that they put in. I commend the noble Lord not just for his speech but for his handling of a complex and long inquiry. As we know, it produced a comprehensive report and a long response from the Government. I shall try to restrict my comments to implementation, innovation, data, R&D spend and people.
It was entirely predictable—and we have already heard it in preceding speeches—that a lot of what we would be debating today is the nexus between this strategy and the National Health Service. For that reason, while it is always a pleasure to see the noble Lord, Lord Henley, sitting on the Front Bench opposite, I am a little disappointed that we do not have a representative of the Department of Health, which, largely speaking, will be called on to answer 90% of the questions raised in this debate.
On implementation, as you can tell from the report, the Select Committee was exercised by a fear that implementation would be a real problem, and the complexity of the NHS only added to that fear. As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, set out, we made some serious attempts at clarifying the accountabilities and governance for that implementation, but it is quite clear that the Government have not picked up on very much of it. I join the noble Baroness in asking the Minister to undertake to publish what the milestones are for the implementation process and regularly to update us on what one hopes will be the achievements commensurate with them.
On a separate issue, it is also clear that the industrial strategy challenge fund is being used to push certain elements of this strategy. I would like the Minister to clarify how decisions around the industrial strategy challenge fund are taken. What is the process for pointing that fund at particular projects and issues?
On the subject of independent scrutiny, the recommendation of the Select Committee was for the creation of a new statutory “Office for Industrial Strategy”, something along the lines of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Clearly, the Government have not picked up on this, but they should understand that the need for involving Parliament in the scrutiny of this strategy is very important. The whole point of having the industrial strategy is that it spans different parliamentary periods: it has to last more than the lifespan of one Government. To have a scrutiny process that is independent and reports to Parliament is part of the way in which we will sustain that strategy through several or many Governments. I ask the Government to look again at the independence and make sure that whatever emerges in terms of scrutiny is fully independent and reports to Parliament.
On the subject of innovation, this is clearly a keystone for the success of the strategy. I am sure there is general agreement that the UK is gifted many great innovators. As we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Young, the challenge is to get these innovations into the NHS as routine NHS care. Innovative treatments improve the long-term prospects of patients and, while sometimes costing more today, reduce the need for future expense. Thereby hangs the Catch-22 that we have just heard about in detail: the NHS routinely accounts for the initial cost of the treatment, not the long-term savings that accrue in treatment that does not have to happen. This has to change and the process by which the NHS accounts for its success has to be better managed.
In response to our recommendation, the Government say that work is under way to address the challenge of supporting “proven innovations”. Perhaps the Minister will outline what an innovation needs to do to be proven before it is adopted in the NHS. What are the proof points that the NHS needs for this implementation? Meanwhile, how are budgets actually being flexed to make this happen?
No one reading the Government’s responses to recommendations 9 to 14 can be anything other than confounded by the complexity. I have to say that I knew the NHS was complex, but I did not have the scintilla of an idea of how complex, as already alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones. As well as AHSNs there are ITT/ITP, AAC, AAP, CQUIN, NHSI—not to be confused with NHSE—DHSC, LSC and no doubt as many acronyms as you can pull up. I note that the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, is leading a review to simplify this innovation landscape: perhaps that explains why he is not sitting on the Benches opposite. Put simply, how much, in total, are the Government spending on genuine innovation within the NHS? Do they even know?
Turning to data, clearly the new Health Secretary has focused on this of late. Without sounding patronising, most people in a new job concentrate on what they know. The proof will be whether this enthusiasm survives when other issues take over on his agenda, but his current energy in that area is welcome. I am also pleased that the Government seem to agree with the Select Committee’s recommendations around data. I remind noble Lords that those recommendations can be summarised as: the collection of usable data; standard format for that data—and I would add, on my own account, a standard taxonomy within that format; linkage between different systems, as our chairman alluded to; rules for commercial exploitation, and we will come back to that; and a programme to gain public acceptance. These are very important. This is not trivial and not without cost, so how is this going to be accounted for within our archipelago of health systems?
Key to the public acceptance of the use of data—this is really important—is that the public understand that the commercial use of this data will benefit the NHS, and therefore society as a whole, rather than just individual commercial concerns. In their response, the Government say they have identified three exemplar areas to start working on this and two more were going to be identified in June. Perhaps the Minister can let us know where those areas are. What I am more interested to know is when this work will be assessed, who will be doing the assessing and, more importantly, how the lessons learned from these exemplars will be distributed across the whole system. Once again, with respect to the capture and use of the data, the government response outlines a complex set of solutions and we have to try to simplify. I realise that we are starting from a complex position, but adding more to an already complex situation is never usually a solution.
As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, pointed out, there is another really important element around commercial exploitation and the contracts around how these are delivered. It is vital to ensure that the benefits of this data are properly reaped by the NHS itself. So can the Minister set out how the Government view the balance between the commercial interests of the private sector and the needs and the benefits that the NHS can derive from ownership of that valuable data? There is a balance: who is working on that balance and how will it be articulated in terms of contracts going forward?
With regards to informed consent, the Government have said they will give patients the ability to opt out of data. That in itself is important, but it works only if they know what they are opting out of: if they understand what their data is, what it is going to be used for, and how anonymisation will work for them. Serious energy must be put into a public education process, so that people understand the nature of their data and how it could be used. Just to give people an opt-out without understanding that is to squander their data and perhaps to lose value for society and for the NHS. Can we have an undertaking of a process of public education and know who will be leading that process?
On the plan to devote 2.4% of GDP to R&D, which fits around this, we welcome the Government’s undertaking to drag the United Kingdom back up to around the average of where we ought to be, but clearly, in this strategy and many others, a lot of the money is going to be coming from the private sector. In this case, what is the balance? How much money is expected to come from the private sector and how much from the Government? I reinforce the idea that the thoughts of Sir Paul Nurse should be required reading. I do not know whether noble Lords heard the “Today” programme, where Sam Gyimah, the Science Minister, and Sir Paul Nurse had a very reasoned and interesting debate. It was very good that the Minister was put up to have that debate—it was commendable by the Government and it was a good debate—but he was not able to explain where the £1 billion that we will not be getting from the European science programmes, from Horizon 2020, will come from. Which budget will it come from? Undertakings have been made in a general sense, but at the moment there is no specific budget to replace that money, and that will make the 2.4% not just difficult but impossible.
Finally, for the strategy to work, the UK needs to have the very best people working on it. We are all agreed on this. The Government have to understand that raising a quota is not the solution to this. A reduction in the size of the form that has to be filled in is not a solution. They are replacing free movement of Europe’s top scientists with a form. To use a phrase used in other contexts, it would be putting friction into that system—and that friction will put people off and prevent them coming in. Again, Sir Paul Nurse was very clear on this issue, as were the other Nobel laureates who signed the letter that was sent around. Further, unless future plans for this new immigration process also include the families of those people—the same can be said for healthcare workers, by the way—then we will lose very many people.
In conclusion, I got an overall sense from the Government’s response that they were fairly grumpy about this report, and I would say, “Please don’t be”. The report was based, as the chairman set out, on a great deal of evidence. All of us genuinely want the life sciences strategy to succeed; we all think it vital and pivotal to the future of this country. At the very least, this will require four conditions to be met. First, we have to have an implementation process and protocols that drive it forward. Secondly, the NHS has to be empowered and resourced to raise its head above the daily issues and be able to introduce innovation. Thirdly, the structured gathering of patient data, signed off by the patients themselves, must be made available to be used for the benefit of the whole of UK society and not just the private sector. Finally, sustained and consistent investment in research and development, and full access to the best possible people around the world, are needed. If we meet those four criteria, the strategy will be a success and Great Britain and the United Kingdom will be healthier and will also be wealthier.
Lord Mair (CB)
My Lords, it is a privilege to have been a member of the Select Committee undertaking the inquiry into the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, under the expert chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I should declare the following interests: I am a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Royal Society, and an emeritus professor of engineering and director of research at Cambridge University.
There can be no question but that the UK life sciences sector makes a substantial contribution to the UK economy and to the health and well-being of society. Modern medicine and healthcare rely heavily on science and engineering to deliver improved prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness. But above all, the continuing success of the life sciences depends crucially on its researchers—the people referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Fox. Before addressing the key issue of recruitment of researchers, I will comment on the importance of entrepreneurship. Our committee heard from business, investors and academics that the UK performs well in translating science and engineering research into innovation through university spin-outs and other early-stage businesses. We also heard persuasive evidence that the UK is less successful in growing small firms into much larger companies. In his report, Sir John Bell highlighted that the UK has more small biotech firms than anywhere else in Europe. Entrepreneurship is fundamental to the success of such enterprises and to their growth.
Our committee heard from many witnesses that entrepreneurship training was a significant skills gap within the life sciences sector. The UK’s world-leading academic research base provides an excellent source of new ideas and discoveries, the commercialisation of which is crucial in the context of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy. This requires successful entrepreneur- ship. Closely related to this, our committee heard evidence on convergent training, from which individuals become knowledgeable about science, engineering and business. This would aid the all-important flow of capital to innovative UK firms. The Bell report emphasised the need for entrepreneurship training at all levels, incentivising varied careers and the migration of academic scientists and engineers into industry and back into academia—importantly, to increase the influx of talented scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs in the public and private sectors.
University postgraduate education therefore needs to focus strongly on equipping young scientists and engineers with the entrepreneurship skills needed to establish and manage companies. The increasing emphasis on this in many of the centres for doctoral training funded by the EPSRC and UKRI is to be welcomed. This should be mirrored in other funding schemes for PhD students. Schemes such as the enterprise fellowships run by the Royal Academy of Engineering are also an excellent way of supporting innovative young scientists and engineers in managing spin-out companies and enhancing their entrepreneurial skills. This and other such schemes should be strongly supported and encouraged as part of the industrial strategy.
I will now comment on the recruitment of international talent. I fully agree with the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Fox. Our committee heard from many witnesses about the paramount importance of retaining the ability to recruit the very best researchers from around the world. Many businesses in the life sciences sector, and most universities and research establishments, rely on access to international talent from within and outside the EU. There is a real danger that this crucial access to international talent is now under threat. Research and innovation are increasingly global. Numerous witnesses from business and academia told our inquiry that freedom of movement within the EU has been an essential ingredient of the success of our life sciences sector. Without this freedom of movement, ambitions for our world-class life sciences industry will inevitably be curtailed. Sir Paul Nurse, a former president of the Royal Society and now director of the Francis Crick Institute, told our inquiry that the UK’s image is suffering terribly at the moment as a consequence of Brexit uncertainty. He highlighted the crucial importance of our ability to recruit the very best from around the world.
As referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, Sir Paul also emphasised that the current visa system for individuals coming to work in the UK from outside the EU is expensive and tedious, and puts people off. The whole tone of the present system is wrong. It is essential that the Government do not apply the same system to EU nationals post Brexit. Whatever Brexit deal is reached, any new immigration policy must result in a streamlined system for the frictionless movement of researchers. This is a widely held view from everyone involved in the life sciences sector—indeed, in the whole science, engineering and innovation community. International talent at all levels must be welcomed by the UK and not made to feel unwanted. The system must also be fair, transparent and efficient.
