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Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for International Development (Alok Sharma)
The Department is investing in migrant source countries to give people better opportunities to build decent lives at home. Over the past four years, support for UK aid across all programmes has enabled 14 million children to gain a decent education, and nearly 52 million people now have access to clean water and better sanitation.
Thangam Debbonaire
Refugee settlement is one way to allow people to secure a safe and legal route to a safe country if they are classified as refugees by the United Nations. DFID funds and supports that, but there is no commitment to long-term resettlement programmes. Will the Secretary of State consider committing himself to a minimum of 10,000 refugees per year via resettlement and for a minimum of five years?
Alok Sharma
As the hon. Lady will know, in every year since 2016, the UK has resettled more refugees from outside Europe than any other EU member state, and I pay tribute to the local authorities that have already settled 16,000 refugees from Syria. The hon. Lady will also know that we intend to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees, as well as up to 3,000 vulnerable children and their carers, by 2020. Under our new compact, there are global resettlement scheme plans to resettle 5,000 of the most vulnerable every year post 2020.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Ind)
I welcome my right hon. Friend to what I think is his first session of questions as Secretary of State for International Development, and I wish him—as we all do—very well in the role. May I ask him to update the House on the quality of our £75 million safety, support and solutions programme, which has been used particularly on the migration route in Africa, including north Africa? A particular feature of the programme was the ability to return those who had escaped the clutches of traffickers to their home areas, where they could warn others that the outward route was dangerous and damaging. I should be grateful for an update.
Alok Sharma
I pay tribute to the fantastic work that my right hon. Friend did in this Department. He was an absolute champion for DFID.
Phase 2 of the safety, support and solutions programme is now running. We are delivering humanitarian protection to vulnerable migrants en route, as well as informing people about living conditions and—as my right hon. Friend mentioned—the other risks that they may face if they travel through the Sahel or the horn of Africa. One of our partners, the International Organisation for Migration, has reached more than 4,000 people with awareness-raising activities.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
Alok Sharma
The hon. Lady has raised an incredibly important point. We are working on nutrition with a range of multilateral agencies, and my ministerial colleagues and I continue to engage in discussions with them. At the United Nations General Assembly, it was announced that £61 million would be provided to develop crops that are better adapted to grow in higher temperatures and that can withstand drought. That is the sort of work that will make a long-term difference when it comes to food insecurity.
Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend update the House on the Rohingya situation and tell us what discussions he has had with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Government in Dhaka about the situation in Cox’s Bazar?
Alok Sharma
My right hon. Friend did an enormous amount of work in this area as Minister for Asia, and I pay tribute to him. He will know that the major humanitarian crisis is caused by Myanmar’s military. He will also know that we recently announced the provision of an extra £87 million for food, healthcare and shelter, not just for the refugees but for those who are hosting them. The Minister in the House of Lords, Baroness Sugg, is currently in Bangladesh looking into these issues.
Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
In north-east Nigeria, almost 2 million people have been internally displaced. In a disturbing development, the Nigerian Government have closed two major international non-governmental organisations, posing a risk to thousands of lives. May I urge the Secretary of State to do all that he can to press the Nigerian Government to enable those NGOs to operate, because they are about saving lives?
Alok Sharma
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We are extremely concerned about this issue, and we have raised it with the Nigerian Government. We have asked them to complete their investigations as swiftly as possible. He is absolutely right: those organisations provide support to millions of vulnerable people, and we must make sure that that work continues.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
A fortnight ago, I was privileged to be in Jordan to see some of the remarkable work of small organisations helping child refugees from the Syrian civil war recover from appalling injuries. What further support can DFID give to those small NGOs that make such a positive difference?
Alok Sharma
As my hon. Friend will know, we have pledged almost £3 billion since 2012 to provide support in Syria and neighbouring areas. We are working with a range of NGOs, and I would be happy to meet him to discuss the individual NGOs to which he referred.
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that the greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration. By 2050, it is forecast that up to 1 billion people could be on the move as a result of climate change. The Select Committee on International Development recommended that the UK use last week’s UN climate summit to address that, so will the Secretary of State tell us specifically what discussions he has had on this subject and what concrete actions his Departments will take?
Alok Sharma
The hon. Gentleman raises an important matter. The Prime Minister made a number of key announcements at the UN General Assembly, including the doubling of our investment and commitment to the international climate finance fund. That is something that we will work on, but the hon. Gentleman is right that that is a key issue. The way to tackle poverty is also to tackle climate change.
Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
The world is on course to have 200 million climate refugees by 2050, so will the Secretary of State tell us why his Government continue to be part of the problem by funding fossil fuel overseas, both with the Overseas Development Administration budget and with export finance? If he wants to be part of the solution, will he commit to work with Cabinet colleagues to increase the number of refugee settlements in the UK, as recommended by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees?
Alok Sharma
I say gently to the hon. Lady that we are regarded as world-leading when it comes to tackling climate change. If she had been at the UN General Assembly, she would have seen that. A whole range of announcements were made there. I am always happy to have a discussion with her, but she should acknowledge that the UK is actively leading in this area across the world. That is acknowledged by Governments across the world, too.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
The Secretary of State for International Development (Alok Sharma)
The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is absolutely dire, with millions fleeing the Maduro regime. Last week, I announced an additional £30 million of vital humanitarian aid to deliver life-saving medicines and clean water, as well as support for vital health services for refugees in neighbouring countries.
Sir Peter Bottomley
Everyone will be glad that we are doing what we can to help. Would it be a good idea if party leaders together nominated members of the Youth Parliament to go and see what has caused this social, economic, humanitarian and political crisis in a country that should be the richest on its continent?
Alok Sharma
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Inflation is running at over 1 million per cent. in Venezuela and poverty has doubled. That is the economic model and regime that the Leader of the Opposition has been defending over a long period. People will know that Venezuela serves as a grim reminder of what might happen to the economy of our country and, indeed, the aid budget should the Opposition ever get their hands near government.
Mr Speaker
I welcome the invocation of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which, for the benefit of observers, customarily sits annually in the Chamber on a non-sitting Friday. A sitting is due to take place next month. It is a magnificent organisation that deserves the support of every one of us.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
Until the Venezuelan Government were destabilised, HIV treatment was successful and deaths from AIDS were decreasing. Since destabilisation, HIV treatment is almost impossible for many people in Venezuela and the healthcare system has collapsed. What are the Government doing, particularly to ensure that antiretrovirals reach HIV-positive people in Venezuela?
Alok Sharma
The reason that the healthcare system and, indeed, public services have collapsed is the Maduro regime; that is something we have to acknowledge. As I have said, the support that we are providing includes healthcare support. There has been a big increase in disease outbreaks over recent periods, and that is why we are providing support for healthcare and vaccinations.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
How much are the UK Government giving to the UN central emergency response fund, and how much is that fund giving to the Venezuelan crisis?
Alok Sharma
We have given about £2 million of support to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and to national societies. In terms of additional funds that we have made available, we do not discuss the value of programmes inside Venezuela or name partners, for security reasons. I hope that my hon. Friend will understand that.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
Given the extent of the problem, the millions of people fleeing Venezuela and the amount that the Minister has alluded to, what steps are we taking to ensure that that aid is offered directly to the people affected and not diverted by the regime?
Alok Sharma
The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. We have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to fraud, and we have robust controls against diversion. I can tell him that we have due diligence assessments in place to monitor the spending in Venezuela.
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Zac Goldsmith)
Climate change and biodiversity were top priorities for the Government at the recent UN General Assembly. The UK played a leading role, with the Prime Minister announcing a doubling of our international climate finance to £11.6 billion and a major focus on backing nature-based solutions to climate change.
Angela Crawley
The International Development Committee has specifically recommended that the UK Government should adopt the concept of climate justice to guide their climate spending, but this Government seem scared to even utter the words: not a single International Development Minister has ever said the words “climate justice” in this Chamber. Why are this Government so intent on ignoring this recommendation?
Zac Goldsmith
Given what we know about the science in relation to climate change and what we know about what is happening to biodiversity, habitat and species loss, it is absolutely right that this Government’s focus should be on tackling and preventing climate change, both through technology and by doing everything we can to protect and restore the natural world. If we do not do that, no amount of money from this or any other aid Department will properly compensate poorer countries for the devastation that will follow.
Deidre Brock
I am afraid that the Minister failed entirely to answer my hon. Friend’s question. Will he tell the House when he will follow Scotland’s lead and the recommendation of the International Development Committee and explicitly adopt the concept of climate justice to help to guide climate mitigation spending?
Zac Goldsmith
I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but I do not agree that I did not answer the previous one. We provide £5.8 billion for climate finance at the moment, and that will double to at least £11.6 billion. The whole basis of that programme is, in a sense, climate justice. It is about helping developing countries to prepare for climate change, to adapt to the inevitable changes and to fight the causes of climate change to minimise the impact.
Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
By 2030, the destruction of the world’s important habitats and the threat of climate change could force more than 100 million people into poverty. Does my hon. Friend agree that urgent action is needed to tackle deforestation throughout the world?
Zac Goldsmith
I commend my hon. Friend for all her work on this issue. She is absolutely right, and that is why, when the Prime Minister spoke at the UN, he emphasised the importance of investing in nature as a means of tackling climate change. She mentions forests, and they are an obvious example. About 1 billion people depend on forests for their survival, and protecting and restoring forests alleviates poverty, tackles climate change and helps to reverse the biodiversity loss that we have seen over recent years.
James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
First, may I welcome my hon. Friend to his well-deserved place at the Dispatch Box? The environmental world rejoices that he is there, and I know he will do an outstandingly good job. Does he agree that it is a perfectly legitimate use of aid funds to spend money on climate change reduction and climate change battling as well as on the mitigation of the worst effects of climate change? That helps in a global sense, and it also helps to mitigate the worst effects for the poorest people in the world.
Zac Goldsmith
I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words. He is exactly right to say that we will have no hope at all of tackling poverty globally if we do not take a bigger interest in preventing climate change and the annihilation of the natural world that we have seen in recent decades. The people on the frontline in relation to nature destruction are the world’s poorest people. They are the people who depend most directly on the natural world, so he is absolutely right.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Zac Goldsmith
As we heard from the Secretary of State in his first answer, we have committed serious sums of money to enabling smallholders around the world to adapt to climate change. We have also launched an initiative at the UN called the Just Rural Transition, which is about shifting the way subsidies are spent around the world on land use, away from unsustainable use towards sustainable use, just as we are doing in this country. The OECD tells us that the 50 top food-producing nations spend €700 billion a year subsidising land use, on the whole very badly. If we can shift even a fraction of that, it will have a much bigger impact than all the world’s aid departments put together.
Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Ind)
The Secretary of State for International Development (Alok Sharma)
DFID’s support for the SheTrades Commonwealth programme has trained over 2,700 women-owned businesses. We recently announced £30 million for the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa programme, which will help to unlock $3 billion of additional lending to women entrepreneurs.
Caroline Nokes
Some of the most inspirational, determined business leaders and entrepreneurs in Romsey and Southampton North are women. Do the Secretary of State and his Front-Bench team agree that female empowerment cannot begin and end in school, but has to continue into the workplace? Will he commit to giving more support to make sure that we have women business leaders in the developing world?
Alok Sharma
My right hon. Friend is right. Economic empowerment for women is vital, and I made mention of the affirmative finance programme, which is tackling issues such as access to finance, access to mentoring support and overcoming laws that discriminate against women. It is worth pointing out that women typically reinvest up to 90% of their income into education, health and nutrition, compared to 40% for men, so investing in female-led businesses can transform societies.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Specialist organisations such as Khwendo Kor that deliver services to women are being restricted by other NGOs in consortia by exclusivity clauses so that they can only bid with one organisation for funding, so expertise is being lost. Can the Secretary of State ensure that exclusivity clauses are removed?
Alok Sharma
I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss that case and to try to understand a bit better what we could do.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Menstruation stops many women participating in the business world and mostly affects the poorest, no more so than in the Rohingya camps, as Oxfam has told me. WUKA produces underwear that deals with the problem, is reusable and environmentally sustainable. Will his Department meet WUKA, Ruby Raut and others in St Albans who have developed the product to help women beat the problems of menstruation?
Alok Sharma
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for all the work that she has done in Bangladesh in tackling humanitarian issues, and she raises an important point. We have a flagship programme called the Girls’ Education Challenge, which does fund support for 23 menstrual hygiene projects across 13 countries, but of course I would be happy to meet with her and the company in her constituency.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
Ukraine is a country that is perhaps redeveloping rather than developing. Can the Secretary of State tell us what projects he is supporting for women in business and education in the east of Ukraine, where there is a war with Russia, particularly through the International Committee of the Red Cross?
Alok Sharma
I am not aware of the details of programmes that the hon. Gentleman talks about, but I would be happy to meet him to discuss that case.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
The Secretary of State for International Development (Alok Sharma)
Governments around the world collectively spend around $140 billion every year on aid. However, the United Nations estimates that an additional $2.5 trillion is required annually in developing countries to meet the sustainable development goals. That investment gap needs to be met largely by the private sector. That is why I have established an international development infrastructure commission to advise the UK Government on how we can mobilise additional private sector funds, alongside public money, to deliver on the sustainable development goals.