Another key issue is the cost of necessary visas. These are often prohibitive for young researchers but should be commensurate with typical academic salaries and with the length of stay requested, from a day visit to longer-term appointments. According to the Royal Society, if the Government decide to apply immigration charges to EU nationals then, based on the current system, an EU academic with a partner and two children entering the UK on a three-year tier 2 visa would have to pay up-front costs equivalent to 14% of their annual salary. This is a major deterrent for young researchers.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, referred to the report by the Migration Advisory Committee, commissioned by the Home Secretary and published in September. The report recommends that any new immigration policy should have a less restrictive regime for higher-skilled workers than for lower-skilled workers. It also recommends that the Government should do what they can to reduce the bureaucratic burden of the system. Nevertheless, the report’s underlying suggestion that the tier 2 visa route be extended to EU nationals is disappointing because it is currently an expensive and burdensome route. The tier 2 visa route is not welcoming and is a deterrent to attracting talent. In the rest of Europe, talented people will be able to move freely between EU states, yet to work in the UK they will require a visa, obtained through one of the most onerous and expensive visa routes. This is certain to stifle the attraction and retention of talent in the UK. Why would a talented French researcher choose to come to the UK when it is so much simpler to go to Germany or Italy?
The recent report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee highlighted a number of key principles that should underpin a successful immigration system. They include the need for an efficient, streamlined and low-cost application process for employees and employers and the need readily to recruit highly skilled people, wherever they are from, without being subject to an annual limit.
In summary, there can be no question but that immigration policy is central to the continued success of the life sciences sector. In 2015 more than half of the UK’s research output was the result of international collaborations. These collaborations are increasing, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the UK’s research output. These collaborations must not be put at risk. As the president of the Royal Society, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, put it:
“The UK is a global leader in science because top home-grown and international scientists want to work here. We must do everything we can to ensure that the UK maintains its role at the heart of European science, because that is in everyone’s best interests. If science loses, everyone loses”.
Any science or engineering researcher appointed by business or academia should be allowed to come to the UK without feeling unwelcome and without encountering unnecessary bureaucratic barriers. Can the Minister give an assurance that his department will endeavour to ensure that any post-Brexit immigration policy will be proportionate, light-touch, inexpensive, easy to navigate and welcoming? This is certainly what is needed if the life sciences industrial strategy is to flourish.
Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn (Con)
My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on your Lordships’ Science and Technology Select Committee under the expert chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. At once I should say that, unlike many of the members of the committee, I have no special skill in the life sciences, while others, including the chair, are indeed experts in the field. I add my thanks to the officials of the House who helped the committee in its work and to the specialist advisers.
This is, of course, an area where the United Kingdom has long had an internationally established and highly distinguished role. For example, Francis Crick and James Watson were working in Cambridge when in 1953 they established and first published the double-helical structure of DNA, for which they, along with Maurice Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. They drew on the work of others, including the brilliant X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. That work clearly transformed the field in which we are speaking today and brought the United Kingdom to the front rank.
The report, with the subtitle Who’s Driving the Bus?, draws substantially on the report by Sir John Bell, Life Sciences: Industrial Strategy, which was published in August 2017—with whose conclusions our committee in the main agreed. But the Bell report did not go on to deal in much detail with the implementation of its recommendations. This is where our report makes a number of more detailed recommendations, and it is here that the Government in their response in their White Paper of November 2017, their life sciences sector deal of December 2017 and their response to our report could usefully have been much more precise and explicit.
In this country we have the huge benefit of the National Health Service, which is open in principle without charge to all UK citizens. The potential value of the data which the National Health Service accumulates has been well discussed in our report and by members of the committee speaking this evening. It is clear that standardisation of the data, and the manner and terms for access to it, require clarification. That should expedite the process of innovation whereby new scientific and medical discoveries are implemented rapidly and widely. It is no easy task to expedite such innovation without being overcentralised, and much of our committee’s report is concerned with that process.
It is here that there are grounds for criticism of the Government’s reaction. For one thing, as other members of our committee emphasised, they could usefully and formally adopt the Bell report as government policy, which they have not yet explicitly done. That is one of the committee’s key recommendations.
A related point is the need for the Government to be more precise about their industrial strategy and to ensure that the strategy is effectively advocated at Cabinet level. We emphasised that it is important that the Government at Cabinet level should have these issues clearly in mind.
There is one word of caution which I will add. Our report, like Sir John Bell’s report which preceded it, is concerned primarily with health and the medical sciences. It is certainly a large enough field, but our committee's report does not deal with other life sciences: botany, animal zoology, agriculture or biochemistry outside the medical sciences. They are vast fields. Our report makes that point explicitly, but there is a risk that those who read it hastily may feel that it covers the whole field of the life sciences, which it certainly does not. There is certainly scope here for further consideration of these vital fields.
Overall, there is a feeling that the Government certainly appreciate the vast importance of this field and the need for adequate funding. However, unless they sharpen their focus and consider more closely the precise nature of their policy and the manner of its implementation, the position will not be optimal. This is one of the fields of science and technology in which Britain has led the way and continues to do so, yet both the health of the nation and a major section of the economy depend on increasing our effectiveness in this area. That is the challenge which lies before us.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and his committee on the excellence of their report. I declare an interest as president of the Health Care Supply Association and of GS1 UK, the bar-coding association. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, we all agree that the UK’s life sciences sector makes a hugely significant contribution to our country. Clearly it is the flagship of the Government’s industrial strategy, but the committee asked some pretty searching questions, particularly in relation to the National Health Service, which is what I want to focus on.
We have an enormous paradox. As Sir John Bell has said, the NHS is potentially an enormous asset for those seeking to develop and discover new innovative products and to be able to test them in a living healthcare system. The irony is that the NHS is absolutely useless at adopting generally proven new innovations. I am sorry to say that the strategy is going to do nothing whatever to improve that. All the innovations are worthy but minimal, and we know that they will not succeed. Unless something drastic happens the NHS will continue to refuse to take innovation seriously, and I find that a very depressing situation.
The committee has commented on the complicated arrangements for implementation and the clear lack of accountability. It has also referred to the NHS’s own commitment as being incoherent, unco-ordinated and ineffective. The reality is that the only thing that counts in the NHS at the moment is cost control. We know that when it comes to asking the NHS to invest in the kind of innovative products and medicines that would give the UK a lead in global development, it refuses to do so. I have talked to a number of innovative companies that are desperately trying to sell into the NHS, and the situation is really depressing. The Association of British Healthcare Industries has basically said that the adoption and spread of proven technology is a major problem. The NHS spends on discovery and development but it will not spend on adoption and spread. That is so different from the commercial sector. When I hear that NHS Improvement is not interested but it is interested in productivity, it makes me despair. Surely its investment in innovation is the one way in which we can actually enhance the productivity of our health service.
I am president of the procurement association in the NHS, and I confess that there is a problem with procurement in the health service. It is basically concerned only with the cost of individual items. When pressed, Ministers, NHS England and so on will say that they are concerned about overall value, but the reality is that they are not. They are concerned only about the actual cost of individual products. The ABHI also comments that SMEs might be forgiven for thinking that the strategy was designed mainly to support large companies. SMEs are having a real problem getting leverage and support from the Government in this crucial sector.
I shall give an example of an innovative company and the problems that it is having. In summary, over 200 NHS patients have been treated to date with Natrox oxygen therapy, an innovative treatment indicated for chronic non-healing diabetic foot ulcers and other chronic wounds. The NHS has not paid for any of the patients to be treated; the company has. It is a small start-up business, and it can no longer afford to fund free treatment for the NHS because the NHS now wants the company to dedicate itself to providing products to paying healthcare customers in other countries.
The NHS has pushed this company from pillar to post with all the so-called innovations that it has developed. Almost two years ago, the company went down the road of the “innovation scorecard”. My noble friend, who is in despair about this innovation scorecard that so many of us have heard about, may talk about it later. So the company spent a lot of energy on the scorecard and was preparing a tender submission but then the NHS abandoned the process. That was later restarted but the company was told it had to start again from scratch. It did so, but then it heard that the innovation scorecard process was being abandoned and it now had to utilise Innovation Connect. It registered on Innovation Connect in March but has had zero feedback from that route—not even an acknowledgment. There is no clear or obvious path to contracting for new products on the Innovation Connect website. The company has followed this up with emails and met the people concerned but has had absolutely no response.
So here we have the potential of NHS-assisted innovation, with some research funded by the National Institute for Health Research, not being available to NHS patients. Members of the company’s board, comprising UK and international investors, are pushing to relocate to the US on the basis that more interest and commitment has been shown by US healthcare providers. If that happens, NHS patients will lose out, the country will lose out and yet another UK innovation will have been lost overseas. I am afraid this is not an isolated incident; it is happening day after day. Hugely innovative companies simply cannot get inside the NHS.
It is the same story with medicines. Obviously pharma companies do not enjoy much sympathy in the world, but we are coming to the end of the current five-year PPRS agreement, which essentially rebated to the Government any cost of branded drugs, over a certain allowance for inflation, and instead of that money being used to invest in new medicines it has just gone back into the coffers of the Treasury. Patients in this country simply do not have access to the kinds of medicines that are available in France and Germany. It seems to me that NHS England has no interest, or policy to do so, in saying that it is in the UK’s interest to invest in new medicines, many of which have been developed in this country but will not be developed here in future. We are absolutely at the tipping point of losing a lot of the pharma industry, as the chief executive of AstraZeneca has made clear in his recent remarks.
We come to the Government’s response. Frankly, it is pathetic. The accelerated access review and academic health science networks are worthy but very marginal, as they can deal with only a few products and medicines. Then we are told that we can have a life sciences council. Wonderful. What on earth is a life sciences council going to do to get the NHS involved in investing in innovation and in the future of our country?
I am afraid I have reached the gloomy conclusion that for all the bold talk, exciting strategies and ministerial visions, the NHS is incapable of responding. Patients are losing out, innovative UK companies are getting a raw deal and, frankly, the life sciences strategy is doomed to fail.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, in December 2017 the Government announced:
“Government and life sciences sector agree transformative sector deal … Business Secretary Greg Clark and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announce a Sector Deal with the life sciences sector”.
What happened when the committee produced its report? I shall give one example of a story in the press:
“Lords slam government’s delivery of Life Sciences Strategy … The government’s delivery of its Life Sciences Industrial Strategy is ‘wholly inadequate’, overly complex and incoherent, conclude the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee in a damning report published yesterday”.
Life sciences—what a huge and important area. If you look up on the internet what life sciences cover, you will find the following: anatomy, biochemistry, botany, genetics, immunology, microbiology, neuroscience, biotechnology, fermentation technology—that is relevant to me in my industry, and I will come on to that—food science, genomics, immunotherapy and pharmacology, and I could go on. I have touched on just a few of the life sciences.
I shall give one example from my own world. The fermentation of beer and biochemistry are important because our consumers are demanding. We manufacture hundreds of millions of bottles of Cobra beer a year, but the consumer expects every bottle to taste exactly the same as the one before. You are using yeast, a natural ingredient, and the natural process of fermentation. The ingredients change with harvests over the years, yet the consumer expects it to be the same. Our master brewers are highly trained scientists, constantly trying to perfect and innovate, whether that means producing a double-fermented beer or a gluten-free beer that tastes as good as the normal one. That is really difficult from a life sciences point of view. So I know from my own world how important this issue is.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and his committee for the report that they have produced. It is hard-hitting, and it is for the Government to respond to it today—not the official response that has been given that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to. The noble Lord also mentioned that Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, is now chairing the Industrial Strategy Council. He is a hugely talented individual, so that is very good news.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, also referred to the letter today. It is serendipitous that just today we received this letter written by 29 Nobel Prize winners written to both Prime Minister May and President Juncker. I quote from the letter:
“Scientific research and innovation are crucial for tackling the many shared challenges we face … to meet these challenges for everyone's benefit, science needs to flourish and that requires the flow of people and ideas across borders”—
the noble Lord, Lord Mair, spoke about that—
“to allow the rapid exchange of ideas, expertise and technology.