Tim Loughton
I welcome the Secretary of State and the new Ministers to their posts. Representing a coastal constituency, I am only too well aware of the impact of pollution and plastic waste on marine life and our beaches. It was great to join many of my constituents at the recent great British beach clean. Given that much of the plastic problem affects developing countries—especially island nations—how are the Government using the aid budget to help to clear up our oceans?
Alok Sharma
My hon. Friend raises an incredibly vital point. He may be aware that the Prime Minister announced at the United Nations General Assembly last month that we are encouraging countries to join the UK-led global ocean alliance of countries in support of protecting at least 30% of the global oceans within marine protected areas by 2030.
Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has announced a new commission of business and finance leaders to mobilise private finance to invest in some of the world’s poorest countries. What action is he taking to guarantee that all aid-backed private investments uphold labour rights and living wages for workers in the global south?
Alok Sharma
I think that is a sort of welcome for the infrastructure commission we have set up. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that labour rights are vital. When I was Minister for Employment, I worked with the International Labour Organisation on these issues, and if he has particular suggestions to make, I would be happy to discuss those with him.
Dan Carden
The Secretary of State is failing to take labour rights seriously. He is a career investment banker by trade, and he has—[Interruption.] I think it is relevant that he has gone from corporate wealth management to managing the UK’s aid budget. Feronia, a Canadian palm oil company based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has received tens of millions of pounds of UK aid via the CDC Group; it has been plagued by scandal for years; and, in July, Joël Imbangola Lunea, a community activist involved in a land dispute with Feronia, was allegedly murdered by a security guard employed by the company. Joël was father to eight children—
Mr Speaker
Order. May I just appeal to the hon. Gentleman to get to his question mark, because a lot of colleagues want to contribute and they must do so?
Dan Carden
Will the Department now launch its own investigation into this case and the litany of failures surrounding Feronia?
Alok Sharma
The hon. Gentleman is very welcome to write to me about the case. He wrote an article a few days back describing me as
“exploring ways to profit from human misery”.
May I just point out to him, with respect, that he could perhaps take some lessons from the Chairman of the Select Committee, who knows a lot more about development than he does?
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Alok Sharma
My hon. Friend is a true champion on humanitarian and environmental matters. I made reference in a previous answer to what we are doing about plastics, but I can also inform her that the UK Government have pledged £70 million to directly tackle this issue in developing countries, through the provision of technical assistance and testing practical approaches to increase plastic recycling rates.
Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)
Alok Sharma
The hon. Lady will know that we run a range of projects designed to ensure that we have fair trade, and of course I commend the work that goes on in this area.
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
Globally, vaccines save 2.5 million lives every year. What discussions were had at the recent UN summit about the UK’s role in the global vaccination programme?
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Dr Andrew Murrison)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue. She will know that the UK is the No. 1 contributor to vaccines worldwide in the development space. She will also know that the UK will be hosting the Gavi replenishment next year and that for every pound spent on vaccines £21 is recouped; this remains one of our best buys in terms of international development, and we made that clear at the UN General Assembly last week.
John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
Alok Sharma
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we are a major aid donor to Pakistan overall. We are in discussions with the National Disaster Management Authority in Pakistan, and we stand ready to respond and provide funding if it is indeed requested.
Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
The economy in Zimbabwe is expected to contract by 5.2% this year and millions are at risk of hunger, with warnings that the country is facing its worst ever famine. What are we doing to help?
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Andrew Stephenson)
Humanitarian needs are rising in Zimbabwe, due to a combination of poor and erratic rains and the deteriorating economic situation. DFID has committed £49 million to a new Zimbabwe humanitarian resilience programme, but our ongoing re-engagement depends on fundamental political and economic reform in Zimbabwe.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Alok Sharma
We have a long-standing position on Kashmir, which has been reiterated and followed by successive Governments, but where there are matters related to humanitarian issues we of course always look at those.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) had a question on the Order Paper but it was not reached, so I will call him, on the strict understanding that he will be exemplary in his brevity.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
Currently, approximately 97% of the UK’s export financial support for energy in developing countries goes to fossil fuels and only 1% to renewable energy. That is a ridiculous and untenable position, given the Government’s avowed aims. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that his work in supporting developing countries to tackle climate change is not undermined by his colleagues in the Department for International Trade?
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Zac Goldsmith)
I am pleased that the CDC has made no new investments at all in coal-fired power stations since 2012, and that increasingly UK ODA supports renewable energy. I am assured that as a result of its adoption of the recommendations of the taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures, UK Export Finance is looking very carefully at the risks, which the hon. Gentleman has just highlighted, of its support for oil and gas.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and First Secretary of State (Dominic Raab)
I have been asked to reply. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is in Manchester for the Conservative party conference. He is, as we speak making, the keynote speech, setting out that we will leave the EU on 31 October, so that we can get on with our dynamic domestic agenda.
Julian Sturdy
Askham Bog, a world-renowned nature reserve in my constituency, has been described as “irreplaceable” by, no less, Sir David Attenborough; yet it is threatened by proposals to build more than 500 houses on adjoining land. Will my right hon. Friend put in a good word with the Prime Minister to ask him to join me in lying down in front of the bulldozers to save that important piece of natural heritage?
Dominic Raab
I thank my hon. Friend. I always put in a good word with the Prime Minister on his behalf, and I share his passion for preserving our precious natural habitats. Local community views are of course incredibly important to the local planning process; that is what our revised national planning policy framework provides. He will understand that I cannot comment on individual planning applications.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Yesterday marked the start of Black History Month, so I will begin by paying tribute to a young woman already making history this month. Dina Asher-Smith became the first British woman in 36 years to win a sprint medal when she won silver at the 100 metres in Doha. Tonight she aims to go one better in the 200 metres —and I am sure the whole House will wish her well.
Ms Abbott
If I may continue, uninterrupted!
Last week, my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) raised the very specific issue of how many of the hundreds of abusive and violent messages that she receives use the Prime Minister’s own words. The Prime Minister dismissed those concerns as simply “humbug”. Since that exchange, my hon. Friend has received four further death threats, some again quoting the Prime Minister’s words. Women across this House experience death threats and abuse. Will the Foreign Secretary take the opportunity to apologise on behalf of the Prime Minister for his initial dismissive response?
Dominic Raab
I thank the right hon. Lady for her question. My eagerness to rise to the Dispatch Box was because, in Black History Month, as she becomes the first black MP to take to the Dispatch Box for PMQs, it is only fitting to say that she has blazed a trail and made it easier for others to follow in her footsteps. That is something in which I and every hon. Member in this House can take pride in paying tribute.
The right hon. Lady raises the increasing level of online and wider abuse that politicians from all parts of the House get, and we should come together to be clear that there must be zero tolerance of any abuse or any threats. May I also say that I have found the level of abuse that she herself has received online to be totally disgusting and totally unacceptable. At the same time, I am sure that, as a passionate champion of free speech, she will defend our right in this House to defend the issues of substance. The remarks that the Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend, made were aimed at the suggestion that he could not describe the surrender Act in such terms. It is absolutely clear, given the substance of the legislation, that it would achieve that and undermine the ability of the Government to go and get a deal in the EU, which on all sides we want to achieve.
Ms Abbott
So, we can take it that there is no apology from the Foreign Secretary. I raised the very specific point that my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury made about the abuse she gets that uses the Prime Minister’s language.
Deliberately disturbing billboards showing unborn foetuses have been put up in the London borough of Walthamstow. They are upsetting for women walking past, but particularly upsetting for my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), because these billboards are targeted at her in response to her work to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland. Abortion in Northern Ireland should be decriminalised on 21 October. What will the Foreign Secretary do to ensure that, from later on this month, women in Northern Ireland will have the same human rights to legal and safe abortion as women in England, Wales and Scotland?
Dominic Raab
The right hon. Lady has referred to the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and the abuse that she has received, which I and all Members of this House, I know, believe is totally unacceptable. There is a place for free speech, but we should never allow that to cross over into abuse, intimidation or harassment of hon. Members from all parts of the House going about their business. The most important thing that we can do on the specific issue that the right hon. Lady raises is get the institutions in Northern Ireland back up and running so that they can exercise their rights, their prerogatives, on behalf of the people of Northern Ireland.
Ms Abbott
I notice that the Foreign Secretary has not said anything about those horrific posters—they are not posters that anyone would want to see, particularly someone who is pregnant, as is my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow.
Last week, Labour reiterated its call to end the rape clause, which forces women to fill out a four-page form to prove their child was born of rape in order to get financial help. Will the Foreign Secretary today back Labour’s pledge to remove the abhorrent rape clause from universal credit?
Dominic Raab
I would say that we have looked at this issue and we continue to look at it. On the subject of using inflammatory language, it is incumbent on Members in all parts of the House to be very careful about it. I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is looking at this matter and will continue to take questions and scrutinise it very carefully, so that we get the balance right. I gently say to the right hon. Lady that Labour wants to abolish universal credit and engage in an open spending spree on handouts. That is the wrong thing to do—trapping people in the welfare trap. On our side, we want to help those people from the poorest backgrounds get into work, and our record speaks for itself.
Ms Abbott
How much more dismissive can the Foreign Secretary be of people and families dependent on benefits? We are not talking about a spending spree; we are talking about a system that is fair and just, and which does not subject people to undue humiliation.
Last week, the 100-year-old travel company Thomas Cook went out of business. We know that 72% of its workers are women. We also know that, although Governments around the world stepped in to save Thomas Cook subsidiary companies in their own countries, the UK Business Secretary thought that this was not her job. Can the Foreign Secretary explain to those workers, some of whom are with us today, why their Government sat idly by?
Dominic Raab
First, we did not sit idly by. The Government’s efforts, co-ordinated by the Transport Secretary, to ensure that the holidaymakers and travellers who were caught overseas could be returned to the UK, have been very effective and required a huge amount of cross-Government work, including in my own Department. On whether the Government should have stepped in to bail out Thomas Cook, it is very clear from looking at the financing that such a step would not have rendered the company more sustainable and would not have saved jobs in the long run. We are, of course, concerned to ensure that we have a sound economic base in the long term. We have created 3 million new jobs in this country since 2010, and will continue with that. What we are not going to do is routinely bail out companies that are unsustainable. That is not the right way to go about this.
Ms Abbott
Nobody is asking the Government routinely to bail out companies. We are asking the Government why they will not even meet the workers.
Whether it is women Members in this House, women claiming benefits, women’s reproductive rights in Northern Ireland or the failure to support women workers at Thomas Cook, is not this a Government letting women down?
Dominic Raab
On this side of the House, we are proud to be on our second female Prime Minister. [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. The Foreign Secretary has embarked on his answer. I want to hear it, and I think the House and everybody else will want to hear it as well.
Dominic Raab
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Members on the Labour Front Bench are pointing to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). Well, I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for her accomplishments in tackling human trafficking, for her accomplishments and drive to tackle violence against women and for the domestic violence Bill that we will be introducing in the House today for further debate.
Ms Abbott
The Foreign Secretary has not mentioned the fact that there are over 600,000 more women and girls in poverty now than in 2010. I gently say to him that I was a Member of this House when Tory MPs defenestrated the first female Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, and I was a Member of this House when the Tory MPs worked their will against the second female Prime Minister. It seems to me that Tory Members of Parliament may on occasion make women their leaders, but they need to learn—[Interruption.] They need to learn how to treat them less cruelly.
Dominic Raab
The right hon. Lady mentions Margaret Thatcher. I gently say to her that if she wants to talk about treating women better, she might have a word with the shadow Chancellor, who talked about going back in time to “assassinate” Margaret Thatcher. That is not appropriate language from the Opposition.
The right hon. Lady talked about Labour’s record. Let me remind her that female unemployment rose by over a quarter because of Labour’s economic mismanagement, and now Labour wants more debt, more borrowing and higher taxes. On our side, we are proud: female unemployment at record lows, a higher percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards and a record low gender pay gap—lower than under the last Labour Government.
Mr Speaker
Order. I believe I am right in saying that the shadow Home Secretary has had her six questions. [Hon. Members: “More!”] There will be more.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Ind)
Dominic Raab
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We want to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online for our children, but also for all members of our society. Our online harms White Paper set out our plans to make companies more responsible for their users’ safety online, especially children, and also sets out measures to reinforce powers to issue fines against those who put them at risk.
Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
It is a disgrace that the Prime Minister is not here. Since he was elected in July, he has been to only one Prime Minister’s questions. Quite simply, he is running scared from this Chamber.
Right now the Prime Minister is setting out his Brexit fantasy at the Tory party conference—a deal that he knows is unacceptable and doomed to failure. When this deal fails, as Tory Members know it will, Downing Street sources have insisted that the Government will not seek an extension. They will not obey their legal obligations. Yet again, this Prime Minister is prepared to act unlawfully. Has the Prime Minister not learnt his lesson? He is not above the law. Can the Foreign Secretary confirm whether those sources are correct that the Prime Minister will not obey the law? Are this Government seriously planning to take on Parliament in the courts to force through a catastrophic no-deal Brexit, or will the Foreign Secretary now rule that out?
Dominic Raab
Of course this Government will always adhere to the law. The Prime Minister has written to Jean-Claude Juncker setting out our proposals. We want to take forward the negotiations. We want to avoid a no-deal scenario, and I would urge the SNP, rather than undermining the negotiations in Brussels, to try and support the Government in securing a deal that is good for this country. The right hon. Gentleman talks about respecting judgments. We will always respect legal judgments. I call on the SNP to respect the judgment of the people of Scotland when it comes to staying in the United Kingdom and the judgment of the people of the United Kingdom to give effect to the referendum on the EU.
Ian Blackford
“We will always respect legal judgments.” The fact is that this Prime Minister cannot be trusted, and his Foreign Secretary cannot even commit the Prime Minister to the letter of the law. This Government must be stopped. I am looking now to colleagues on the Opposition Benches, and I urge them: we must unite. We must stop this Prime Minister by removing him from office. The Scottish National party stands ready to bring this Government down. Other parties need to step up at this moment of national crisis—prepare a vote of no confidence, ensure a Brexit extension, prevent a no deal and call a general election. Doing nothing is not an option. We must act. So I ask the Foreign Secretary: will he give the Prime Minister a message from the Scottish National party? It is not a case of if but when: we will bring this dangerous Government down.
Dominic Raab
The right hon. Gentleman is at risk of sounding like he is all mouth and no trousers, because he had the chance to vote for a general election and he turned it down; he had the chance to avoid no deal; and the best chance now is to back this Government in securing a good deal—good for the United Kingdom and good for all quarters of the United Kingdom, including the people of Scotland.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Dominic Raab
My hon. Friend gets straight to the crux of the matter. We must leave by the end of October, come what may. We are committed to doing that. The most effective way of doing it that will unite this House and bring the country back together is to get behind the Prime Minister’s efforts to secure a good deal. I think it is incumbent on all Members on both sides of the House to support the United Kingdom rather than try to undermine the negotiating position in Brussels.
Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
I will certainly pass on the hon. Lady’s specific request to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. She is right to raise the quality of housing. When I was Housing Minister, we developed proposals for a social housing Green Paper. We want social housing tenants to feel they are treated with respect. I remember meeting an individual who said that he ran his own business, and when he went to work he was treated with respect but when he came back home he was treated disrespectfully by his housing association. That is not right.
I would gently say to the hon. Lady that we have delivered over 222,000 additional homes in the past year—the highest level in all but one of the past 31 years —and we have built more council housing than in the previous 13 years of the last Labour Government.
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Ind)
Sir John Major rang me about half an hour ago simply to give vent to his indignation, which I already fully shared, that a major policy announcement of historic significance—our last offer, apparently, to the EU of a withdrawal agreement—was being made not to this House of Commons, which is not even to have a statement, and not after discussion in the Cabinet, most of whose members know nothing about it, but in a speech to the Conservative party conference in which the Prime Minister—who, I remind you, was one of those who voted to stop us leaving the European Union at the end of March—began with an attack on Parliament. If a deal is obtained, I will be delighted and I will apologise to the Prime Minister. I will vote for any deal that is agreed among the 28 member states of the European Union. But can the Foreign Secretary reassure me—it seems to me obvious, otherwise—that this is not just a party political campaigning ploy to blame the European Union for the lack of an agreement and to arouse fury between people and Parliament so as to escape from the responsibility that seems to me to lie with the Spartans on the far right of the party, with whom he and the Prime Minister used to be close allies?
Dominic Raab
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend. On the specific point, the proposals we are setting out to Brussels—David Frost, the Prime Minister’s special adviser, is in Brussels doing that—will be set out first in the House of Commons. They will be published—[Interruption.] No. The shadow Foreign Secretary is chuntering from a sedentary position, but the proposals have not been set out in Manchester; they will be set out in written proposals to Jean-Claude Juncker and published in the House later on. I gently say to my right hon. and learned Friend: I know—[Interruption.] Later today—[Interruption.] The shadow Foreign Secretary is continuing to talk from a sedentary position. My right hon. and learned Friend and I have always had slightly nuanced but differing views on the EU, but I think the one thing we all want to do is to get a deal right now—that is why the attempts by Parliament to frustrate that have been deeply counterproductive—and to give effect to the promises that, on all sides of the House, we made to give effect to the referendum and to keep trust with the electorate of this country.
Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
The hon. Lady’s concerns are shared right across the House, so it is something that will be of interest and importance to everyone here today. The national planning policy framework is very clear: the green belt must be protected and brownfield sites must be brought forward. In order to provide a greater boost to the supply of new housing, we have introduced measures to boost the density of and the ability to raise homes in more urban or suburban areas while protecting the green belt. A huge amount of money has gone into infrastructure development right across the country to ensure that we can build the right homes in the right places and to answer the significant concerns of local communities, who ask where all the schools, housing and roads will come from. We are making sure that we give councils the support they need to build the right homes in the right places.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
The Government are backing a new hospital to serve Basingstoke with money to develop our business case. Does my right hon. Friend agree that a bid that could include new jobs, new state-of-the-art facilities and new homes is one that everyone in north Hampshire should get behind?
Dominic Raab
It sounds like a tantalising proposal. I am sure that the Health Secretary will look at it very carefully indeed. We have made it clear that we back the NHS with the biggest cash boost in history, an extra £34 billion a year by 2023-24. We can do that only with a strong economy, which is precisely what the Labour party will put at risk.
Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Dominic Raab
I feel for anyone in the Thomas Cook scenario—people stranded abroad or people who lost their jobs. I have set out why the Government do not systematically bail out or step in to prop up firms that are unsustainable. I am afraid that if the hon. Lady looks at the figures, she will see that that was not a sustainable route to follow. Of course, if she wants to write to me, we will look at any details she raises, but the bottom line is that the way we create a healthy economy and jobs is by making sure that we have the tax measures in place—by not raising taxes on businesses and by supporting the workers of this country. That is what we are doing.
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Ind)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on being at the Dispatch Box as Deputy Prime Minister.
How is it that the Government are allowing special advisers at No. 10 Downing Street, speaking on behalf of the Government, to tell outright lies? My right hon. Friend should be familiar with the fact that on Saturday such a special adviser—whom I believe to be Mr Dominic Cummings—told The Mail on Sunday that a number of hon. Members were in receipt of foreign funding to draft what is known as the Benn Act, something which in itself is totally untrue. Moreover, he went on to say that that was going to be the subject of a Government investigation, which is also completely untrue because, mercifully, this country is not yet run as a police state by Mr Cummings.
Dominic Raab
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend. I was not quite sure what the question there was, but the position of the Government is that advisers advise and Ministers decide. It is right that the legislation that we have rightly dubbed the surrender Act gets the kind of scrutiny that a Government would get—whether it is from the Executive, parliamentary Select Committees in this House or, indeed, the declarations of interest that should come forward in the normal way.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
Dominic Raab
The Government have been very clear: we will respect the law—[Interruption.] We will respect the law, but we are not going to extend beyond 31 October. I would ask all hon. Members who signed up to that shoddy legislation to reflect on whether—with the fact of the multiple conditions, the £1 billion a month that it would cost the UK taxpayer and undermining the position of the UK Government to get a deal in Brussels—they are actually courting the no-deal scenario they pretend they want to avoid.
Mr Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
May I join in the tributes paid earlier to the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) for her historic achievement today?
Today marks the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that Gandhi’s message of non-violence, religious tolerance and greater rights for women is as applicable today as it was in his lifetime?
Dominic Raab
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I would go one further and tout the words of Martin Luther King, who said that we—I think on all sides of the House—should believe in a society where you are judged on the content of your character, not the colour of your skin, let alone your gender. That is why we on this side of the House are proud of our record of record levels of BAME communities in employment and children from BAME communities taking more rigorous GCSEs. We have the first Asian Chancellor, the first female Asian Home Secretary and I am proud to be in the most diverse Cabinet in history.
Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
Of course we share the concerns of anyone in the position of the hon. Lady’s constituent. That is why the head of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens, and the Health Secretary have said that they have put in place all the necessary arrangements to make sure that, in a no-deal scenario, medicines will continue to flow across the border, as is required. But if the hon. Lady really wants to avoid a no-deal scenario, she should get behind this Government getting a good deal in Brussels, and that is the best thing for all concerned.
Amber Rudd (Hastings and Rye) (Ind)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his role today. I remember when my right hon. Friend resigned from the Cabinet because of his disagreements with Brexit policy—a route I subsequently became familiar with—but does his experience not remind him that there are honourable, different opinions across this House about how we leave the European Union and about how we interpret the will of the people, and the essential thing is that every Member here representing their constituency has a role to play in that? May I urge him, when working with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, to make sure that any decisions—any progress—are taken through this House?
Dominic Raab
I can give my right hon. Friend that reassurance. I do understand, and we have always managed to stay on civil, cordial, even amiable terms throughout all the challenges of Brexit, which we on both sides of the House should seek to do. Parliament of course has a crucial role to play. I do not think anyone can legitimately say that Parliament, with the stalwart support of the Speaker, has not scrutinised Brexit at every stage. But we also have to remember on all sides, and particularly on this side, the promises we made to the voters to give effect to Brexit—to get Brexit done—and that is the way we can move on, unite the country and take Britain forward.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
I say to the hon. Gentleman, the Chairman of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, that we are absolutely committed to boosting bus services in his constituency and indeed infrastructure right across the country. That includes transport, that includes broadband, and that means making sure that we have a more balanced economy that can boost jobs, reduce deprivation and ensure we can fund the precious public services we need. On the specific point he raised, I will ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government to write to him personally.
Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)
Within the last 24 hours, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has launched a ballistic missile, possibly from a submarine; if so, that would be the first submarine-based missile it has launched in three years. It is its ninth launch, I believe, since June. Has my right hon. Friend had an opportunity to talk to other leaders in the region? Given that this comes a few days before the resumption of talks with the United States, what assessment has he made of the continuing threat of the DPRK to the region and the wider world?
Dominic Raab
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for his time at the Foreign Office; he was a very effective Minister, and he continues to make the case from the Back Benches. We are concerned about the situation in North Korea and we regularly raise it with our international partners. There has been a series of missile tests by Pyongyang, which are deeply troubling. We continue to make it clear that it must show restraint and adhere to its legal commitments. Of course, there is some bluff and bluster in the lead-up to the talks with the US. We would like to see a de-escalation of tensions and a route to denuclearising North Korea.
Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
I feel for any family and any children in the situation that the hon. Lady highlights. We are frustrated, as is everyone, that agreement has not yet been reached that would provide access to Orkambi. We have a system, with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and NHS England, where it is for clinicians, not politicians, to determine the fair price for medicines. I say gently that I think the proposals put forward by the Labour party would put that at risk, because they would repel investment and innovation. That is not the right way to get medicines to the people who need them.
Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)
May I ask the First Secretary of State to turn his attention to Hong Kong? Yesterday’s events were truly awful. Obviously, the people suffering most are the victims of violence on both sides, but now a number of UK companies with interests in Hong Kong are being adversely affected. As we are one of the guarantors of the Sino-British joint declaration supporting one country, two systems, is there now an argument for him to discuss Hong Kong with China in the UN Security Council? Perhaps the next six-monthly report on the declaration would be an opportunity to do that.
Dominic Raab
We are concerned about what we are seeing on the streets of Hong Kong. We of course condemn any violence by protesters, but the vast majority are seeking to exercise their right to peaceful protest. Any response by the Hong Kong authorities needs to be proportionate, but what we need above all is a political process and a dialogue between the Administration and the people of Hong Kong that can lead to the kind of political reform that is envisaged in the Basic Law and reflected in the joint declaration my hon. Friend cites.
Sir Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)
Dominic Raab
We are absolutely determined to correct the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation. We have apologised for the mistakes that were made and, to date, over 7,200 individuals have been given documentation confirming their status. The hon. Gentleman talks about Brexit, which has been a divisive issue for all parties and people right across this country. The best way of resolving that and bringing the country together is to get a deal, get Brexit done, and move on. It is incumbent on those in all parts of the Labour party to think about the promises that they have made, and to get behind this Government as we strive for a good deal that works for the country.
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State join me in welcoming the £13.8 million of funding for East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust that has been earmarked for upgrading Eastbourne District General Hospital, which many of my constituents use? A few years ago, the hospital was earmarked for closure; under the Conservatives, it is earmarked for investment.