Europe was the home of the Enlightenment and the birthplace of modern science, but partly as a result of two devastating internecine wars in Europe in the 20th century, it suffered a decline relative to the USA … this decline has been reversed in the last few decades as a result of the ease of collaboration nurtured by the EU through its many initiatives and programmes, which have greatly benefited European science. Creating new barriers to such ease of collaboration will inhibit progress, to the detriment of us all. Many of us in the science community therefore regret the UK’s decision to leave the European Union because it risks such barriers”.
There is regret.
“It is widely recognised that investing in research and innovation are increasingly crucial for shaping a better European future… We must not allow the UK or the EU to become more insular in our approach to each other.
By deciding to leave the EU, the UK has given up its right to participate in EU research and innovation programmes”.
Does the Minister agree with that?
“It must now step up its commitment to those programmes if it wants to remain involved … The challenges we face must be tackled in a manner that benefits everyone and those challenges are better faced together. Only a deal which allows the closest possible cooperation between the UK and the EU, now and in the future, will make that possible”.
That is it, my Lords: 29 Nobel Prize winners, including people I know, such as Professor Paul Nurse, who has been cited several times in the debate and is chancellor of the University of Birmingham. Professor Sir Venki Ramakrishnan is a friend of mine, president of the Royal Society, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and a Nobel Prize winner. Professor Sir John Gurdon is a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Nobel Prize winner. Sir John Walker is a fellow of Sydney Sussex College, where I am privileged to be an honorary fellow at Cambridge, a Nobel Prize winner. These are the experts—oh, sorry, we cannot listen to experts.
The committee’s report was so hard-hitting and positive, saying:
“The life sciences sector is the flagship for the Government’s Industrial Strategy”,
but, it says,
“So far, Government action has been wholly inadequate”.
However, it is optimistic. It says,
“all is not lost. Prompt and vigorous action by the Government can save the day”.
It talks about how we do so well in translating basic science into innovation, but that it has heard time and again that we are less successful in growing SMEs into larger companies.
“Sir John Bell sets the aim of four massive UK life sciences companies being created over the next 10 years”.
I will come back to that.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, spoke about the size of the sector: £30 billion employing nearly 500,000 people. The committee heard evidence time and again about how the success of the sector would be measured. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned this, but I think it is important to restate it. Sir John Bell said:
“The … people I have interacted with … want to see the health service deal with [the uptake and spread of innovation]; … The problem is … it is not clear who is driving the bus … Whoever is driving the bus, the windscreen wipers do not work and the exhaust is falling off”.
That is not just in the committee’s report; Sir John Bell corroborates it in his report. He said that one of the reasons why the NHS struggles with adopting innovations is because it is struggling to do even the most simple of things. This is really serious. The noble Lord, Lord Fox, also spoke about this. The committee report states:
“Unless the NHS’s ability to adopt and spread innovations, it will not be able to play a full role in the implementation of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy”.
As chancellor of the University of Birmingham, I know that we partner very closely with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, the largest hospital in Europe. Our medical school is one of the top rated in the country. Dame Julie Moore, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, told the committee that financial incentives, such as best practice tariffs for trusts that show rapid adoption of innovations, could be a way forward. Does the Minister agree?
Then we come to R&D and innovation. I have stated time after time, in debate after debate, that this country underinvests in R&D and innovation. We invest 1.7% of GDP. I am very happy to hear the Government say that they will have a target of 2.4% of GDP by 2027. If you look at the chart of expenditure across the world, we are at 1.7% and the OECD average is 2.4%, which is where the Government want to get to. The USA is at 2.8%. Israel, one of the most innovative countries in the world, spends approaching 4.5% of GDP. No wonder so many amazing tech innovations come out of Israel.
The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, spoke about the difficulty of growing companies, and the report agrees that,
“the UK’s historic poor performance in this area is a concern because real economic value comes not from funding start-ups but enabling scale-up”.
Scale-ups are the challenge of business. I know that having grown a business from scratch. Sir Paul Nurse, the report writes, said that the UK lacked individuals who understood both science and finance. That is normal. In many industries, you have experts, but they are not necessarily financial experts as well.
The tax system can be used to incentivise investment in particular areas of the economy. The BIA, cited in the report, said that the inherent flaw in the EIS scheme, which I have used in my business, and the venture capital trust scheme,
“is that investors cannot follow their money in future non-qualifying fundraises. This penalises early investors as they become dilutive as a company progresses.
The BIA suggested that continued tax relief for EIS and VCT investors when investing further in companies they have backed at an early stage and preferential access to further fundraises would,
“inventivise greater and longer-term investing”.
Does the Minister agree?
Professor Chris Lowe, director of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences at the University of Cambridge—where I chair the Judge Business School advisory board—emphasised the importance of entrepreneurship. We have a centre for entrepreneurship at the Judge Business School, now, I am proud to say, one of the highest-rated business schools in the world. Professor Chris Lowe said:
“if you are going to generate a lot of new ideas which will eventually feed through to a large multinational industry, you need the entrepreneurs to set that up and get it running. It is a matter of culture”.
Then there is the elephant in the room: the Brexit uncertainty. The noble Lord, Lord Mair, spoke so clearly about worry about freedom of movement: allowing people to reside and work freely. It has been such an advantage in the life sciences sector, but Brexit poses a potential barrier for us to access that talent from the EU. One member of the Cambridge Judge Business School advisory board is Dr Menelas Pangalos, who is executive vice-president of innovative medicines and early development at AstraZeneca, which is headquartered in Cambridge. The report quotes him as being,
“Worried about the impact of Brexit on our employees … the fact that we have no idea what is going to happen is a real problem. We are starting to see people turn us down now in the UK because they do not know what the outcome will be for future employment”.
This is AstraZeneca, one of the leading pharma companies in the world. Professor Sir Paul Nurse told us that the UK’s,
“image is suffering terribly at this moment”.
I keep saying this: we have not taken back control with Brexit; we are losing control and losing our standing in the world. I could go on. The life sciences sector requires,
“unencumbered access to high quality talent”,
said Sir Paul Nurse. The noble Lord, Lord Mair, mentioned the tier 2 visa. I do not want to repeat, but he said how ridiculous the system we have is. The report says clearly what is happening for tier 2 visas for non-European workers,
“including doctors and other healthcare staff, software developers and laboratory scientists. In December 2017, January 2018 and February 2018 the cap … was hit for an ‘unprecedented’ three months in a row”.
So we are just turning away talent that we need. This is absolute madness; we need to change it.
The Government response is tax incentives. They have said, “Oh well, we have increased the R&D rate of tax to 12%”. Does the Minister agree that that is adequate? If we really want tax incentives, we need to do much more.
Then there are unicorns. It was reported in the Daily Telegraph today that Britain is the home of 15 unicorns—companies worth at least $1 billion. We are much better than other European countries, outperforming France and Germany. Companies in the life sciences sector are among these unicorns. Cambridge is a great area which is a fertile ground for growing an economy, with start-ups, SMEs, scale-ups and global players such as AstraZeneca. The Cambridge life science anchor model works really well.
Birmingham Health Partners talks about collaboration, innovation and application and says:
“Finally it is now down to the UK, the EU and to Member States to ensure that the unique relationship between the UK and EU research is maintained for the benefit of medical research and ultimately of citizens across Europe. Neither the UK, nor Europe can afford a ‘Brexit’ for medical research”.
It says that, for medical research, a no deal would mean: loss of researchers from the UK; disruption to productive collaborations; reduced funding for UK medical research; barriers to clinical trials and research into rare disease. A no-deal Brexit is not an option.
I quote the Prime Minister, who said these beautiful words on 21 May:
“William Wordsworth described the statue of Sir Isaac Newton that stands in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge as being ‘the marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’. That romantic image belies the truth that the essence of scientific progress is not private contemplation, but collaboration. Nothing is achieved in isolation and it is only through co-operation that advances are made. Every great British scientist could only reach new frontiers of invention because they built on the work of others, exchanged ideas with their contemporaries and participated in an international community of discovery”.
What do we do? We Brexit.
An article in the Lancet said:
“It may be that if [the UK] have to have [their] own separate regulatory system, then manufacturers will choose to launch [their product] in Europe and the USA”.
The APG, the group of American pharmaceutical companies in the UK, including huge companies such as Pfizer and Lilly, said that,
“uncertainty over Brexit is affecting global decisions on future investments in life science and health industries”.
There are now six months to go. An article in Nature spoke to scientists about how it was affecting them. One said that:
“The uncertainty is already stunting science”.
Another said that:
“Research money is already flowing away from the United Kingdom”,
and another that:
“If it weren’t for Brexit, these people would have joined my lab”.
The head of Roche is quoted as saying that the UK is “less interesting” to pharma because of Brexit.
I could go on. These are the people at the coalface, who are running some of the biggest life science companies in the world. This country has 1% of the world’s population but produces 16% of its leading research papers. We have the best universities in the world. Oxford and Cambridge now rank first and second in a recent list; along with those in America they are the best universities in the world. Cambridge, not an American university, has won 100 Nobel Prizes—more than any other university in the world. Professor Sir Greg Winter, Master of Trinity College, has just won a Nobel Prize. Our whole life sciences sector is at stake. The only way to save it is not Brexit. A Norway-EEA model would allow the sector to carry on seamlessly, but the best way to save it would be to remain in the European Union.
Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to be taking part in this important debate. I too was a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee which produced the report we are talking about, under the able chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. It was a fascinating but very worrying inquiry. I draw attention to my interests in the register, particularly as chair of the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust, about which I will speak today. I will focus on the role of the NHS.
We all recognise that the NHS is vital to the success of the Government’s life sciences strategy. It is a unique asset that differentiates the UK from other countries. It is the big opportunity. The Government recognise this, but the challenge is not whether to recognise it but how to deliver on that opportunity. In our inquiry we heard extensively from industry that a silo approach to NHS budgeting and organisation makes innovation difficult, even when it is substitutive rather than additive —as my noble friend Lady Young said. In other words, even if a new treatment is an alternative and not an additional new approach, it is difficult to find a way through.
We also heard from NHS England that living within a tough funding regime means that the centre has to be sure of the benefits to the NHS of any innovation before any change can be approved and funded. Both these contributions, though understandable, were concerning to the committee. On top of this, the danger of the new NHS settlement is that too much of it will be used to prop up the existing service rather than to attempt to transform. It is an inevitable conflict. I sympathise with the Minister dealing with that one—although the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, is not in his place.
I thought it would be useful to use a real example to highlight the realities and choices around innovation. It is very easy to talk about theory and potentially hugely positive macroeconomic effects. The life sciences strategy is defined by Sir John Bell as the application and harnessing of biological sciences and technology. If it is handled well, whether via the use of data, genomics, new drugs and treatments, new devices and approaches, and so on, it is absolutely also about better patient care and outcomes. I do not want to repeat the excellent contributions of my committee colleagues, so I will choose one disease, cystic fibrosis, to illustrate my point.