Dominic Raab
I am delighted about the new investment going into my hon. Friend’s constituency. We have backed the NHS, which will have almost £34 billion a year by 2023-24. There is an extra £1.8 billion going into 20 hospital upgrades, and we are providing £250 million to boost artificial intelligence, so that we can have earlier cancer detection, new dementia treatments and more personalised care. All that would be put at risk by a Labour Government, who would tank the economy.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman. Members on all sides of the House want to stand up to, and have absolutely zero tolerance for, any domestic abuse. The best way forward is for us to work together in a collaborative way, which, frankly, we have not seen in recent months and years because of Brexit. That opportunity will come today, when we debate the Domestic Abuse Bill on Second Reading.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
Last year, I attempted to introduce legislation requiring banks to maintain or deliver a cashpoint, on a free-to-use, 24-hour basis, to every high street that supports 5,000 residents or more. I was inspired to do that when the tourist town of Battle lost its last cashpoint of that type. I am grateful that LINK has now seen the case for Battle’s cashpoint, but I am conscious that other high streets across the UK are not so fortunate. Will the Deputy Prime Minister help to set up a meeting with me and Ministers to help to deliver a boost to all our high streets?
Dominic Raab
I will certainly pass on my hon. Friend’s point directly to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and other Ministers, and will see what more can be done in the neighbourhood that he talks about. The reality is that some businesses and high streets are suffering, partly because of online competition, and partly because of consumer trends. We need to make sure that we boost high streets and businesses, and in particular the small businesses in this country that have created over 80% of new jobs. All that will be put at risk, frankly, by the damaging and counter-productive policies that the shadow Chancellor has come up with this week.
Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)
Dominic Raab
I have to say to the hon. Lady that of course we will adhere to the law, but the Prime Minister has been clear that we must leave by the end of October in order to maintain public trust in our democracy and avoid the public feeling that parliamentarians and politicians do not listen to what they have said. If she wants to avoid a no-deal Brexit, get behind the Government in securing a deal that all sides can support.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Yesterday, I was honoured to speak at the official opening of CAE’s new flight simulator and aviation training centre at Gatwick airport. Will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming this significant aviation inward investment into global Britain?
Dominic Raab
It is absolutely crucial that we make this country the best place to invest for technology and innovation, and that is part of the vision of global Britain. So I pay tribute to the project in my hon. Friend’s constituency. That is what we can deliver if we can get Brexit done and dusted and move on, and allow the people of this country to move on.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (IGC)
The right hon. Gentleman and the Government talk about the will of the people and the need to restore trust in democracy when it comes to Brexit, while completely forgetting that over 16 million people voted for us to remain in the EU, 13 million people chose to abstain in the referendum, and 1.5 million youngsters were not eligible to vote and now want a say about their future. On that basis, surely the way to protect democracy is to put any Brexit deal to a confirmatory referendum because, if we do not have that people’s vote, we will leave the EU without the consent of the majority of people of this country.
Dominic Raab
I know that the right hon. Lady and I have different views on Brexit, but we have always got on professionally and civilly in the past, and I understand the passion with which she holds her views. But I think a second referendum will be the last thing this country wants. It would solve nothing and put the Union at risk, because it would be a political gift to the SNP. If she wants to avoid no deal, she should back the Government, not undermine them, as they strive for a good deal in Brussels.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
With the shape of a potential deal becoming clearer, will the First Secretary of State repeat and confirm his absolute commitment to leaving on 31 October, which is in contrast to the Lib Dems—I do not think we have a single Lib Dem in the Chamber this afternoon—[Interruption.] Oh, we do—we have one. Forgive me, Mr Speaker, I got that wrong. We have one Lib Dem in the Chamber. That commitment is in contrast to the Lib Dems, who want to overturn the democratic result, and to the Labour party, which does not quite yet know what it wants.
Dominic Raab
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to get Brexit done. The country wants us to move on and to keep faith with the voters. As for the position of the Liberal Democrats, of all the different views in the House of Commons, I find this the most difficult to understand. How could we have 16 Liberal Democrat MEPs actually writing to Jean-Claude Juncker telling him not to negotiate or do a deal with the UK? That is deeply irresponsible and is courting the very outcome of a no-deal Brexit they say they wish to avoid.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
Did the Prime Minister, as The Times reports today, receive a request from President Trump for help in trying to discredit the Mueller report and the role of British and American intelligence in uncovering the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections? Will he assure the House that no British Prime Minister would ever collude with any foreign leader to undermine or smear our security and intelligence services or damage their vital co-operation with their American colleagues?
Dominic Raab
I should first be clear that the Prime Minister is not going to comment on the discussions with President Trump that were held in private, but I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that of course neither the Prime Minister, then the Foreign Secretary, nor any other member of the Government would collude in the way he describes. That is of course entirely unacceptable, would never have happened and did not happen.
BILL PRESENTED
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Points of Order
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
I would have thought it the normal course of events to proceed with the ten-minute rule motion, but if colleagues particularly want to raise their points of order now, a simple nod of the head in acquiescence in such an arrangement and empathy with it will suffice. Not surprisingly, the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards), who is invariably of an amiable disposition, seems content that we proceed in that way. We will come to the hon. Gentleman erelong, but first of all I believe there is a very important point of order from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy).
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. If I may, I should like to seek your advice. For the last six days, an organisation calling itself the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK has been waging a campaign of intimidation and harassment against me and, by extension, my constituents in Walthamstow—from turning up in our town centre with a 20-foot banner of my head next to an image of a dead baby of about the age of the baby I am currently carrying myself, proclaiming that I am working hard to achieve such an outcome; to buying from Clear Channel billboards advertising in my constituency, displaying near schools graphic and scientifically incorrect pictures of foetuses; to libelling me on national radio as someone who wishes to see abortion up to birth; to its Stop Stella campaign, which explicitly encourages people to target me as a hypocrite for being pregnant and advocating the right of all women to choose when to be.
Walthamstow residents have made clear their distress at this behaviour, and so have I. The organisation has made its point. It disagrees with me; I understand that and have asked it not to continue. Despite that, it has already stated that it will keep returning and targeting me until I stop campaigning. Already, I have received numerous threats and abusive messages that directly quote its material.
As you would expect, Mr Speaker, I have sought police assistance against this harassment. I am sad to report that, as yet, none has been given, including from the parliamentary authorities, although Sadiq Khan and Clare Coghill, the leader of my council, have been fantastic allies. I also have proposals for the Domestic Abuse Bill, which I hope Ministers will look on kindly, to recognise this form of abuse. As I have always said to bullies, “It’s not my time you’re going to waste.”
One of the troubling things about importing this kind of campaigning into our politics—the organisation has said that it will extend its protest to other MPs, and it is clearly influencing debate in this place, as some even in this Chamber have said that I wish to kill babies—is how it is funded. This organisation claims, in its constitution and accounts and in a statement it made to the BBC last October, to be a charity, yet the Charity Commission has refused to register it. Nor is it clear whether it has repaid the gift aid it has previously claimed under the auspices of this charity status. If not, given that it knew that it was not registered with the Charity Commission, this group has facilitated tax evasion, which of course is a criminal offence. Nor is it clear whether it is complying with the rules for third-party campaigners in the run-up to an election, or whether it is accepting illegal foreign donations, given that it is part of a network of such organisations across the world.
Sadly, I understand that the organisation has also threatened to sue journalists who ask about these matters, so we cannot have clarity about who is funding this sustained campaign of intimidation from an organisation whose counterparts in other countries have picketed maternity hospitals with baby coffins and incited such hatred and radicalisation that it has resulted in violence, including a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado.
Given the calls for a general election, the Charity Commission, the Electoral Commission and, indeed, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs must prioritise investigating such organisations and tackling the potential consequences for our public debates. I am sure we would all want to know whether all taxes are paid, all donations declared and all donors legal.
I am not sure, however, where we as parliamentarians can start in holding such a company to account for its toxic culture and approach, and in the absence of police action. We cannot uphold free speech on any issue if we do not also hold to account those who seek to abuse it and the laws on campaigning. Perhaps, Mr Speaker, you will have some suggestions for me so that we can ensure that no MP and, indeed, no other woman has to go through what I have been going through in the past few days.
Mr Speaker
I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order. At the outset, I know she will understand if I say that in respect of some of the other matters to do with tax treatment and funding that she mentioned, I cannot comment. It is perfectly reasonable for the hon. Lady to set out those matters, but they do not require a response from me and it would not in any way be authoritative.
However, as far as what I regard as her major point is concerned, I will be absolutely explicit in my response. I believe that campaigning of that kind, with the intensity involved and the explicit public threat, to its apparently endless continuation, is vile, unconscionable and despicable. There is a major difference—it is important that we should be clear about this—between putting a point of view with considerable force and insistence on the matter of abortion or any other matter of public dispute and putting it in extreme and provocative terms, and in doing so saying, “We will go on doing so until you stop exercising your right as a Member of Parliament to campaign for what you want. Give in to our intimidation, our threats and our bullying, or it will be the worse for you.” That to me, colleagues—I hope that I carry the support of the majority of the House in saying this—is rank, unacceptable and displays, if I may say so, and I will, an absence of any moral compass. Anybody who thinks seriously about these matters cannot seriously think that that is right. It would be wrong in any case, but for the hon. Lady to be subject to that treatment when she herself is pregnant, and those intimidating and harassing her, ultimately unsuccessfully, know that to be so, is double appalling.
With reference to what the hon. Lady said—and it is a challenge, which I take in good part—about thus far an absence of support from the House authorities, I am very disappointed to learn of that. I cannot comment on the particulars. What I do undertake to do is to meet the hon. Lady within 24 hours, if she wishes to meet me, and I will, as appropriate, be accompanied by people in this House who are best placed to advise. I am delighted that the Mayor of London and his team are supporting her, but she is entitled to proper and unstinting support from the House authorities. If she feels that that is not the case and there is more that we can do, or there are things that we have not done at all that we should be doing, I am determined that she should get that help.
The hon. Lady is respected across this House as an extremely dedicated, articulate and principled campaigner for her causes. Nothing on earth can be allowed to prevent her from continuing in that vein. Although it is not a matter of order within the Chamber, it is right that she should seek the support of Parliament’s spokesperson, as she wants to reinforce her right to go about her business in a legitimate way. She has that right, and I stand absolutely with her in insisting on the continued exercise of that right.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. Having discussed this matter just this morning with the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), may I say that the Government are similarly concerned about the nature of the campaign against her? Indeed, my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has already communicated her concerns to his Department, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has already offered to meet the hon. Lady. We take these allegations very seriously, and we will see what can be done.
Mr Speaker
I hope that those replies will do for now, but let us get together, as I have suggested, and no doubt the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) will want to meet the Minister at the appropriate time.
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
Further to the point of order from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), Mr Speaker. As someone who sits on the opposite side of the abortion debate, may I express my solidarity with the hon. Lady? The abuse and the billboards do nothing to further the debate. Abortion is a very personal issue. We should use this place as a forum for debate, but should do so in a constructive, collaborative manner. Let me echo the point that those people do not speak for all of us who may have a different view.
Mr Speaker
I hope that colleagues will agree that that was a very welcome point of order from the hon. Lady, and I think that I speak on the House’s behalf when I thank her for saying what she has said.
I think there was another point of order from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), on a wholly unrelated subject.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you; it is unrelated.
Following his statement to the House last week, the Prime Minister, in response to a question that I asked about an instruction that had apparently been given by his adviser, Dominic Cummings, that parts of Government data that are of significance and concern to many people should be brought together, told me that I had
“mentioned something about which I am afraid I was hitherto unaware”.—[Official Report, 25 September 2019; Vol. 664, c. 817-8.]
That was a very polite response, but it seems to many of us somewhat surprising in view of the publicity given to the issue and the fact that other Members have raised complaints with the Information Commissioner. I wonder whether you could give me guidance, Mr Speaker, on how the Prime Minister could perhaps be persuaded to return to the House to clarify the matter.
Mr Speaker
I do not treat what the hon. Gentleman has said with any levity when I say that conflicting accounts of a Government’s position on a given subject are not a novel phenomenon. There have been many precedents, under successive Governments and in relation to a plethora of different Departments, sometimes including No. 10 Downing Street itself. I do not sniff or cavil at what the hon. Gentleman has said about the apparent inconsistency that perturbs him, and I am grateful to him for giving me notice that he would raise the matter. However, I do not think that this is a point of order. The hon. Gentleman is seeking procedural advice.
By the way, when I say that this is not a point of order, I say it for the purpose of the intelligibility of our proceedings to people observing them. The great majority of points of order are not points of order. They are ruses by which to raise matters that are of particular concern to Members at the time—in the most recent instance, the point of order from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), quite the most compelling and pressing case to raise.
As far as the hon. Gentleman is concerned, I think that he should work on this basis. If he wishes to pursue what he sees as a potentially or actually inaccurate parliamentary answer, he should take the short journey from here to the Table Office and seek advice on how to pursue it. I hope that he will forgive me if I say that, in doing so, he should adopt my—I think—now established motto in these matters by way of advice: persist, persist, persist. I say this to the hon. Gentleman. Table further questions. Do not take no for an answer. Write letters. In a legitimate, as opposed to an illegitimate, way, make a nuisance of yourself, man.
If there are no further points of order, we come now to the ten-minute rule motion, for which the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr has been so patiently and good-naturedly waiting.