The Royal Brompton and Harefield Trust is a leader in the treatment of cystic fibrosis in both children and adults. CF is a life-limiting genetic disease that is caused by a defective gene which codes for a protein in cell membranes and therefore affects multiple organs in the body. Life is limited due to progressive lung disease, and those with CF are informed by their clinical teams, from an early age, that maintenance and awareness of lung function is important to maximise their life expectancy. As a result, people with CF are expected to attend clinics at their specialist centre regularly, to monitor their lung disease and receive treatment to prevent, halt or slow disease progression.
Our patients travel from all over the UK for specialist care and, through patient experience surveys, they report that attending a clinic so frequently for monitoring is significantly impacting on their quality of life. They must take time off work, arrange childcare and fund the significant cost of travel into central London. In addition to this, CF outpatient services at our hospital and other specialist centres are busy and frequently overbooked. This is a growing concern because research in this area has predicted an increase of 75% in the number of adults with CF. The good news is that this is due to advances in medical care and associated increased life expectancy, and further new drug trials are in the offing. However, the increasing pressure on services increases, for example, the serious danger of cross-infection, which is a significant issue for this patient group. Coming to hospital more or for longer than they absolutely have to is not good for their overall health.
A recently published guideline from NICE on cystic fibrosis has urged healthcare teams to consider providing telehealth as an option for routine monitoring, with benefits recognised both to the patient experience and in allocating hospital resources. The clinical team at the Royal Brompton and Harefield Trust has developed an innovation project that aims to address these challenges by empowering the person with CF to monitor their own health from home. Providing self-assessment equipment and a technology app platform to share that data with the healthcare team unlocks the team’s ability to provide remote, virtual consultations and advice. It will allow people with CF to gain a greater awareness of their overall health and to see the impact of lifestyle changes or new medicines. It is hoped that putting data in the patient’s hands will start to equalise the power dynamic that exists between patient and the healthcare team that currently holds much of the data used for clinical decision-making. It offers the trust the opportunity to reduce the number of in-hospital clinic appointments and consider how to allocate resources better in view of the growing patient population.
Although there is a lot of evidence from clinical practice indicating that the impact of this innovation will hugely improve both the clinical management of CF and patients’ experience of living with and managing this serious disease, there is no clear evidence yet that it can be economically sustainable. It is too soon to make and prove that hypothesis. The team are currently both tendering for the services of a technology partner to develop the platform and exploring with the current commissioner—the payer for our services, NHS England—how to pay for it. The platform is likely to demonstrate fairly quickly that the number of outpatient consultations between CF patients and the clinical team, especially face-to-face ones, can be greatly reduced, saving the patient travel costs and freeing up capacity in the hospital. Over the longer-term, the platform will enable the patient and the clinical team to identify the symptoms of an imminent exacerbation of the disease, which can then be managed so as to minimise the need for the patient to be admitted to the hospital as an in-patient.
If these cost savings and efficiencies from this innovation could be applied over a large number of patients, there is clear potential for the overall current budget spent by NHS England on CF to be reduced. But, crucially, the cost of running the platform in its first one to two years, when added to the existing costs of service provision, are almost certain to increase the current budget for CF, at a time when NHS England is looking to cut back on specialist service provision more generally.
My point in raising this as an example is not special pleading to the Minister, although I am sure he is listening, but to try to give a concrete example—there are so many others—of how current commissioning will need to change in order to support innovation. Innovation cannot and will not happen as part of the current regime. The systems, incentives and funding models are not right. Yet at all levels, whether in the individual clinical team, at NHS trust board level, in academic and business partners or nationally, we all want to deliver change and efficiencies. To make this work we need to be round the table having a serious, grown-up conversation.
I was struck by hearing evidence in the inquiry that genomics has been successfully developed as a comprehensive national strategy partly because it had, in effect, a separate organisation, so there was absolute focus and clarity around mission and delivery. If the life sciences strategy is to harness the power of the NHS and deliver both efficiencies and innovatory new treatments and approaches, it too will need absolute focus and accountability. It cannot be an add-on.
Sir John Bell’s excellent strategy and evidence to us identified a small window for us to get the incentives, the systems and the accountabilities sorted in order to realise the unique potential we have as an economy because of the power of the NHS. Can the Minister convince us today that the Government recognise this?
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for chairing this important committee and for securing this debate. I am also grateful to him for inviting me to speak in the debate on preventive medicine and the role of the NHS. The report draws attention to the health service’s failure to implement the results of research.
The greatest threat to the health of the British people today is the worst epidemic for 100 years: namely, the obesity epidemic. Half the people are either overweight or, frankly, obese. This has produced four million type 2 diabetics, increasing rates of cancer, heart disease, joint disease, gangrene of the limbs, blindness, dementia and many more. We keep being told, “It’s all very difficult—it’s multifactorial, you know”. Only one factor causes obesity, and that is putting too many calories into one’s mouth. We need to eat fewer calories and eat foods that satisfy hunger.
How did we get into this mess of the worst epidemic for 100 years? During the war there was no obesity, because we ate the right food in the right quantity and it satisfied hunger. How? Because we used to eat things like fat, dripping or lard on wholemeal bread, and whole milk—none of this skimmed nonsense. Why did all this change? It changed because the unscrupulous junk food industry realised that fat was an essential food which limited the amount that we ate, and so it demonised fat and advocated and produced food which was low in fat and high in carbohydrates. The problem with this is that low-fat, high-carbohydrate food is pretty tasteless, and so to make people eat it the industry added large quantities of sugar. So the obesity epidemic was born: low fat, high carbohydrate and high sugar, and the nation began to become more and more obese.
In the early 1960s, Professor John Yudkin warned of the danger of a low-fat, high-sugar diet, but the food lobby and other miscreants managed to rubbish his work and have him dismissed from the Chair of Nutrition at the University of London. The science is quite straightforward and has been known for years, although it was not introduced but ignored because of the powerful food lobby. As noble Lords already know, when fat enters the duodenum it releases hormones such as cholecystokinin and gastric inhibitory peptide. These delay the emptying of the stomach and give the sensation of fullness, which satisfies hunger, and you stop eating. When the fat is emulsified and absorbed it passes further down the alimentary tract, then normal service is resumed in the stomach. It is a very precise and effective mechanism. But the unscrupulous junk food industry had to sabotage that mechanism in order to increase its sales and profits. The sabotage involved demonising fat.
This whole subject has been bedevilled by misleading advice, most of it deliberately misleading, allowing the food industry to produce cheap food that does not satisfy, and so people eat more and more of it and get fatter and fatter. The tragedy of all this is that mainly those in the lower income groups are worst affected by the seduction of the unscrupulous junk food industry. Unfortunately, the public have been bombarded with thoroughly misleading information and advice. They have been told that exercise is the best way to get rid of excess fat. You have to run miles to take even a pound of fat off. Only a fraction of the calories we eat is expended on exercise. Of course, exercise is important for general health and a sense of well-being.
Obesity in children has now reached enormous proportions, and the problem starts before the age of five, before they go to school. If a woman is pregnant and obese, she transfers this tendency towards obesity to the child in utero, not genetically but by a mechanism that is not understood, and so we put it into Greek and call it epigenetics. So the die is cast at any early age, and the tendency to obesity is there. But the good news is that it does not need to lead to obesity; it can do so only if the child eats too many calories. There is a condition, myxoedema, where the thyroid gland fails, and people with that condition tend to put on weight. However, they can do that only if they are eating too many calories.
Even today, the Department of Health is still advocating exercise and diet as the answer. Only a fraction of the calories we eat is used up in exercise, so the department should stop talking about how exercise and diet is the solution. It should emphasise that the answer is to put fewer calories into the mouth. Its slogan “exercise and diet” should be changed; it should emphasise diet and give exercise the lower profile as far as obesity is concerned.
Saturated and trans fats should be minimised but not the majority of fats. During a Select Committee on the long-term future of the NHS, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, we were served up with some rather curious, dubious statistics, one of which was that the obesity epidemic was costing £4 billion a year. I suggested that the point was in the wrong place. It was much more likely to be £40 billion. That is what is wrecking the NHS. Curing obesity could release £40 billion; obviously not all of that would be released but it would be a start.
We have an enormous job on our hands in preventive medicine as we are in the middle of this disastrous epidemic, the worst for 100 years. We need not only to reduce the size of the epidemic but to start preventing the next generation falling into the same trap. I suggested to the Select Committee that we needed an all-out campaign—involving every man, woman and child, every institution and government department—not to tell people what to do but simply to tell them the truth. The answer is to have smaller portions and smaller plates, food that you have to chew, such as wholemeal bread, vegetables and nuts—clearly, avoiding food to which you are allergic. Some of the expert witnesses from the hierarchy told us that all-out campaigns do not work. We pointed out that the Lord Speaker’s campaign against AIDS when he was Secretary of State for Health, as Norman Fowler, was highly successful, largely, I suspect, because he was absolutely honest and direct and did not mince his words.
GPs have been told by the Department of Health not to call patients obese because it is judgmental. They ought to realise that there is a distinct difference between being judgmental and making accurate diagnoses. The message is simple. The obesity epidemic is killing millions, costing billions and the cure is free.
Lord Desai (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for chairing the committee that created this report and for his very good presentation. I also blame him for getting me to speak, otherwise I would not have spoken. Being the 11th speaker I promise to try to say something different. I promise not to talk about Brexit or the 29 Nobel Prize winners.
In a long time following government policies I have never seen an industrial strategy succeed if it was formed by the Government. Governments are not very good at forming industrial strategies. Industrialisation happens from the private sector not the public sector. Reading the report, very good though it is, I thought that setting up boards and implementation strategies was all top down. Somehow we will sit there and design a policy which will be implemented. That is not the way that innovations happen. I have been through the Harold Wilson policy when the idea was to encourage large corporations over small ones. Then we had the Conservative Party strategy and then new Labour’s one. We need to understand that if this is the way you want to go, fair enough, but there has to be a single lead person to implement it.
I will give two examples. First, when the redevelopment of the London docks was done—it is not an industrial plan but it was a major project—the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, was crucial in driving the process forward. It happened because there was a responsible point person to implement it. Another example is the northern powerhouse strategy where the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, has taken a lot of interest and been driving it forward. So yes have a strategy, have various committees that do various things, but then have a point person whose responsibility it is to deliver the strategy. Unless you have a point person the strategy will not be delivered. In parenthesis, I also worry about these very important people who do very useful work in their daytime jobs sitting around in a committee room in London for three or four hours. The opportunity cost of that must be enormous. They should have a conference call. We need to think about what successful strategies of innovation or change we have followed in the past and whether they can be repeated in this case.
My next point is about the NHS. It has been called the pivotal agency for this subject. It has been criticised by my noble friend Lord Hunt. I want to try to explain why it would be difficult for the NHS to do what is expected of it. We all love the NHS and we are always unhappy with it. We always want to lay more and more aims and objectives and goals on its shoulders. The main thing about the NHS, which will always be the case, is that it is underfunded. It is a universal law that if you price something at zero you will have perpetual excess demand and you will have to ration. You will have to decide what to do and what not to do. Current needs are so acute that things such as innovation may happen, but they will not happen by policy but by accident. As my noble friend Lord Hunt pointed out, you may have innovations that will be helpful and cut costs in the long run but to be able to afford to try that you need a bit of excess fat in the system. That excess fat is not there. If you adopt an innovation and it goes wrong the whole world will descend on you—newspapers and everybody will say, “My God, why are they wasting money doing this?” It is like a poor family living at the edge of the poverty line being told, “The food your children are eating is not healthy. Why don’t you eat organic food?” They reply that yes it would be better for them but they cannot afford it. One of the reasons for the obesity epidemic in poorer families is that bad food is cheaper and good food is expensive. But that is another story.
If we are going to have the NHS do anything about education innovations we will have to think of a new way of doing it. It is also a highly centralised situation. I read somewhere—in paragraph 58 or something—that they do not want an innovation that cannot be implemented across the whole thing. Why do they not adopt an innovation and let it spread? That is not in the logic of a centralised system. A centralised system is not very good for encouraging innovation. We know all this. It is not rocket science. Let us be kind to the NHS and say that what it does it does very well but it will not be able to do other things that we want it to unless we generate some extra income for it.
I shall just mention data. The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, who will follow me, knows much more about the commercialisation of data and so on, and I am sure he will say more about it. However, I shall make two observations. By and large, under both parties in government, we have not been very good at using internet data in a large data-creating strategy—at recording, storing and using large datasets. We have failed again and again and had to abandon it. If we are to see NHS data converted into income and benefit for the NHS, we will have to get a better strategy than we have had so far.
There are two dangers. First, if we insist on centralisation, it is too large a problem to standardise and get all the data in a single format. If we do not do it, however, the problem will be that some regions will benefit from selling their data but others will not. The biggest danger is that as soon as you sell data people will say, “You’re privatising the NHS. Stop it”. I would love to see a package in which NHS data is sold for the benefit of both research and patients and can generate income. If someone can find a way of doing it, they should get a Nobel Prize. But it is not as easy as all that.
I want to say one more thing. It is usually said that in America it is much easier for pharmaceutical firms to innovate. It is more difficult in the UK. Why is that? In the UK we have what I call a monopsony buyer of drugs. There is a single buyer of drugs with very little room for experimentation. It does not have the excess fat to be able to experiment; it must buy whatever is going. In America, not only is expenditure much larger—as a total, as a percentage of GDP and per capita—it is decentralised. A pharmaceutical firm can try out an innovation in this, that or the other region and sell it across much more easily than by going to the NHS and having to bargain over whether it will buy the drugs. This is not an insurmountable obstacle, but we have to understand that the nature of the NHS is such that it would not be a very efficient buyer of innovations that it would be risky to adopt and which could fail.
In this respect, perhaps we ought to study why innovations in fields such as fintech and artificial intelligence in the UK are much more successful. There are fantastic small fintech firms that then grow bigger because they start small and are bought out. The fintech process is similar; it does not involve that much science but it involves technology and imagination in inventing new products and uses. We have a thriving fintech sector and a thriving artificial intelligence sector. It should be similar in this case; we should be able to have many successful small, innovative firms, which later grow into larger firms—or not. One question we ought to study is: why might there be obstacles in the life sciences sector that prevent such processes happening?
I have spoken for far too long, but this is an excellent report and I am sure the Government will derive the right lessons from it.
Lord Freyberg (CB)
My Lords, I too would like to thank the committee for so thoroughly examining this vital part of our economy and national purpose. This is not simply another industry sector. As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said, the essence of what it brings is clear in its name: life. It is all the more important, therefore, that we as a nation have a clear, simple and credible strategic objective, backed up by the right ways and means to achieve it for our patients as well as our pocketbooks. We need to do this in ways that play to our natural strengths: our science, our NHS and our willingness to work together in times of need. We should not try to become like the Americans or to build companies, however ambitiously large, in the shape of the biotechs of the past. That would fail, not because we do not have enough ambition, but because to succeed and be credible we must be organised and authentic.
We have a strong legacy of leadership in life sciences. Twenty-five of the bestselling drugs ever were discovered here, but most were commercialised by non-UK companies. To reset this imbalance, we need to give industrial help across the board—to UK innovators and progressive charities to translate great science and data into world-class assets. We need to manufacture them here, show their value through early-access patient use in the NHS and then supply the larger firms with healthcare assets that will be sold abroad, not disappear abroad. We must capture the value of the assets we have here, anchor IP here in the UK and return the high value of health data here, to our NHS. I agree entirely with others that we must have the consent of patients in place for this to work.
UK plc is already in competition for this new life sciences industry with other nations richer and more comfortable with risk than we are. The future health service is about innovation with business to better enable prevention and early diagnosis, so we need to realise this now and act now. To enable pharma and tech companies to thrive here, UK plc now needs to act like a life sciences plc would—joined up, commercial and clearly led.
The strategy and the excellent report cover a broad field, but I shall focus on two areas covered in the strategy: first, harnessing the national infrastructure, which gives us our global offering; and secondly, value capture, which is our reward. We have invested billions in public sector infrastructure that can help industry, large and small. We have basic research and specialised equipment held in universities. We have hundreds of biobanks and thousands of opinion leaders in NHS networks wanting to test new innovations in clinical practice. However, we have allowed much of this to be fragmented, internally competitive and tough to navigate from the inside, let alone for industry, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, made clear so forcefully. We must create a national industrialised product that our innovators can use and promote globally as a simple, credible, national offering in life sciences. The report says that we need a bus driver, but first we need a navigable bus route, with systems working together as a national unit, each part contributing what it is best at, rather than trying to compete with each other for the same bio-dollar.
There are positives that we must celebrate. We are recruiting patients into clinical trials at unprecedented speeds, and providing ever more research-ready, real-world data for virtual clinical trials to be performed. The strategy created programmes that target translation, prevention and early diagnosis. It also laid the foundations for HDR UK to build industry-available data lakes and included the health catapults as a nurturing ground for UK IP and SMEs. It is therefore pleasing to see an additional five years’ funding announced today for the Medicines Discovery Catapult.
Moving on to value capture, we cannot invest this strategy’s target of 2.4% of our GDP in R&D by 2027 without capturing the value of our health data and IP. No life sciences plc would allow its IP and data to be so distributed and its commercialisation capabilities to be internally competitive and underfunded. The formation of UK Research and Innovation, which combines the research councils with Innovate UK, which grants money to UK innovators, means that we can address this now as part of the strategy.
However, the Commons Public Accounts Committee noted in April this year:
“Currently, ownership of intellectual property resides with the body that conducted the research rather than with the government funder”,
and that:
“Other countries, for example China, actively ensure that the products of university research are protected”.
Surely we should select the life sciences and health to pioneer a national industrial approach to the IP we generate. In a very British way, which the US could never do, UKRI could help form a central IP function to help universities funnel the best IP into national reserves. Imagine the stimulus Innovate UK could then provide to UK SMEs by giving non-cash grants in the form of access to our health data or our national IP. This would be transformational, pioneering and authentically British. Noble Lords will have heard me, the noble Lords, Lord Mitchell and Lord Scriven, and others in this House recommend that a central commercial support system be provided for the NHS and public sector health data controllers so that industry has one place to come, through which the UK can drive the best commercial deals for the nation.
Today, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, have spoken powerfully about, many health-related data and IP deals are being done bilaterally between a large industry eager for data and grateful hospitals with limited commercial skills eager to get through the winter. These show me that optimising the value of data to the nation is an industrial skill that the public sector does not have at scale. The nation will benefit far more from access to commercial skills able to be deployed from a central independent resource, sponsored by government and available across the NHS and public research data sources, with strategic national goals, a range of business models to hand and a sovereign fund to receive a national portion of the proceeds. Let industry-savvy commercial skills deal properly with industry. The returns from these sovereign IP and data assets could deliver untold value to the nation to help deliver the 2.4% target.
To bring this together at a time of intense competition —and the need for speed—needs industrial leadership. I applaud the strategic work of Professor Sir John Bell, the ministerial oversight and drive of the noble Lords, Lord O’Shaughnessy and Lord Henley, and the Office for Life Sciences. However, no life sciences plc which believed in such an ambitious strategy would allow itself to be run without a CEO. Here I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Desai: we need a full-time bus driver. Having no single national owner tells the industry that we have no one driver and allows the national infrastructure to remain fragmented. A full-time industry leader should be appointed immediately, with power over the appropriate budget to harness the national infrastructure, to co-ordinate a national product and to ensure that every step is being taken to capture national value.
Lord Turnberg (Lab)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and his committee on this excellent and timely report. I hope I will not disappoint the Minister too much by saying that I will concentrate on the NHS and the huge effort that is needed to introduce innovations into clinical practice.
The Government’s response is strong on what they are trying to do to stimulate even greater innovation and it is hard not to commend them for describing their willingness to put more money in and to develop high-level administrative structures—albeit perhaps too many and too high-level—to encourage and oversee advances in the sciences. Their response is strong on efforts to implement the methods by which these aims might be achieved. But—there is always a but—everyone knows that we in Britain are excellent innovators and inventors but are much poorer at translating innovations into clinical practice for the benefit of patients. Here I echo the wise words of my noble friends Lady Young and Lord Hunt. We are pretty good at defining the problems that are preventing translation but much poorer at defining the solutions. We tend to have masses of data but a paucity of actions based on the data. I will use the example of an interesting effort to introduce a pretty simple innovation into preventive medicine.
I am indebted to Professor Trisha Greenhalgh, whom I heard speak about this recently. She is professor of primary care health science at Oxford and she told us about a trial she was involved with in Newham. The problem they were trying to solve was how to prevent patients with significant memory loss wandering off and getting lost—not too uncommon, you might think. Why not put a simple monitoring device—a GPS system—on their wrists? Let them wear it and whoever was monitoring them would always know where they were. This is a bright idea and so simple that you may wonder why no one has thought of it before. Of course, nothing is so simple. They tried it out on about 20 people with memory loss in Newham to see if it would work. They immediately came up against a series of problems and at the end of a very few weeks only four people out of the 20 were wearing the device, and they soon stopped.
A whole range of issues was raised. Would people with dementia be happy to wear the monitoring devices? Who would do the monitoring? Family members might be at work or elsewhere. Nurses and social workers are already extremely stretched and overworked. Some even voiced their opposition to people wearing monitoring devices on the basis that it would interfere with individual liberties. They raised the spectre of state interference. They also wondered whether a GPS device of this sort might be a medical device needing approval by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and, if so, what sort of regulation would be needed. If someone complained, would it not be important for the professionals to get indemnity insurance first?
If this simple device came up against a whole range of hurdles, what hope is there for more complex interventions? It is always the case, I am afraid, that interventions are going to be perceived as disruptive by those who have to introduce them—both the patients and the medical professionals—and they are being introduced in a system that is constantly evolving anyway and many of those who are in it are overworked and stressed, as we have heard. We have reached a situation where it is now at least as valuable, if not more so, to put money into research on delivery uptake—that is jargon for accepting innovations—than on original discovery.
I started by saying that it is much easier to describe the barriers to translation than it is to produce solutions so I will point to where solutions may be found. The first is the recognition by those with the novel bright ideas that these barriers exist. It is no use complaining about the reticence and resistance to change of a backward-looking profession, as there is a tendency to do, I fear. This is a particularly cynical accusation when so many of the innovations that are introduced are the result of efforts by the medical profession itself. The first condition that has to be accepted by all these wonderful high-level committees and authorities that encourage innovation is that on the ground in our hospitals and general practices everyone is overstretched and distracted. The reality is that to gain the interest and confidence of busy doctors and nurses you have to ensure that all the systems are fully worked out; that all the support, technology and personnel are in place to make it simple and straightforward to introduce the innovation; that all the regulatory processes are fully approved; and that the patients are fully informed, their illnesses are suitable for any novel treatment and they are entirely willing to receive it.