Public Expenditure and Taxation (Advisory Body)
Wednesday 2nd October 2019
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Public Expenditure and Taxation (Advisory Body) Bill 2017-19 View all Public Expenditure and Taxation (Advisory Body) Bill 2017-19 Debates Read Hansard Text
A Ten Minute Rule Bill is a First Reading of a Private Members Bill, but with the sponsor permitted to make a ten minute speech outlining the reasons for the proposed legislation.
There is little chance of the Bill proceeding further unless there is unanimous consent for the Bill or the Government elects to support the Bill directly.
For more information see: Ten Minute Bills
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to establish an independent advisory body to make recommendations on the equitable distribution of public expenditure across the United Kingdom, the calculation of block grants to devolved administrations, the implications of the devolution of tax-raising powers for the United Kingdom fiscal framework, and the resolution of fiscal disputes arising between governments in the United Kingdom; and for connected purposes.
For decades, British Governments—red and blue alike—have tinkered around the edges of our broken economic system without challenging its structural flaws. Nine of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe are located within the British state, as well as the richest by a country mile. These disgraceful geographical wealth inequalities are a record of shame. Successive British Governments, even after the 2008 financial crash, have been too timid to challenge the economic status quo, which prizes consumer debt addiction and the financialisation of the economy. In response to the crash, the former Chancellor George Osborne used to talk a lot about geographical and sectoral economic rebalancing, but in reality there has been little action to match the rhetoric.
Of the 12 NUTS—nomenclature of territorial units for statistics—nations and regions of the British state, only three, London, south-east England and east England, are not in deficit. Recent international data showed that the largest difference in economic prosperity in Europe was between inner London—the UK’s richest region, with a regional GDP average of 614% of the EU average—and west Wales and the valleys, the UK’s poorest, with a regional GDP of 68% of the EU average. London acts as a black hole, sucking in talent and investment from the rest of the UK and beyond. Perversely, this inequality further incentivises investment in London from the public and private sectors alike, so the cycle continues unabated.
That is why I am introducing a Bill to establish an independent advisory body to make recommendations on the equitable distribution of public expenditure across the British state: a new office for fair funding, with delivering geographic wealth convergence as its statutory aim. It would advise on the calculation of block grants to devolved Administrations, make recommendations on the implications of the devolution of tax-raising powers for the United Kingdom fiscal framework and act as an independent arbitrator in dealing with the resolution of fiscal disputes arising between the Governments in the UK.
There are constant misunderstandings and mis-statements about the relative funding and public spending levels in Wales compared with those in other parts of the UK. Forty years after the introduction of the infamous Barnett formula, it is still very poorly understood. On a number of occasions, the British Government have erroneously claimed that for every £100 of public spending in England, £120 is spent in Wales. While that may be the case for devolved spending, it is certainly not the case for total expenditure, which is a very different measure. Identifiable public expenditure per capita in Wales in 2015-16 was 113% of the England level. Total expenditure per capita in Wales—identifiable plus non-identifiable—was 110%, well below the 120% claimed by the Secretary of State.
For the British state, it pays to keep the system as impenetrable as possible. Relative need, as used in consideration of funding for the devolved Administrations, makes no allowance for the concept of pump-priming, in which additional funding is allocated for long-term capital investment to realise the latent economic potential of poorer-performing geographical areas. The issue is well described in the first report of the UK2070 Commission, which claims that the Treasury Green Book is biased in favour of capital investment in the most successful regions. It is also important to mitigate the self-reinforcing tendencies of the Treasury Green Book and cost-benefit analysis whereby fast-growing places automatically move to the front of the queue for more public investment. One of the main reasons the British state currently has anaemic economic growth is low productivity. The best way to boost productivity would be to invest in poorer-performing areas, but what we are likely to get from the Brexit “Britannia Unchained” gang is even more money spent in London.
In July 2019, the Public Accounts Committee published a report outlining several problems with the way in which funding is currently allocated to the devolved Governments. It identified unnecessary complexity involving funding arrangements, recommending that the Treasury become more transparent in the way that it allocates funding. It concluded that the allocation of funding outside the Barnett formula without consequentials was unsatisfactory. For example, the dodgy deal with the DUP that resulted in £1 billion extra funding clearly undermined the little credibility that the Barnett formula still retained. A lack of clarity on whether the block grant reflects need was reported, and the Committee expressed concern at the impact of slower population growth on funding per head. The report also reiterated Plaid Cymru’s concerns about delays in the sharing of information by the Treasury with the devolved Administrations on the comparability factors included in the statement of funding policy.
The statement of funding policy, usually published alongside the comprehensive spending review, sets out the comparability factors that are used in the calculation of the Barnett formula. The last set of comparability factors in relation to spending programmes was published in 2015, and a departmental breakdown, with no material difference, was published as an addendum to the spending round last month. The comparability factors are decided unilaterally by the Treasury, and that needs to be changed as a matter of priority.
HS2 is a case in point. It currently swallows up a third of the UK Government’s support for rail: £2.1 billion out of a total of £6.4 billion in the year 2017-18. It is clear from published and leaked reports that HS2 will cost far more than the planned £56 billion—up to £100 billion. The Treasury categorised HS2 as a national project with a comparability factor of 0% for Wales, while Scotland and Northern Ireland had a 100% score. As a result, full Barnett consequentials are payable to Scotland and Northern Ireland, but not to Wales. These are huge sums of money. If HS2 ends up costing £100 billion, full Barnett consequentials for Wales will amount to £5 billion.
Transport expert Professor Stuart Cole has also demonstrated that HS2 will have negative consequences for Wales, particularly in the south of my country, as journey times to cities in the midlands and north of England are reduced and new technology encourages companies to areas with HS2 stations. Professor Cole’s analysis was supported by a report from Greengauge 21, which drew on analysis by KPMG, which found that HS2 could reduce employment growth in Wales by 21,000 jobs between 2007 and 2040, as well as costing the economy of the south of my country £200 million per annum. My Bill aims to put a stop to the unfair way in which those comparability factors are set by setting up an independent advisory body.
With growing fiscal divergence and an evolving constitutional landscape, the need for such an independent body has never been greater. The Wales Act 2014 devolved certain tax and borrowing powers to Wales. It enables the Welsh Government to legislate in respect of stamp duty land tax and landfill tax, and for the partial devolution of income tax to Wales. A fiscal framework was negotiated between the British and Welsh Governments to establish rules for determining matters resulting from fiscal devolution. At the moment, the three Welsh rates are set at 10p, maintaining parity with England, but with the possibility of further devolution and greater fiscal divergence, the current mechanism for developing and negotiating the fiscal framework is unsustainable.
Significant concerns remain with regard to the dispute resolution mechanism in the framework. If no agreement is reached, the status quo remains. How can the devolved Administrations secure a fair hearing if the UK Government, with whom they are raising the dispute, are playing judge, jury and executioner? If we established an office for fair funding under my Bill, we would have a system of independent arbitration.
There is international precedent for an independent office for fair funding. In South Africa, the Financial and Fiscal Commission is an independent body that does not determine expenditure allocation formulae directly but advises the South African Government on those formulae. The South African Government have to consult the FFC regarding the division of revenue between different tiers of government. In Australia, allocations of federal funding to the six states and two territories are overseen by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, which is a statutory, independent, non-partisan body. The CGC was discussed in the 2009 report from the Lords Select Committee on the Barnett Formula, which recommended that a similar body be set up in the UK.
While an office of fair funding would not solve the fundamental imbalance at the heart of the British state, it could at least give Wales and other neglected areas the tools to begin improving our infrastructure and to diversify our economies. Brexit is not an excuse to reassert Westminster control over Wales. The Bill would help to create a level playing field between the nations of the British state.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Jonathan Edwards, Liz Saville Roberts, Guto Bebb, Anna McMorrin, Jane Dodds, Caroline Lucas, Ben Lake and Hywel Williams present the Bill.
Jonathan Edwards accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on 3 October 2019 and to be printed (Bill 437).
Domestic Abuse Bill
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
I will call the Secretary of State for Justice in a moment to move the motion, but before I do so, and in recognition of the fact that there are no time limits on Front-Bench speeches, I will tell the House that more than 40 right hon. and hon. Members are seeking to catch the eye of the Chair. I know that colleagues will want sensitively to take account of that in framing their contributions.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Robert Buckland)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I am mindful of the information with which you have kindly furnished the House, Mr Speaker. You will know that historically I have been generous in accepting interventions. I will tailor my generosity today, because I want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to take part in this landmark debate. I look around the Chamber, and in all parts I see colleagues who have made a huge contribution to getting where we are today. We still have a long way to go, but I am pleased, encouraged and proud to see parliamentarians of all colours who have put their shoulder to the wheel to tackle the challenge that we face. It is a challenge that has been too big for too long, and the Government have consistently made clear our continued determination to tackle the scourge of domestic abuse. Legislation, including the Bill, whatever its landmark status, is only one aspect of the work that needs to be done and that we are undertaking across Government to diminish the prevalence and impact of domestic abuse, and to make it clear to the public that we have zero tolerance of abusers.
This is not just a matter for the Ministry of Justice—it is for the Home Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department of Health and Social Care. I am glad to be supported by Ministers from all those Departments and, indeed, all of Government, as we need to put our metaphorical shoulder to the wheel. The Bill puts the needs of victims front and centre, by providing additional protections, strengthening the agencies’ response, and amplifying the voice of victims. We are determined to ensure that victims feel safe and supported, both in seeking help and in rebuilding their lives.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
As the daughter of a social worker who spent her entire career working alongside children and families, supporting victims of domestic abuse, may I ask the Secretary of State to join me in thanking the hard-working social workers and, indeed, police officers who are often the first line of response, as well as charities across the country who support victims of domestic abuse?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is right to remind us at the get-go of the importance of a co-ordinated approach. All of us, including Members of Parliament, need to be domestic abuse-aware. We need to understand that it presents in myriad ways and myriad circumstances.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
Domestic abuse is a leading cause of homelessness, and some of the most harrowing cases I have dealt with as a constituency MP have involved the difficulty faced by survivors of abuse in accessing safe, secure housing. Will the Secretary of State undertake to ensure in the Bill that survivors of domestic abuse automatically have priority need status for housing and, most importantly, that local authorities are fully and sustainably funded to deliver that obligation?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue, and the Bill provides an opportunity to delve into it. It is important that we outline those principles on Second Reading. In Committee, we will have an opportunity to debate the detail. I am particularly interested in the points that she made. I want to make the Bill as good as possible, and I need the help not just of colleagues in government but of all hon. Members to do that.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
May I make a little progress? As I have said, I will be as generous as I can.
Can I take the House back 25 years to a case in the Crown court at Carmarthen that involved a young couple? The man was charged with assault against his wife. A young barrister had been given that case. That was me, and I remember seeing photographs of the victim’s injuries. I was 24, and not very worldly-wise. I looked at the photographs of that woman’s eyes, which were bloodshot and bruised. The police had got there in time to take photographs of the injuries—something of a rarity in those days—and I immediately thought that she had been a victim of a direct assault by punching, but I was wrong about that. She had been strangled—strangulation causes those types of injury.
The victim came to court. Frankly, I could not see what the defence was for the case, but my instructions were to plough on none the less. I saw a frightened and terrified woman having to come to this grand and rather old-fashioned court. Luckily, the judge was humane, sensible and sensitive, but there was a problem: the woman did not want to follow through and give evidence. The judge called her into court and called her to the stand because he was concerned about what was happening. He asked her to explain why she did not want to give evidence. She said that she still loved her partner, that she wanted to be with him and that she did not want to put him through the stress of a Crown court trial. With that, the case was over. He was acquitted, they went on their way, and I was left thinking, “Is that really the end?” Was it in fact just the beginning of the domestic abuse that we all recognise?
That story has haunted me all my professional life. The evidence shows that victims of domestic abuse will often have been a victim on dozens of occasions before they call the police or the authorities. Victims are suffering in silence, often for years, and we are unable to reach them.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
I will give way in a moment. I have not yet finished this part of my speech.
I believe that the days of the courts approaching abuse as “just a domestic” have, happily, gone, but my goodness me, we still have a heck of a way to go. I want to give the House one statistic before I give way. In the year ending March 2018, some 2 million adults between the ages of 16 and 59 experienced domestic abuse. That is 2 million people, like the woman I was talking about, whose everyday lives are blighted by abuse and who live with the effects, be they physical or emotional. So we have a high degree of duty to them to pass this legislation.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
Another aspect highlighted by the Secretary of State’s incredibly moving story is just how long the survivors of domestic abuse have been waiting for this kind of legislation. They have been waiting for 25 years, and indeed for much longer, but for the past three years the Government have been promising to outlaw cross-examination by perpetrators of domestic violence. People have waited for so long, so will he now give a commitment that this Bill will be seen through before the House is prorogued once more? If it was not, that would be the final straw for many very vulnerable people.