Most importantly, if all those are in place and everyone is happy, it needs to be shown not only that the innovations can be used and that they work but that the outcome for patients is beneficial. That is the key. So when some remarkable advance is announced by the Secretary of State or anyone else, and he then stands back and waits for the service simply to get on with it, he will be missing the mark. There are many steps and hurdles to be overcome when one understands the reality of the health service. What we need is research into the ways in which we can overcome the barriers to adoption and how translation into practice is currently prevented. We need that research just as much as the research that goes into invention and innovation. Without it, we will continue to underachieve.
I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, has been given the responsibility of simplifying the innovation landscape and developing policies to encourage the adoption and spread of proven innovations. The Government’s response document talks of innovations being adopted “at pace and scale”—everything now has to be at pace and scale. I wish him luck with that.
There is a recommendation in the report that financial incentives should be offered to encourage acceptance of innovations on the ground. I am sure that that would be helpful but I fear that it will be insufficient. Early in the Government’s response comes a statement that we have, I think, heard before:
“Our globally-renowned NHS will be a key partner in delivering the deal”—
and so say all of us. But before you can begin to change to early adoption of innovations at real pace and scale, it has to be accepted that the reality of day-to-day pressures on the ground just gets in the way.
I hope the Minister recognises the difficulties and will tell us how he believes they can be tackled. I hope he will be able to address at least some of the problems I have outlined.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the committee on the excellent report they have put together. I feel amply and ably qualified—some might say over- qualified—to take part in this debate, having given up chemistry and biology aged 14 and with a B in GSCE physics, so listen in. It does, however, fit very much with my areas of interest, particularly the interplay between innovation and inclusion and talent and technology. No matter how good the innovation, the IP and the kit, ultimately it is about the people—be they in our marvellous universities and higher education institutions or across our phenomenal NHS. Young people would say to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, that this is a great report, “obvs”.
The areas I will touch upon have been mentioned by many noble Lords, but I hope I will bring something new. They include data, talent and immigration. We are often told that data is the new oil that will fuel the fourth industrial revolution, but that undersells it. It is potentially more impactful than Texas tea, because data does not have any finite limits. When it comes to data, perhaps our deepest well, if you will, is the NHS. But as other noble Lords have alluded to, what is NHS data? Does it exist? If it does, who owns it and what form is it in? What do we want to do with it? Can we do something useful with it? The great potential is that, as is all too often the case, the data is partial, patchy and fragmented. However, with current developments, not least in AI and machine learning, we can turn GIGO on its head and bad data into largely good data, or, if not good data, then useful data.
All the issues have been set out, and are seen not least in examples such as the Royal Free—although I wonder what we may think of that experiment in only a few years. We see the excellent work from the Moorfields collaboration with DeepMind. It is a single provider with a single arrangement with a single corporate body. However, the results should not necessarily be decried because of that. It demonstrates the potential here, not to supplant but to turbocharge our wonderful clinicians. This is augmentation, giving the most phenomenal cognitive prosthetic to anybody in a position to pop it on.
As I said, however, no matter how good the data and the kit, ultimately it is about talent and what we do in this country to develop and embrace it to optimise the benefits for the life sciences and the whole of the fourth industrial revolution. If it was a marathon, we would barely be lacing up our shoes right now. So much needs to be done, whether it is on apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships and FE, or from preschool all the way through to PhD and post-doc. That is demonstrated not least in the current levels we invest in research, as has already been set out.
It is worth offering thanks and respect to my noble friend Lord Baker and the university technical college initiative. He has done more than most, including Secretaries of State in the Department for Education, to make a difference by enabling and empowering talent in the area of science and technology.
I move now to immigration. We have already heard the words “expensive”, “disappointing” and “puts people off”. Surprisingly, that is not a description of the Brexit negotiations but of our current immigration policy. Look at any element of the policy and ask: why would we do that? Why would we have any cap at all on talent? Surely it should be a threshold. If individuals have what we require, wherever they are from, and there are positions available for them to take up, should we not say, “Come on in, you are so very welcome to be part of our next chapter”? Take the student part of the picture. Will my noble friend the Minister tell us the policy reason why international students are included in the net migration figures? Crucially, will he tell us how it benefits Britain, productivity and the mission we are on right now?
Ultimately, life sciences is as good an example as any of the link between talent and technology and between innovation and inclusion. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, undersold the power of life sciences somewhat. He said that, in his industry, each bottle of Cobra has to taste exactly the same as the last. Life sciences is even better than that—and I can say that, on a night out, every bottle of Cobra tastes better than the last.
Lord Holmes of Richmond
That is the power of our life sciences.
To touch on an area that has not been mentioned but which is critical, I turn to the whole question of clusters. We see from the Valley in the US and other examples around the world how critical clusters are to this. Any noble Lords who have not yet had the pleasure should go to Pancras Square: go there, do it. Only a few years ago, you would not go to that area in daylight, never mind after dark. Now, you come out at the back of King’s Cross and there are beautiful buildings. It is a wonderful physical space. But what you experience is nothing short of a collective, collaborative beating brain for Britain.
Then there is the golden triangle. What plans does the department have to do even more to connect that wonderful Oxford/Cambridge/London golden triangle? Of course, we need other clusters, but that is a key one to push. What is happening with transportation? What is happening to the Varsity Line? What is happening to housing and social provision to make the golden triangle as attractive as possible, so that we have that marvellous coming together of industry, academia and medicine—every element that we need—to collaborate? When we have that co-location and cluster, we see pace happening due to proximity.
We have a phenomenal opportunity. This truly could be the new dawn for Britain if we are able to seize all the opportunities in the life sciences space and across all elements of the fourth industrial revolution. I was lucky enough to be on the Artificial Intelligence Committee, which reported earlier this year, and I also did a report largely off my own bat on distributed ledger technologies. If noble Lords are having difficulty sleeping, they may choose to look at that. My purpose in writing that report was again to drive the possibility into the public good. I titled it Distributed Ledger Technologies for Public Good: Leadership, Collaboration and Innovation.
We know all we need to know to make a success of the life sciences and of the fourth industrial revolution, be that AI, machine learning, robotics, distributed ledgers, IOT or nanotechnology. We know everything that we know because we understand psychology, science, philosophy, economics, culture, attitudes and behaviours. What is the department doing across the piece to further turbocharge everything to enable us to make a success of the fourth industrial revolution; to enable the NHS to be the service it always could have been; to drive commercial benefits in the right way, from the NHS, and enable that to go straight back into treatment? An NHS for the future and a nation fuelled by the fourth industrial revolution: that is a better Britain worth fighting for.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
In 2014, we witnessed an heroic corporate battle when the American drug company Pfizer mounted a hostile takeover bid for the Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca. The bid was successfully resisted. Many politicians were aghast at the prospect of such a large component of the British pharmaceutical industry disappearing into the maw of an American competitor. Some of the leaders of the Conservative Party were conflicted in their reaction to this prospect. The City of London derives much of its income by mediating such takeover bids, and the Conservatives favour the interests of the City. On the other hand, our pharmaceutical industry is one of the few British industries that can be said to be world leading; and the loss of one of its principal players would have severely diminished its status.
What was at fault in this episode was the failure of our weak laws of corporate governance to protect British companies from the depredations of foreign competitors. Other European countries, including France and Germany, have created strong barriers to protect their companies against such depredations and activities. It is appropriate, however, to take a closer look at AstraZeneca, which is representative of the large multinational pharmaceutical companies. Zeneca, which is the British component of the company, originated in 1993 from the demerger of the pharmaceutical operations of Imperial Chemical Industries. Zeneca combined with the Swedish Astra company in 1999. Since the merger, AstraZeneca has become one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and has made numerous corporate acquisitions. In 2009, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca were respectively the world’s fifth-largest and sixth-largest pharmaceutical companies, measured by market share. However, since then they have been sliding down the scale, and today they are seventh and 15th respectively.
AstraZeneca proudly boasts that its focus is on developing new medicines that would make a meaningful difference to patients’ lives; and says that the UK is right at the heart of efforts to achieve this. However, a very different impression is gained by looking at the list of its acquisitions, which have been the basis for its product lines. In this respect, it is probably no different from the majority of large pharmaceutical companies.
For an explanation of the structure of the international pharmaceutical industry, one must consider some of the fundamental economic determinants. Research to find new drugs and remedies is risky and expensive; and there are no guarantees of immediate success. The clinical trials that must precede the release of a new drug are bound to be protracted and expensive. The marketing of a new product requires considerable resources and an extensive sales force. For a while, a proprietary drug can reap huge benefits, but, eventually, the profits will disappear when the patent of the original drug expires. Then the product becomes a generic drug that can be cheaply manufactured and sold by other companies.
The consequence of these circumstances is that large pharmaceutical companies must maintain a steady stream of new drugs passing down the pipeline that runs from their clinical trials to their certification and marketing. To maintain the supply of new products, the companies are involved in an incessant process of wheeling and dealing and of mergers and acquisitions that absorb smaller start-up companies. The failure to maintain a sufficient product pipeline can cause a large company quickly to crash. Thus, at the time of the attempted acquisition by the American drug giant Pfizer, AstraZeneca was in a vulnerable state and Pfizer was also heading in that direction.
Had Pfizer succeeded in its takeover bid, it would have captured the product lines of AstraZeneca; and the likelihood is that it would have suspended the research activities of the company and divested it of its British employees. It seems clear therefore that our large pharmaceutical companies require much stronger protection against hostile takeovers. However, on looking further down the food chain, it seems clear that the smaller UK companies also require protection. They are the mainspring of pharmaceutical innovation; and to lose them to foreign takeovers would be to lose our international competitiveness.
We should also question whether past experience is the best guide to the future. Modern advances in biochemistry, genetics and cytology imply that, in future, the development of drugs and remedies might proceed in a very different direction. This might utterly alter the structure of the international pharmaceutical industry. The Government continue to adhere to the view that industry should lead the way in stimulating the practical application of biomedical research. The activities of the drug companies are determined largely by their commercial priorities, which are poorly aligned with public health requirements, but the Government appear to be largely unconcerned by this. The one exception to this aspersion is the concern that the Government have shown over the declining efficacy of antibiotics and the failure of the industry to undertake research to find replacements.
The activities of the drug companies could become more closely aligned with the interests of public health if our National Health Service were to exercise a greater leverage over them. This is one of the principal observations of the excellent report of the Science and Technology Committee that we are debating today. The Bell report, which was the precursor to the committee’s report, asserted that the NHS is potentially an enormous asset for those attempting to discover and develop new, innovative products and to test their utility in a healthcare system. Given the decentralised structure of the NHS, which is a product of the reforms of the Conservative Government, the organisation lacks a coherent purchasing policy that could redress the power of the large pharmaceutical companies. The result is that many new products that are too costly to afford are denied to NHS patients. A better integration of NHS IT and data services could greatly facilitate clinical trials as well as epidemiological research, and the NHS could thereby become a driving force in medical innovation.
However, these prospects are being severely stymied by Brexit. We have learned that already the EU certification of pharmaceuticals, which has been taking place largely in the UK where the European Medicines Agency has been based, is now taking place elsewhere. The agency will transfer to Amsterdam when the UK leaves the EU. In the event of a no-deal Brexit, our clinical trials will lose their validity as far as the EU is concerned and will have to be conducted elsewhere, or at least in conjunction with an EU partner. This is not the worst of it. Last night we heard from the BBC of the likelihood that the research staff of the Francis Crick Institute would leave in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Some 40% of them are from the European Union and, of those, 78% have declared that they are unlikely to stay. In fact, 51% of all the research staff have said the same. The reasons given are the hostile environment, which will inhibit free movement, and the lack of research funds, of which there will be no guarantee beyond 2020. The carelessness of the protagonists of Brexit who dismiss all such concerns is incomprehensible to many of us.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, it is getting late and I am speaking far down the list, so I shall try not to repeat what others have said. However, let me start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Patel and the committee on tackling this very important topic and pressing the Government on the urgent need for practical—I stress that word—and coherent steps for implementation. As I think every noble Lord has said, the life sciences and the wider health agenda are fundamental to our current and future prosperity. I am not going to comment on the issues of structures and leadership that other noble Lords have talked about but would simply note how vitally important they are in terms of making progress.
I must refer to staffing. Today’s press coverage and various briefings that we have all had highlight the fact that science is global, and we need a global workforce that can attract and retain the best. As we have just heard, there are massive risks here. Government support for this is vital and we need to keep a close eye—I hope that the committee itself will do so—on all the proposals on immigration that will come out, and that we will continue to argue for an approach that allows in the people we need. Also, it should not do that on an arbitrary salary level cut-off. The fact is that, in the academic and clinical fields, salaries are often low. People like research nurses are vital, yet they may well be earning below the salary levels proposed.
I turn to the NHS, on which I want to make three points. The first is about this being a two-way street. It is not just that the NHS can benefit innovation but that the NHS also benefits from innovation and development. Yesterday I spoke to Sir John Bell and he reminded me of this. He pointed out that recently he ran a competition for digital pathology which will be transformative. Our current ambitions, as he said, in early diagnosis may provide the best and cheapest route to improving outcomes in cancer. This will be absolutely central to the NHS, so there is potentially—although I stress the word “potentially”—an enormous win-win here.
However, that brings me to my second point: is what the Government are proposing to do to engage the NHS adequate, or is it that this is just another add-on from the point of view of the people who are trying to run the health service? Is it just another priority? Is it the centrepiece, as I think it was described in evidence to the committee? I can see how that will be a major obstacle. I have also noticed that other noble Lords have been talking about the fragmentation of approach; it being too little and too late, and about the need perhaps to mandate some of these changes. I also note the despair of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and am reminded of him chairing some 15 years ago the Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Task Force with his normal energy and optimism. As a former chief executive of the NHS, and in fact the last chief executive who had a totally top-down structure, I will avoid being defensive about it and its ability to develop and tackle innovation. However, I recognise the description of the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, of the clinical reality of what is actually happening in the NHS from day to day.
I want instead to touch on the word “transformation”. My noble friend Lord Patel and other noble Lords have talked about the need for transformation, but let me make one point. This may be about organisational change but perhaps we need to reconceptualise the whole issue. What would it be like if we start to look at the NHS as an important driver in itself of the economy, as a part of the productive sector rather than just a cost? What I am talking about is not just its support as a base for the life sciences and other great developments but also its development of a productive workforce. It is interesting to note that NHS Improvement thinks that the aim is about productivity in the NHS. What about the productivity of the workforce being part of the aim of what the NHS is there for? Moreover, what about the costs of ill health, which are being recorded very clearly? A report by a UN High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, published about two years ago, developed the links between health systems—in particular, investing in the health workforce—and economic growth in different countries. That is extremely relevant here.
I think that if we started to reconceptualise the NHS as being part of our future prosperity, driving economic as well as social growth in the country, the Government might start to think rather differently about some of their policies. They might consider some of the things that the noble Lord, Lord Fox, talked about: empowering and resourcing people and, as I would put it, improving healthcare and health, rather than empowering and resourcing people to take on innovation. “Innovation” can be a slightly awkward term; what we are actually talking about is improving health, and I use the word “health” deliberately, having recognised in the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, that it is about health and not just about healthcare and health services. If we took a different approach to the NHS overall, would the policies be different and would the NHS be looking at these things in a different way? Would it want to be a much better partner than we have heard it is?
In saying that, I would note that if we did that, we would not be the first country to do so. South Korea has identified health as one of the great growth sectors. The South Koreans are determined to have one of the best health systems in the world and they are using their great enterprise and ability to create a much larger part of their economy based around health, which is in any case now the largest industry sector in the world. There are examples of that.
I want to touch on my third point before coming back to considering what the future might look like. The NHS is a part, and only a part, of an extraordinarily rich and deep infrastructure that both indirectly and directly supports research, innovation and development. We have heard points made about getting innovation into the NHS, but let us also remember the other factors. For example, it is where most of our homegrown clinical scientists are trained and educated. It also inculcates an important set of collaborative and public interest values into the whole approach to research. That helps to maintain the credibility of UK research in the world because it is based on a clearly objective set of values. These are some of the things that we should think about as regards the NHS.
I want also to widen the argument slightly. I would argue that we need to think further about the life sciences sector within a very wide cross-sectoral approach to health and biomedical and life sciences as a whole. In 2015, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, which I co-chair, asked the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to write a report on The UK’s Contribution to Health Globally. It identified four sectors: government, which included the NHS and DfID; commerce, which included all the life sciences in the sense that we are talking about them here; academia; and the voluntary sector. When you map those things out, you find that there is an extraordinary infrastructure. As my noble friend Lord Bilimoria mentioned, the UK has three of the five top-rated medical schools in the world—including Cambridge, he will no doubt be delighted to know, along with Oxford. We have two of the four highest-rated medical research journals and the top science journal in Nature. We have an extensive reach into health issues that are not just about the UK in that we are leaders in research into malaria and into neglected tropical diseases. The UK has an extraordinary footprint which, when we looked at it, was second only to the US and indeed beat it in a number of areas.
At that time—this was pre the referendum—we were beginning to worry that we were mapping the UK’s contribution to health in its peak period. Of course, that really will be the position post Brexit, assuming that Brexit happens. We argued that we need policies that strengthen both the whole health sector and the connections between not just the NHS and life sciences but the four elements. We argued that we should aspire to be a global health hub, by which I mean a go-to place globally for all aspects of health, whether it is academia, life sciences, professional education, health systems or international development—all areas where we have extraordinary strength.
I note that Korea is clearly going down this route. It is equally clear from recent developments in the past year or so that both Germany and Japan are stepping up their development in health as part of their economic development and influence on the global stage. I would just say that it is ironic that, when we produced that report, we thought that greater collaboration with Europe was one of the steps we should take to make sure that this vision could come about, but I will not dwell on that point.
We have been asked by the Lancet, the Wellcome Trust and others to revisit the report to pick up on recent developments around Brexit, new developments in science—including AI, which has developed rapidly in the past three or four years—new policies that approach bits of the health system such as Health Education England and Public Health England, which are becoming much more global in their outlook, and a range of other issues. That is so that we can re-present a vision that says that, actually, life sciences need to be part of this wider approach to health and there are huge dividends and benefits to be had from that. As I said, health is the biggest industry in the world by some counts. Now, it seems more important than ever that we get behind this whole health sector in the widest sense, building links across the four elements with real strategic intent.
Finally, turning again to the report, I offer my congratulations on a timely and important contribution and on pressing for practical action in this vital area.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, the debate has been excellent. At times, I felt privileged to listen to those who know a considerable amount about this issue sharing with those of us with lesser knowledge and experience some of the issues they are grappling with. In some cases, the analysis and diagnoses we heard left me in awe. I am worried about how on earth the Minister will respond to the various points in the sort of detail we hope for.
My background may have been in chemistry but I am an accountant and public servant by training, so I am not up on the life sciences. The issues raised today have made me think very hard about the process under which the debate was created. We have here a very substantive report, to which others have given credit; I wish to add my praise for the 32 recommendations, the analysis and the discussion that have gone into the report, which prompted today’s debate.
The report critiques another report in turn, that of Sir John Bell, which I read and found extremely interesting, useful and informative. It generated a prompt response from the Government, which is unusual; some of the comments must have hit a few nerves because the response came back very quickly. I am not trying to be unfair but I read it as a rather defensive report; other noble Lords have picked up on the way in which it tried to swamp responses rather than argue them intellectually, which is a pity.
I am left with the fact that when the chairman introduced the report, he said that it was trying to help to move the debate forward and move the idea of a sectoral approach to the life sciences further into action. That is probably right, but his key question left me floundering a bit. Although it is referred to in the report, the question “Who’s driving the bus?” seemed to take us off on the wrong track, if you will excuse the pun. I do not think that this is about the driver; I think that it is about the bus. I will come back to that. “Why is it a bus and why is it one bus?” might have been the better question. That is where I want to go with this.
If possible, I want to stand back from the debate because passions have been ignited. People care about our NHS very strongly. It is a fantastic and wonderful organisation; anybody who has ever had anything to do with it knows that we need it here for everyone. The problem is that the concerns about the NHS as an operating activity are interfering with its ability, or our concern about its ability, to develop as a source of innovation and move forwards to the other benefits that we think should come from it. I will come back to that.
In the original Industrial Strategy from November 2017, the aim is very clear:
“We will create an economy that boosts productivity and earning power throughout the UK”.
It mentions productivity and earning power. It does not have a sectoral view; it is about generic issues. Five key policies—ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment and places—are lined up against four grand challenges to,
“put the UK at the forefront of the artificial intelligence and data revolution … maximise the advantages for UK industry from the global shift to clean growth … become a world leader in the way people, goods and services move … harness the power of innovation to help meet the needs of an ageing society”.
Where does that leave health and life sciences? I am not sure that the language is a very good match. That also got me thinking. It is important that those with expertise, knowledge and experience of issues that can be supported through policy and finance are able to create the jobs, productivity and wealth that we need as a country. Does it have to be done in one bus though? That is my question. How do the creative industries deal with the issues that are raised as generics under the industrial strategy and life sciences? The DCMS is a different department, with different thinking; we have had this discussion across the Dispatch Box in the past and it is not clear to me. What about education, one of our biggest export earners, and higher education in particular? What about health?
We do not need everybody doing the same thing to have an industrial strategy that creates an economy which boosts productivity and earning power throughout the United Kingdom. If that is true, the sector deals have to be given their own space and their own ability to move forward. The reason I have been thinking about buses is because of why we are getting so exercised about the particularities of the NHS and the problems it faces, rather than thinking about how to solve those in one way while leaving space, time and effort to ensure the developments needed in order to create the industrial strategy are given space to breathe.
To go a little deeper into why I want to take that approach, a couple of speakers from both sides of the House said that if you look at the Government’s recommendations, it is very surprising they have not taken the advice of the committee to ensure the Bell report is implemented in full. If you have a strategy and it is what the sector wants, why are you not getting behind it and pushing it forward? They have not done that. Why is the report so full about the number of committees it has set up and the additional money that has been found or reannounced? There is no analysis about those difficulties and problems. The Secretary of State’s powers are retained and not devolved in any sense. The Secretary of State might be required to give approval to certain things and is allowed to be on a committee but is not necessarily going to be giving up any power to the sector in order for it to get on and drive its own bus, as it were.