Robert Buckland
I pay warm tribute to the hon. Gentleman, who has been an assiduous campaigner on this issue. Domestic abuse is predominantly experienced by women, but we also know that there are many relationships in our society in which men suffer in silence. We are speaking for everybody, whatever their gender, orientation or classification. This is for everybody. On the question of the carry-over, that motion is on the Order Paper and I know that hon. Members will want to support it. This Bill will be carried over. That is an important sign of our deep commitment to this issue.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (IGC)
I only wish that the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s very moving story was an exception, but sadly, as he and I and many others who have practised at the criminal Bar or as solicitors will know, it is still all too common a story today. I have two quick questions that I hope he can answer. First, will this Act ensure that our police change their attitude? He is right to talk about the courts and the judiciary, but what about our police, who I fear still think of these instances as “domestics”? Secondly, will he meet me to discuss what is happening in our courts? There is now far too long a delay between complaint and trial—there is often a delay of between two and three years, and that is not fair on the victims.
Robert Buckland
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady. On her second point, I will meet her. On her first point, the important thing is what we do to embed the legislation, and that has to be by way of further training and seeing the operational effect of the strategy we set out and the direction that the primary legislation takes.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
I give way to the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for giving way. I, too, have seen examples like the one that he quoted, and I particularly welcome the provisions in clause 75 relating to the prohibition of cross-examination by the abusive party. As the Bill goes forward, will he and his colleagues particularly bear in mind the legitimate improvements proposed by the Law Society and others in this field? They include a proposal for the proper remuneration of, and a proper system for instructing, the representatives instructed to carry out the cross-examination, in the interests of justice. Will he also consider whether examination in chief could be included in certain circumstances—for example, when the alleged abusive party seeks to call the child of the relationship in support of their case? That, too, can cause real distress.
Robert Buckland
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to talk about his experience, the issues that we can tease out in Committee and how far we need to go.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
I will give way again in a moment, but I would like to make some progress.
Abuse has not only a direct impact but an impact on the wider family and, most appallingly and sadly, on children and young people, who suffer the short and long-term emotional and behavioural effects of abuse. We know that children who witness domestic abuse in the home are far more likely to experience abuse by a partner as an adult. It is therefore our role as a Government and a Parliament to do all we can to protect our children from having to suffer as a consequence of abuse, and to ensure that national and local agencies recognise and respond to their needs.
Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
My right hon. and learned Friend is making a powerful speech and giving some amazing examples. I am sure that most of us have come across stories, perhaps sometimes in our own families, where victims do not believe that the perpetrator is at fault and instead believe that they themselves are at fault. He has mentioned physical, emotional and economic abuse. That is the crux of the problem, and the definition has been widened out. I absolutely welcome the Bill. How does he expect it to provide protection for victims and help to expose the vile perpetrators and bring them to justice?
Robert Buckland
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her continuing commitment to reform and improvement in this area. The widening of the definition from “financial” to “economic” abuse captures the manipulation that can happen, not only in relation to money but in relation to other benefits and through coercive control. I am proud to have played my part as a junior Minister in ensuring that coercive control went on to the statute book as a criminal offence some years ago. We must continue to reinforce the message that abuse is not just about violence, important though that is, and that its collective impacts can change the lives of far too many victims.
Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)
I commend the Secretary of State and, in particular, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), for the work they have been doing on this issue. On a number of occasions we have stated that we want to embed legislation that provides the best protection, and the Secretary of State will know that this Bill contains particular definitions that are unique to Northern Ireland. However, one thing we are devoid of in Northern Ireland is legislative protection from stalking. I hope that he will give thoughtful consideration during the passage of the Bill to incorporating measures to include that, whether there be a domestic connection to the stalking or not. We need that legislation for the individual victims and their families. Will he also give thoughtful consideration to the inclusion of Northern Ireland Members of this House on the Bill Committee?
Robert Buckland
On the hon. Gentleman’s last point, the business managers will have heard him loud and clear. I am keen to ensure that the Bill maintains its focus on domestic abuse. I do not pretend that we can somehow hermetically seal the issue off from other aspects of criminal behaviour and abuse, such as stalking, but I think that the best place for stalking legislation would be in a discrete piece of work. I draw his attention to the work that we did in England and Wales. I was part of the all-party parliamentary group on stalking and harassment, which campaigned and worked at pace to get stalking criminalised in England and Wales. I will give him encouragement, but I really want to ensure that this Bill is focused.
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
I have just returned from the Council of Europe, where members across parties, especially in the Socialist Group, expressed horror that it has taken seven years and counting for the UK to ratify the Istanbul convention. One of the critical points in ratifying the convention is the treatment of women in Northern Ireland and the fact that they do not have the protections that the Secretary of State has just suggested should not be in the Bill. The Government gave a pledge and told the Council of Europe that the Bill was about ratifying the Istanbul convention, and there is a motion of recommendation about the convention in the UK right now at the Council of Europe. Can he give an assurance that he will not leave the women of Northern Ireland out of the Istanbul convention, let alone the migrant women in this country who also need us to put the legislation together?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady makes an important point about the Istanbul convention, and of course we passed domestic legislation about that. I want to make sure that every aspect of the convention is underpinned in domestic law throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. I am simply saying, as a legislator and someone who wants to make sure that we get the Bill in the best possible position, that we need to make sure we get the issues in the right vehicle. If it is the will of the House that the Bill is the right vehicle, that will of course be respected, but I think I am entitled to make that point about what I regard as the real focus of the Bill. I speak as someone who has actively and enthusiastically supported the criminalisation of stalking— as has she—for many years.
Yvette Cooper
I urge the Secretary of State to reconsider this point. We have a Bill before us and the opportunity to address the issue of stalking. There is considerable overlap: many cases that may begin as domestic abuse become terrible cases of stalking when the relationship splits up. There are serial perpetrators of violence and abuse who in some cases are involved in domestic abuse and in others in stalking.
Robert Buckland
Of course, and the right hon. Lady makes an important point. She will know that my decision to extend the unduly lenient sentence scheme to cover stalking offences reinforces my personal commitment and my deep understanding of the link between stalking and obsessional behaviour and the commission of sexual offences, offences of violence or homicide. I absolutely get that, but it is right that we tease out those issues in Committee and look at them again on Report. If it is the will of the House, we will of course do it.
Dr Wollaston
The Secretary of State may know that I took the Stalking Protection Act 2019 through the House and it received Royal Assent in March. Can he update the House on when it will come into force?
Robert Buckland
I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for her work on this important issue and on getting that legislation through Parliament. I will make sure that that information is furnished to her in the course of the debate. Of course, we are brilliantly served by the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), and she will respond to the debate.
We have talked about the moral case for pursuing this issue, but there is also an economic case—a case of financial responsibility. Research has established that the cost of domestic abuse was approximately £66 billion for victims in England and Wales in the year ending March 2017. The biggest component of that cost is the physical and emotional harm incurred by them, but the cost to our economy and our health service is also considerable. Domestic abuse makes up one third of all violent crime reported to the police. The case for removal is clear, but the challenge is not easy. The dynamics are complex and mean that much domestic abuse is hidden. Victims face significant barriers in seeking help and difficulties in escaping from an abusive relationship. That is why we need a cross-Government, multi-pronged approach to tackling it. The Bill is not only part of that approach but demonstrates the breadth of our ambition in showing strong leadership and taking decisive action to help to end the suffering and harm.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
May I say how much I welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to taking a zero-tolerance approach to domestic violence and to sticking up for the victims? Following his welcome speech at the Conservative party conference this week in which he pledged to end automatic early release of certain prisoners, can he confirm that people who commit violence as part of domestic abuse will be included, and they will no longer be eligible for release halfway through their prison sentence?
Robert Buckland
Yes, I can. People convicted of offences with a domestic element will often be convicted of the most serious violent and indeed sexual offences. Under my proposals, automatic release will therefore apply at two thirds, rather than one half of the sentence. I have furnished the House with a written ministerial statement on that.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
Sexual exploitation is one of the most heinous forms of abuse that can be perpetrated in domestic situations. That is when the victim is coerced and forced to perform sex acts in return for money, accommodation, employment, services or goods. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is vital that the Bill explicitly recognises sexual exploitation as a form of domestic abuse?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Gentleman is right, and the definition does that. I look forward to more detailed debate to see how fully we can reflect the important point that he makes.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
The Secretary of State will recognise that there is an interesting situation as between England and Wales. This legislation will apply to England and Wales, but Wales has its own legislature and legislated in this area in 2015. Will he make a commitment to me that Wales will be properly represented on all the scrutiny and advisory boards affected by the Bill, including the answerability of the commissioner for domestic abuse?
Robert Buckland
The right hon. Lady was of course part of the Joint Committee and has an impressive track record on this issue. I have very much appreciated the work that we have done together on these issues. I can give her that assurance. It is clear that all parts of the joint jurisdiction need to be adequately represented.
The Joint Committee was chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who did a wonderful and important job. I want to put on record my thanks to her and all the other members for what they have done. The Government have taken on board many of the Committee’s helpful recommendations, and the Bill is better as a result of its work. I am conscious that we have yet to respond to a small number of recommendations, but we will provide an update during consideration of the Bill in Committee.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
My right hon. and learned Friend has been characteristically generous in giving way. I welcome the establishment of a Domestic Abuse Commissioner. There is no doubt that the Bill is important and vital, and will sail through the House, but I am concerned that people will abuse our well-meaning intentions, and I do not want to see people being able to get different answers in different parts of the country. Does he agree that the commissioner will make that less possible?
Robert Buckland
My hon. Friend is right to hail the appointment of the first Domestic Abuse Commissioner. We thought we should not wait for the Bill to go through both Houses, because we thought that the job was too urgent and too important. We have appointed a designate commissioner, but it is very much our hope that the House will support the appointment by passing the necessary legislation.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
I am sure all hon. Members welcome the Government’s commitment to end economic abuse and to enable partners who are victimised to leave the relationship. I note that the Secretary of State did not include the Department for Work and Pensions in his list of Departments to work with. Does he share the concern of the Work and Pensions Committee at all the evidence we have received from charities that shows people are simply not able to leave violent relationships because of the benefits system? Will he commit to addressing that?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady rightly upbraids me, and I apologise. It is important and good that we now have domestic abuse advisers in every jobcentre, who can really help signpost and give support to people who are in abusive relationships. It is right to say that about 60% of claims are made by the primary carer, which will often be a woman, but in a number of cases individuals are trapped in a position of dependence. I hope that the Bill will be an opportunity for us to do more work on that.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I hope the Secretary of State has seen the work that has been done in Drake Hall women’s prison, which has shown that about two thirds of women prisoners—those who have been screened— have had a major traumatic brain injury or a history of it. Two thirds of those injuries happened prior to their first offending behaviour and were as a result of domestic violence. So would it not make sense, first, if we screened every woman prisoner before she arrived in prison to make sure that she had the right support, and, secondly, if we made sure that every woman who had potentially suffered from domestic violence was given the neuro-rehabilitation that she needs to make sure that she gets over the physical trauma?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point—one with which I am familiar—about the cycle of abuse and then criminality. Women whom I have met in Eastwood Park recently were in a similar position, particularly women from south Wales. I could talk about individual meetings I have had with women prisoners, but the simple truth is that I get the point about acquired brain injury and we want to do more about it. Again, drawing that out in the debate will be really helpful for the Government.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
May I just move on to deal with the provisions in the Bill? I will be as generous as possible in taking interventions.
As we know, the Bill introduces the first all-purpose statutory definition of domestic abuse. Why? It is because we need to do even more to raise awareness of this crime and tackle it more effectively. There needs to be a common understanding, because the outdated perception about violent crime, ranging from common assault through to more serious offences, does not understand the true nature of domestic abuse. It ignores the insidious, controlling or coercive behaviour, and the psychological abuse that, bit by bit, changes what may start as a loving and equal relationship into one that is completely unequal and controlling, where, without the victim realising it, they are turned into somebody who is being abused.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I commend the right hon. and learned Gentleman on his passionate commitment and speech. The Bill contains many important provisions. It is important to recognise that in Scotland we have a gold standard, and that this Bill is primarily about England and Wales, but one area on which we have not been able to legislate in Scotland has been concerning migrant women having no recourse to public funds. Does he recognise that there is a failing in the Bill and that much more needs to be done to protect migrant women who have no recourse to public funds?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that matter. Of course that issue is subject to a current review. I do not just want to park it there, as an excuse to do nothing, as we are looking at it carefully and it may well be that we can take action other than via primary legislation.
While I remember, let me answer the point made by the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston): the proposal is to bring the law she mentioned into force early next year. We are talking about a matter of a few months. I know she will hold me to “early” meaning truly early, as opposed to civil service-speak. I get that, with respect to the wonderful civil servants who serve this Government well and who are dedicated and working hard to eradicate domestic abuse.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for making such a passionate speech. Does he agree that a mother of two children fleeing domestic abuse should not be living in a one-bedroom hostel for more than a year? Women who have experienced domestic violence need priority housing, and reasons such as I have mentioned force some women to remain with their abusers.