What are the problems that make the NHS so difficult and problematic? If it is a cost prevention driven organisation, why is that not being tackled? Why are we not thinking about terms of trade that would allow it to do better in terms of productivity and support? These are issues I do not see answered in the Government’s response, and they are good questions which need to be resolved. The data problem, the visa problem, the education and training problems, how we get behind an organisational structure that bumps into other parts of government are not picked up well and not resolved. My analysis maybe a bit rough, but if that is right, there are commonalities about the sector we are talking about here—health and life sciences, as well as the creative industries and others. They all have the same problems.
The sector deals need to be taken away from the direct control of BEIS. We should have the strength to look at the way in which the Government are running this area of activity. If we are going to create an economy that boosts productivity, then we need to ensure that the generic issues—visas, the need for better education and training, the support that is required through all the sectors—are dealt with properly. They should be dealt with by BEIS, but the other departments need to step up to the plate and sort out the issues specific to them.
I conclude that the industrial strategy, which is a great thing for the UK if it can be made to work, needs to be supported, but it should be very limited. I put it to the Minister that we think harder about the issues that are best done by BEIS and those that need to be devolved to other sectors. We should look at long-standing problems that affect everyone—to those already mentioned could be added housing and cultural issues. They would need to be sorted at Secretary of State level. We should also look at the way delivery happens in the sponsor department, rather than worrying about the difficulties within BEIS. In that way, we might all make progress in a number of buses delivering to appropriate destinations.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, the first question put to me by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, was, “How will the Minister respond?”, and I have to say: with difficulty. I am taken back to the first debate on the industrial strategy as a whole, which was in this House in January, when we had many distinguished speakers commenting. I had the misfortune on that occasion to respond, and I hope I made it clear that although my Secretary of State and department were behind the industrial strategy—“industrial strategy” appeared in our name—it went wider than the department as a whole and covered the whole of government.
This debate and the comments of noble Lords went far wider than the scope of the report. My noble friend Lord McColl offered his very welcome advice on obesity; the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, spoke about the brewing of beer; and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, talked about company takeovers. Indeed, this issue goes wider than both my department and the Department of Health. I will not follow the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, in his use of metaphors involving buses, their numbers and variety, because metaphors by their very nature often get one slightly more confused. I will try to deal with some aspects of the report that are of immediate concern, and offer, as always, apologies that it is me responding and not my noble friend, Lord O’Shaughnessy. I understand that my noble friend was in fact giving evidence this afternoon to another Select Committee, which rather precluded him from answering this debate.
This debate is a healthy reminder of how seriously we take the work not just of the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, but of all committees of this House. I pay tribute to the noble Lord’s committee and its expertise. Whenever I go up and down the country to meet experts in this field or in other fields, a great many refer to the expertise of the noble Lord’s committee and of other committees of this House. I then normally respond by saying that I have had the misfortune of having to give evidence to the committee with my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy, and how difficult that can be. We are grateful for it; the Government take it seriously. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for mentioning that we responded in a timely manner. Had we been allowed yet more time—I shall not be allowed that much time to respond—we might have been able to do an even better job of responding.
I give an assurance to all noble Lords who have spoken, whether or not they are members of the committee, that we will try to respond in due course to the points that have been made. In that regard, I praise and offer thanks in advance to officials in the Office for Life Sciences for all the work that I will be putting them through in providing me with responses.
I wanted to mention the Office for Life Sciences because, as all noble Lords will know, it is a department of government that reports to both my own, BEIS, and to Health. It is significant, in that it offers some view of how government now works. Going back a long time in history to when I first started in government, I think of how much more siloed we were from department to department. The Office for Life Sciences and other new sections that have grown up during the past few years—this goes back to before the Conservative or even the coalition Government; the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, will remember that it started under the Labour Government—offer a sign that government in many areas can work better and get a more coherent answer. For that reason, I hope we will be able to respond to a great many of the points raised in greater detail in due course.
I note, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, stated, that the committee started its report in the summer of last year. In August, Sir John Bell published his report, the first part of the life sciences industrial strategy. I think that my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones looked to us to seek slightly greater ownership of his report. We accept the vision that he set out and have seen prompt implementation of parts of that strategy through the first sector deal that came out so soon after publication of the industrial strategy. We do not want to claim the entire credit for Sir John Bell’s excellent report; it is his report that the Government fully accepted.
Sir John’s report came out in 2017. At the end of November, we had the industrial strategy itself. We then had the first sector deal for the life sciences in December. We had a debate on the industrial strategy as a whole in January. The report produced by the noble Lord came out in April. As he reminded us, we responded in good time. I do not need to go through the many recommendations that the report made nor the Government’s responses to them, but I hope that I can address just some of the points.
I remind those who criticised us for not having done enough since the publication of the report—I think the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, was among them—of what Sir John said:
“Since the launch of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, Government has made enormous progress implementing its recommendations … The new Life Sciences … Implementation Board is functioning and the Office for Life Sciences … is working hard to deliver the rest of the report. No other sector has made such rapid and effective progress”.
He went on to say that he was surprised by the House of Lords’ comments, given the enthusiasm of the sector, this strategy and the progress made.
If I may, I shall just deal with the point about governance that came up so often in the debate. We agree with the committee that a strategic partnership with the sector is crucial to delivering on the vision of the life sciences industrial strategy. It is exactly for that reason that we set up the Life Sciences Council, which has been referred to—the noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned the appointment of its new chairman, Andy Haldane. It is a partnership between government and industry, upon which both my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for BEIS and my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health sit, to provide strategic oversight for the future of UK life sciences. It provides a forum to discuss how the UK can continue to be a global leader in biopharmaceuticals, digital and health, to help develop products and attract the inward investment we need.
As my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones said, it has 27 members. I take her point—I forget which of Parkinson’s laws it is—that it is better to keep committees down to something of the order of about 20. I see that she nods. The same is true of the Life Science Industrial Strategy Implementation Board, with its 24 members. In an ideal world, one would try to stick to 20, but it is always difficult to exclude certain people. Those are the numbers, and I believe that it will still work effectively. That implementation board, the second body I mentioned, oversees delivery of commitments made in the sector deal and will drive progress on future phases of work to implement that strategy. It will be jointly chaired by myself and Sir John Bell and it will have my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy on it. It is there and I believe that, with its roadmap and its timetable, it will be able to effectively measure progress as we wish it to and as my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones wishes. We will monitor that progress and will be happy in due course to share that detailed plan as additional written evidence.
I want to add something about the innovation landscape review, a matter of concern to noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Patel. We have been working with NHS England to carry out an internal review of the innovation landscape, a publicly funded scheme supporting health and life sciences innovation, from initial idea to deployment by the NHS. As part of that work, we have developed proposals that seek to maximise the impact, for the NHS and the wider economy, of public funding for innovation in health and care. Those proposals will inform our wider work to deliver a health system that supports innovation, promotes testing and the development of health tech and ensures that the best innovations are used, so that the health and care system, patients and the NHS can all benefit as quickly as possible.
Turning to what I might politely call an organogram but is really my own scribblings on the list of speakers, I note that virtually every noble Lord expressed concern about the mine of NHS data, the need for informed consent, and what use we could make of it. As has begun to be explained to me, one strength of the NHS lies in its data, and the potential advantages to this country. I forget who used the analogy or metaphor of a mine, but it is one in which we must dig. It is also one where this country will have advantages way beyond those of any other country in the world. It presents opportunities for the benefit of patients and the wider economy.
As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and others made clear, however, a key underpinning for the use of healthcare data will obviously be in building the appropriate trust with the public, along with professionalism and transparency in the use of data, with the information shared in a safe and secure manner. To assist in moving that agenda forward, NHS England and the Local Government Association are establishing a set of local health and care record exemplars, focused on establishing best trust in information sharing. This includes: information governance approaches; the associated cyber standards; how professional engagement should be conducted; and the implementation of associated technical and interoperability standards. These will enable information to be shared and linked across different systems in a consistent manner. I think all of us agreed that we have this and must make use of it, but we will have to tread very carefully to make sure that we can get it. I noted carefully what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and many others said on this issue.
I turn to the question of immigration and the Migration Advisory Committee’s report. Again, I accept that this issue is of considerable concern and we have to get it right, bearing in mind the vital role that we play in making Europe a pioneering base for research and values, and the contribution which international researchers make to the whole of the UK. That is not going to change when we leave the EU. We will seek an ambitious relationship on science and innovation with the EU. That includes continuing to explore future UK participation in mutually beneficial research programmes with our EU partners, in addition to supporting science, research and innovation. Following the publication of the Migration Advisory Committee’s report on students and EEA workers, we are working with the DfE and the Home Office to achieve the best outcome for science and research in the future immigration system. We will continue to work with them to ensure that any immigration system and/or mobility frameworks serve the needs of science and research.
Perhaps I may correct one point that I made earlier. I am grateful to those who advise me on these matters. I talked about Andy Haldane as the chairman; it is of course Pascal Soriot. I see the noble Lord, Lord Fox, nodding. I apologise to them both but I have at least now got that answer on the record.
As I said earlier, I do not think that it would be for me to go into greater detail on the vast array of questions that were put before me during the debate but I will co-ordinate a response to all those who have spoken. I might even try to persuade my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy to sign some of the letters. The key thing to get over is something that was stressed by all speakers: just how important the life sciences area is to this country. That area is worth over £70 billion. It provides jobs for almost 250,000 people. In 2017, we received the highest level of life sciences foreign investment projects in Europe, the highest for the past seven years, and second only to the United States. The sector continues to grow and the Government’s ambitions will also continue in this field. As we made clear in the industrial strategy, we have committed to increase investment in R&D to some 2.4% of GDP by 2027 and to more than 3% over the long term, unlocking an estimated £80 billion over the next 10 years. Our ambition remains for the United Kingdom to be the best place in the world to develop and launch innovative medicines, technologies and diagnostics. We want that to continue. This country is home to a thriving and vibrant life sciences sector. Realising the vision of the industrial strategy and of the part of the industrial strategy that we are debating tonight is crucial to unlocking the opportunities that are appearing ever more rapidly on the horizon.
We will listen to what the committee had to say and to what has been said in the debate. I will make sure that copies of the debate go to members of the implementation board that I have the honour to chair. As we make the ambition of the strategy a reality, we believe that we will continue to strengthen the reputation and appeal of this world-beating sector. I end by again thanking the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and his committee for their work.
Lord Patel
My Lords, the time is late and this has been a long, but very useful, debate. I thank all noble Lords who have so enthusiastically taken part. There have been some excellent speeches. Debate on any report of a House of Lords committee should not be confined only to members of the committee. The rest of the Members the House should be able to take part, and the speeches we have heard show that other Members have been able to take part.
I do not want to be ungenerous to the Minister. I well understand that, in a long debate with lots of questions, he did not have time to absorb them and produce a response that we might find satisfactory. I am glad that he has committed himself and the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, to take on board all the comments that were made and all the questions that were raised, and we look forward to a full response.
As we all want to support this strategy to be a success, we will no doubt come back to this. It may even be that the Science and Technology Committee may look at this again in a year’s time to see how the strategy is progressing. I thank all noble Lords.