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady is right about that. I am very hopeful that this Bill will allow us to tease out these issues and address the issue of secure accommodation for victims in abusive relationships. I will take a moment to pay tribute to the network of organisations such as Swindon Women’s Aid, in my constituency, which provides a gold standard service. She would agree that this is about not just the accommodation, but the wraparound support that women need—the advice, counselling and trauma counselling—to try to rebuild their lives. She is right to talk about the effect on the children of the relationship, too.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
May I move on to deal with some other provisions in the Bill? I want to talk about the concept of financial abuse, which we have dealt with in interventions. I want the new definition to be used by service providers, justice agencies and schools, and promoted to the public at large, so that finally we have a shared understanding of the nature of this abuse. Only then can we really identify, challenge and respond to it. We have already heralded the appointment of Nicole Jacobs as our designate Domestic Abuse Commissioner. This Bill will put that post on a statutory footing. We will ensure that she has the necessary powers to drive this change, so that public bodies such as local authorities, NHS bodies and justice agencies will be under a duty to co-operate with the commissioner. They and Ministers will be required to make a timely response to each and every recommendation made.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
I, too, served on the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee. One of our recommendations was that the post of Domestic Abuse Commissioner should not be part-time—it needs to be full-time. All the evidence we heard was that there was plenty of work to do. Will the Minister reassure us that it will now be a full-time post?
Robert Buckland
Yes, the hon. Lady makes a very proper point. We wanted to get this moving now and get it in place so that the work could begin. I want to see and fully expect the post to become full-time, certainly after it is embedded in law, so I can give her that assurance.
Kirstene Hair (Angus) (Con)
Let me say how powerful it is in this place to have such strong consensus on this important Bill, which focuses on England and Wales. Research shows that domestic abuse can last up to 25% longer in rural areas, as there are more complex obstacles to people exiting these situations and the police resources are spread over a vaster geographical area. Will the Minister therefore confirm that the Domestic Abuse Commissioner will have a renewed focus on rural areas, in order to ensure parity?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes a new and important point in this debate, which I readily take on board. The police and crime commissioner for North Yorkshire has been doing an important piece of work on the understanding of rural domestic abuse, the delay involved in that and all the points that my hon. Friend makes.
Victims of domestic abuse—
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
May I just press on for a moment? Victims of domestic abuse just want it to stop. They do not want to live in constant fear in their own home or to be forced to flee to a place of safety. That is why civil protection orders play such an important role in providing protection to victims and their children, but at the moment we have a rather confusing landscape, with non-molestation orders, restraining orders and domestic violence protection orders. Each of those is available in different circumstances. They do different things and they have different consequences where the order is breached. Victims are not well served by that plethora. In recognition of that, the Bill provides for a new go-to domestic abuse protection notice and the domestic abuse protection order. I hate acronyms but I will call it a DAPO on this occasion. The notice will give victims immediate protection following a crisis incident. It will be issued by the police—
Robert Buckland
Mr Speaker, I think I have been very generous. I respect all hon. Members, and I will give way to the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) now.
Tulip Siddiq
I had better make a good point now! The Minister has been making a powerful speech, and I welcome this Bill, but I have to reiterate the point about migrant women. Leaders of the non-governmental organisation Liberty argue that migrant women face an “impossible” situation
“where they are forced to choose between the risk of detention/deportation or staying in a situation of violence.”
So I ask the Minister, once again: where is the support? The Bill is welcome for the most part, but it clearly is a missed opportunity to create an intergovernmental strategy to support migrant women who are at risk of abuse. Does he agree that all of us should work together to develop a framework of support in Committee? Will he commit to that?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s persistence, because it has resulted in an important point. I assure her that the review is not just an internal review; it involves the sort of agencies that she and I would want to be involved. Not only the review but this Bill and the debates we can have in Committee can help us to get to a situation where we are providing the appropriate support for all victims, including migrant women. I thank her for her intervention.
Several hon. Members rose—
Robert Buckland
May I make some progress? With the greatest respect to my colleagues, I shall finish the point about what the new DAPO will mean. It will be issued by the police. It may, for example, require the perpetrator to leave the home of the victim for up to 48 hours, and the issue of that notice will then trigger a police application to a magistrates court for a longer-term DAPO to protect the victim.
Of course, it will not always be the case that a single incident necessitates the issuing of a notice. That being the case, the Bill also allows for a victim, the police or any other person, with the permission of the court, to apply for one of these orders, and it would also be open to a judge or magistrate to decide for themselves to make a DAPO as a corollary to existing proceedings in the criminal, civil or family court. So, this is a fully flexible instrument. It can be tailored by the court to meet the needs of the individual victim, and it would be for the courts then to determine its length, or indeed to decide that it should be open-ended until such time as a further order was made. Really importantly, the court will be able to attach not just restrictions but positive requirements. For example, an order could prohibit the perpetrator from contacting the victim, require that perpetrator to attend a behavioural change programme and compel them to wear an electronic tag to monitor compliance with an exclusion zone around the victim’s home. Crucially, breach of that order will be a criminal offence, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
I take the opportunity to welcome the tone that is being struck this afternoon. That is incredibly important.
On the point that the right hon. and learned Gentleman is making about DAPOs, we already have a system whereby if a person is convicted of a domestic abuse crime, there is a possibility that there will be a light sentence; they could end up with a suspended sentence. That is what happened in the case of a constituent of mine—the perpetrator got a suspended sentence. Processes were put in place to ensure that the perpetrator did not repeatedly harass or contact the victim, but nevertheless that continued, and there was no action, despite those breaches of conditions, to re-arrest the perpetrator. So what confidence can victims have that the new process will be any better than the present one?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady has given a powerful illustration of the importance of this order, because it can be run alongside a criminal conviction. So even if there is a suspended sentence, as in the case that she cited, an order can be passed—a DAPO—that will have its own criminal consequences. It gives that extra strength, that extra purchase, not just to the authorities but to the victim, to know that there is a mechanism by which the perpetrator can be held to account if they breach the terms. With respect, I think this is an important additional element, but I bear what the hon. Lady says very much in mind.
I want to ensure that we get these new orders right, so we need to make the whole process as simple as possible for victims, and also for the police and others when navigating it. I want these new orders to be effective in changing abusive behaviour and protecting victims. We shall pilot these provisions, therefore, in a small number of areas before rolling them out nationally, so that issues of the sort that the hon. Lady and others have raised can be ironed out and dealt with, to make the provisions as effective as possible. The worst thing to do in these circumstances—we have all been here before as legislators—is to talk nobly and grandly about our intentions, pass the legislation and then find that nothing has changed. When we do so, all we have done is to raise victims’ expectations, only to cruelly let them down. We are all responsible for that, so let us get this right.
If we are to strengthen the protection afforded to victims, we need to employ more measures to keep them safe. So, in addition to the DAPOs, the Bill seeks to build on two other preventive tools: the domestic violence disclosure scheme, which we all know as Clare’s law; and the polygraph testing of high-harm perpetrators.
Clare’s law has been in operation for over five years and I can see many Members—myself included—who campaigned very hard as Back Benchers to get that moving and to make a difference. It has been a success. Just to remind the House, the scheme has two elements: the right to ask and the right to know.
The right to ask allows an individual—or a relevant third party, such as a family member—to ask the police to check whether a partner, or ex-partner, has had a violent or abusive past. If police records show that an individual might be at risk of domestic abuse from their partner or ex-partner, the police can consider the disclosure of relevant information.
Under the right to know, the police may proactively decide to disclose information to keep a potential victim safe. In the year to March 2018, there were over 5,500 disclosures under that scheme—a welcome and encouraging statistic. However, I am clear, and the police accept this, that Clare’s law does not always operate as well as it should, which is why the Bill puts the guidance underpinning the scheme on a statutory footing, and places a duty on police forces to have regard to that guidance. We believe that will help to raise awareness of the scheme, increase the number of disclosures and ensure greater consistency across England and Wales.
I acknowledge that, in contrast to the rest of the Bill, there has been a degree of scepticism about polygraph testing, including from the Joint Committee, but I can assure the House that it is not a panacea—it is not a gimmick; it is a genuine attempt better to protect victims. I will tell the House why. It has been used successfully in the management of sexual offenders for the past six years. In that context, it has been shown conclusively that polygraph examinations provide useful information—useful intelligence—including what is disclosed by the offender, to help those responsible for supervision better to manage the risk of reoffending.
Given that evidence, I suggest that we at least test whether there are similar benefits to be secured in the management of high-risk domestic abuse offenders. To that end, the Bill allows the National Probation Service to conduct a three-year pilot among that cohort and, if successful, to roll the scheme out.
Robert Buckland
I give way to the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), whose seat I unsuccessfully contested 25 years ago next February.
Chris Evans
I do not want to remind the Minister, but in that by-election he actually lost his deposit, so I am amazed that the Conservative party allowed him to stand again. We have known each other a long time; we served together on the Justice Committee, of which he was an extremely talented member, and I am not surprised he has reached Cabinet level. However, he knows that when we served on that Committee we had major doubts about the technology of polygraph testing, and other Government Committees have noted problems with IT. IT is a problem of Government. Is he confident that the technology will provide for this type of Bill?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful. I do not know whether that was a compliment, but I will take it as such. I am very glad to see the hon. Gentleman in his place, representing that wonderful part of Gwent, where perhaps one day the electorate will take a different view—who knows? I hope not for a long time—[Interruption.] I was speaking on a personal basis.
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about polygraph testing. I assure him, first, that this is a pilot; and, secondly, that this is not an attempt to use it as evidence. Clearly, there needs to be a high bar for the admissibility of evidence in criminal or family or civil proceedings. This measure is all about getting the sort of information—intelligence—that can help the police and other agencies to assess risk. Material of that sort can be invaluable and really make the difference for many victims.
Where prevention and protection has failed, some victims will seek remedies before the courts. I recognise that we must do better. In criminal proceedings against an alleged perpetrator, we want victims to be able to give their very best evidence to help convict the guilty. Giving evidence, as I said, can be a daunting, traumatic experience—and often a barrier—so there is already provision for what are termed “special measures”. It has been in legislation for 20 years. Those measures are designed to take some of the stress out of that process. If the quality of a victim’s evidence can be improved by allowing them to give evidence from behind a screen or via video link, or by playing a pre-recorded interview, we should do everything we can to allow that. The Bill, importantly, ensures that the victims of domestic abuse—the complainants in the trial—are automatically eligible for such special measures.
Few things are likely to re-traumatise victims more than being subject to direct cross-examination by their abuser in legal proceedings. Such an experience will inevitably cause immense stress, and would of itself be a continuation of the abuse.
Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I am so grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. I congratulate him on making a powerful speech.
The issue of coercive control is highly complex, and such control can trap victims in debilitating and isolating fear. Sadly, friends of mine who have been victims of coercive control talk of almost being taken psychologically hostage by an abusive former partner. Does the Secretary of State agree that the hope is that the Bill would not only change the law for the better—although we still need to scrutinise it, however widespread the support is—but would change behaviour as well, and encourage women who are victims of coercive control to know that it is not right?
Robert Buckland
My hon. Friend has coined a very powerful phrase—psychological hostage—which is the right characterisation of the relationship he describes. I welcome his support and observations, and I am truly grateful to him.
Robert Buckland
I will give way to my right hon. and learned Friend, the former Attorney General.
Jeremy Wright
I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend and I congratulate him on the way in which he is making the case for this very important Bill.
My right hon. and learned Friend has talked about the confidence that we need to give domestic abuse victims in the experience they are likely to have within the criminal justice system. He is right to highlight special measures, and I know he will also talk about preventing defendants from cross-examining complainants.
In relation to special measures, may I ask him to consider something that he and I know has worked well elsewhere—not just pre-recorded examination in chief but pre-recorded cross-examination? The benefit, as we know, is not just the complainant’s ability to get their part in the case out of the way altogether—dealing with the point about delay that the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) made—but that it very often causes the defendant to recognise the position that he, and it often is he, is in and to plead guilty early.
Robert Buckland
My right hon. and learned Friend speaks with immense experience. He is absolutely right about what we call the section 28 roll-out, which proved in the pilot to be a really successful scheme whereby victims of sexual abuse—child victims—are both examined in chief and cross-examined on video. It is an immensely sensible use of resources. It saves time for the victims. It is all done much more quickly and, as he said, it often leads to a much more sensible resolution in terms of the admission of guilt.
I am very interested in taking that concept further. That does require discussions about resource, and requires me to consult fully with the Lord Chief Justice and the judiciary, as I am constitutionally obliged to do, on its impact. I will obviously have further discussions on that matter and I will discuss it with my right hon. and learned Friend and other hon. and right hon. Members who have both a knowledge of and a commitment to this important issue.
Finally, Mr Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] Well, I will go on if Members want. I could talk all day about this topic—[Interruption.] Oh, forgive me, Mr Speaker, I demoted you.
The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) mentioned the Istanbul convention and made a very proper point about the need to fill the gaps, which is why it is important not only to emphasise what the Bill is already doing but to remind ourselves what the convention requires us to do. We have to criminalise psychological violence and to take extraterritorial jurisdiction over that and certain other violent and sexual offences. This Bill, of course, gives effect to that.
Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for giving way and welcome his speech. He talks about extraterritorial powers. My constituent Samia Shahid was lured to her rape and murder in Pakistan, but we were unable to pursue that as an investigation. Will this measure include provision to cover that?
Robert Buckland
I am incredibly grateful to the hon. Lady for mentioning honour crime, which, of course, takes many forms. I have dealt with it myself in the context of other types of offending. The extra territorial jurisdiction will, of course, extend to offences of sexual violence, and if this Bill does not do that, then, frankly, we need to ensure that it is as watertight as possible. Again, we can look in detail at those provisions in Committee.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way. The Istanbul convention is not just about extraterritorial powers but about the provision that we make for survivors in this country. If we are signatories, it means that we give extra care to people who return having experienced abuse abroad. Will he make sure that we sign the Istanbul convention so that we can provide adequate support for victims in this country?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady is right to remind us of the wider implications of the Istanbul convention. Much of that provision will have to be done as a matter of operation, but, again, this Bill gives us an opportunity to set the framework correctly.
Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)
I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way. I welcome both his comments and the fact that some of the Bill’s provisions extend to Northern Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland is stark. Figures released in 2017 and promoted by Women’s Aid in Northern Ireland, which does fantastic work, showed that by head of the population deaths among women was the joint highest in the entire European Union. In 2018, a domestic abuse call was made once every 17 minutes. Our law is very much falling behind what is happening in England and Wales.
Will the Secretary of State engage with me and my colleagues on what other provisions could be extended to Northern Ireland to offer that much-needed protection for women—and for men and others—who are impacted by this? I ask that because of the importance of this issue and because of the absence of a Northern Ireland Assembly.
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady makes a very powerful case for making sure that we use this Bill as an opportunity to extend as much protection as possible to domestic abuse victims throughout the length and breadth of our country. Scots law and my friends in Scotland have been dealing with this at length. Where it is appropriate to legislate, this House has the opportunity to act.
Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend very much for giving way. It was a huge pleasure and privilege to serve as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), with all the work that she did over many, many months, which is why I am delighted to see the Bill progress today.
No one who listened to Sally Challen be interviewed on the radio the other day can fail to appreciate how important this Bill is. We are talking about resource and about costs that will come with the Bill, but does my right hon. and learned Friend recognise that, currently, the cost of domestic abuse is £66 million a year—as of 2017—so if resource has to be put into the system it must be done?
Robert Buckland
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to remind us of the economic as well as the moral cost of domestic abuse, and the Sally Challen case is one that will live with all of us as an example. The hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and I have spoken about it at length. I look forward to her contribution because, although we are political opponents, we are also friends. Working together on issues such as this, we can show that, as friends, we can make that change.
The Government are absolutely determined not just to stamp out this crime but to provide better support for victims and their families. We have shown in our response to the pre-legislative scrutiny of the proposals that we are open to means of strengthening this Bill. Indeed, we expect to bring forward some proposals of our own. Before the summer, we made it clear that, subject to the outcome of the then open consultation, we would bring amendments to the Bill to place new duties on first-tier local authorities with regard to the support services to victims and their children in secure accommodation. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is currently considering more than 400 responses to that consultation, but it remains our intention to bring forward appropriate provision to enshrine those duties in law and to provide the necessary funding to do so.
Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (LD)
I am very grateful to the Lord Chancellor for giving way. We have in Lambeth among the highest rates of domestic violence in the country, so I very much welcome the introduction of this duty on local authorities. Does he recognise that it is vital that coupled with that duty is a Government commitment to help to provide the sustainable funding for specialist services that is needed? Secondly, does he recognise that the provision of those services should not be done through competitive tendering, which is squeezing out many of the specialist service providers?
Robert Buckland
I am very interested in the hon. Gentleman’s contribution, because he makes an important point about the way tendering is administered. I certainly want to make sure that the probation reforms unlock the genius of the small organisations that can really make a difference, but there is a read-across to the way in which we provide victim services. I am taking a keen interest in the commissioning of those services. Police and crime commissioners clearly have a role, but I want fully to understand and work out the miasma that faces small organisations making those bids, so I take his point very much on board.
Robert Buckland
The hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) has been very persistent, so I shall give way to her.
Rachael Maskell
Services such as Survive in York, which provides trauma support to victims of domestic violence, are seriously under-resourced. It is crucial that the Bill gets trauma support services right, particularly mental health and psychological support services. How will the Lord Chancellor ensure that these services are properly funded as well as provided?
Robert Buckland
The hon. Lady draws together all the issues in her local community. The various agencies, including police and crime commissioners, have a part to play. I want to ensure that the Domestic Abuse Commissioner helps to provide a focus on where the gaps are and where things are going wrong, but my hope is that this overarching legislation can provide a framework within which we can get the greater consistency that the hon. Lady and I rightly want.
No one should have to face violence or abuse from their partner or any other family member. Millions are experiencing it, and we owe it to each and every one of those affected to do all we can to protect and to support them, to put an end to domestic abuse, and to bring offenders to justice. It might be 25 years since the case I mentioned at the start of my speech, but the fact that it lives with me—a mere observer—means that the experience is magnified 100-fold for those who have experienced the physical and emotional consequences of domestic abuse. We owe it to all those millions of people who suffer in silence to do something about it, and to do it now.
Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)
Let me take this opportunity to thank the Lord Chancellor and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), for the productive way in which we have managed to work together on this Bill to date. May I also say that, as a proud Welsh woman, I am delighted that most of the Front-Bench speeches today will be delivered by a Member with a Welsh accent?
Like many colleagues across the House, organisations throughout the sector and—most importantly—victims and survivors of domestic abuse, I am delighted that I stand here today for the Second Reading of this long-awaited and desperately needed Bill. None of us can deny the utter chaos that has prevailed in this place in recent weeks. The Prime Minister’s political game playing very nearly cost us this Bill. Less than a week before Parliament was suspended, the Prime Minister said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) that he would ensure that the Domestic Abuse Bill received “proper consideration” and was “rolled over”. Despite that, and while domestic violence-related homicides in the UK hit a five-year high last year, the Prime Minister went back on his word and blatantly allowed the Bill to drop, alongside a dozen other important pieces of legislation. But thankfully Lady Hale ruled last week that the Prorogation of Parliament was unlawful, and we rightly found ourselves back here with the Domestic Abuse Bill firmly back on the agenda. It was very much a case that Hale saved the day and the Bill.
We cannot afford any more hold-ups. Time is not a luxury that victims of domestic abuse have. Every delay in getting this legislation through is critical. I was encouraged by last month’s announcement that Nicole Jacobs had been appointed as the first Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, but I do have grave concerns—also mentioned by hon. Friends—that the role is only part-time. I sincerely hope that the introduction of new legislation through this Bill will change that. If the commissioner is going to successfully deliver a whole-society response and radically improve the UK’s approach to domestic violence, a part-time position is just not viable.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. A constituent of mine came to me having left her abusive partner after many years. She did not go to a refuge, but instead went to stay with friends and family. She could not afford a lawyer, so she did not contest her divorce. She now finds herself homeless without any priority for housing and will potentially lose the house that her ex-partner is selling. Will this Bill help to provide the holistic approach that can support victims such as my constituent?
Carolyn Harris
I will talk about housing later in my speech, as it is an issue that is very important to the Labour party.
This is our golden opportunity as parliamentarians to transform the domestic abuse agenda in this country. We have a duty to survivors, victims and their dependants —and to generations to come—to get this right.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for the amazing work that she has been doing in this field; she is one of our champions for victims of domestic abuse.
One of the things that has always been missing is the relationships education so that young people understand that abusive relationships often do not start with the first slap or the first thump. They can start with criticism, undermining and isolation—with perpetrators moving people away from their support network, and causing them to lack belief in themselves and believe that they have created the violence that is inflicted on them. Do we not need to tackle that problem, as well as addressing the issue when it gets to the point at which people report the crime?
Carolyn Harris
I could not agree more. This is something that we all see every day when we talk to people who have experienced or witnessed domestic violence. In many cases, it is learned behaviour and we really need to look at that.
As it stands, although there are some welcome and vital changes in the Bill, it is too narrow. There are many areas that are crying out for wider scope. I hope that this can and will be addressed and incorporated through amendments in Committee.
Carolyn Harris
I just want to make a little progress.
We have volumes of data relating to victims of domestic abuse, but at present this only accounts for those aged 74 and under, even though we know that domestic abuse has no age limit. Older people must have their rights protected too, and the Bill needs to recognise that. Statistics consistently demonstrate that the vast majority of domestic abuse victims are women and the vast majority of perpetrators are men, but we know that there are no barriers. Anyone—regardless of sex, sexual orientation, age or race—can be a victim or a perpetrator, so we must ensure that service and funding provision is appropriately proportioned.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
My hon. Friend will be aware of the vital work that the Domestic Abuse Safety Unit in Shotton has been doing for many years. I have been there and have heard harrowing stories. To echo her point, so many people say that they have put up with this sort of behaviour for five, 10 or 20 years when asked, “How long had this gone on before you reached this stage?” We need to ensure that these centres are getting the finance they need to carry on with this vital work.
Carolyn Harris
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point; I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiments.
The Bill needs to include a legal duty to fund a national network of accommodation-based domestic abuse services as a matter of priority, to meet the needs of all survivors and, very importantly, their children. The protection and provision of support for children who experience domestic abuse—either as witnesses or as victims themselves—also need to be consistently included in every aspect of the Bill.
Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)
Women’s Aid organisations, such as Lighthouse Women’s Aid in my constituency, are doing good work but have to survive hand to mouth, relying on money from lottery funding. Does my hon. Friend agree that this makes it extremely difficult for them to employ and retain the staff they need, with the experience and training to give proper counselling to women?
Carolyn Harris
I do agree. I also join my hon. Friend in congratulating those organisations. I have yet to meet an organisation that deals with this issue that has not done excellent work, and all struggle for every penny they are able to get from wherever. They truly deserve our praise.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making an important and powerful speech. Does she believe that the Bill will do enough to support the role of schools in the lives of families? I know the amount of work that goes on in many schools in my constituency to support parents and children when there is domestic abuse at home. One primary school has told me that it suspects about five children in one class are subject to domestic violence.
Carolyn Harris
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and later I will talk about a scheme that helps in that situation.
The protection and provision of support for children who experience domestic abuse—I am repeating myself. I have already read that bit, so we will scrap that, thank you very much. [Laughter.] That is the Welsh in me; never ashamed to say when we are wrong.
As well as ensuring access to support services, the Bill needs to legislate for those children and ensure protected places in all NHS waiting lists, as well as priority access to school places when they are forced to move to a new area to escape domestic abuse. There is already good practice in our communities that has been established to cater for the needs of children experiencing domestic abuse.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to protect those survivors of domestic abuse not just when they are children but throughout their lives? We need some means of following them and taking a holistic approach, because domestic abuse affects their mental and general health as they grow.
Carolyn Harris
It certainly does and I think we all recognise, as I said previously, that experience and learned behaviour can cause perpetrators of the future.
Carolyn Harris
I am going to make progress.
Operation Encompass, which is an excellent example of what we are doing in communities, was set up to enable police forces and schools to confidentially and quickly share information about vulnerable children who need support and safeguarding.
Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for the passionate case that she is outlining. One of my local forces, Gwent police, have played a considerable role in pioneering Operation Encompass. Will she join me in congratulating and thanking not only Gwent police but forces across the country for the important work that they have done in rolling out that initiative?
Carolyn Harris
I am delighted to congratulate Gwent police. On Monday, my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) and I visited the Liberty stadium in my constituency, where South Wales police launched their Operation Encompass. I pay particular tribute to Russell Dwyer, the head of St Thomas Primary School, who was a pioneer in ensuring that it came to Swansea.
Carolyn Harris
I am going to make progress.
We need to secure better outcomes for child victims of domestic abuse. The only way that we will do that is by ensuring that such initiatives are available throughout the country. The Bill also needs to legislate to improve the experiences of survivors and their children in the family courts. Contact arrangements must be based on the child’s best interests, and parental contact should not be automatic, especially where there is evidence that the child could be at risk.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
A constituent of mine is desperately trying to prepare her child after a court order stated, against the child’s wishes and the recommendations of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, that he must spend half his school holidays with his father. In order to support her son, she has put in place resilience counselling through the school, but the father has refused his son this help to support their contact. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that parental rights are being used against children in a way that has a negative impact on their wellbeing?
Carolyn Harris
I thank my hon. Friend. We have worked closely on many cases where children have been put at risk by being allowed access to potentially, if not very, dangerous parents. That is something that I feel passionately about. I believe we need a complete overhaul to ensure that the courts are prioritising the victims, not the perpetrators.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend very much for giving way. She mentioned the family courts. A prominent campaigner against the injustice that domestic abuse victims face in the family courts is Rachel Williams, who recently organised the Stand up to Domestic Abuse conference in Newport, which my hon. Friend and I both attended. Will she join me in paying tribute to campaigners and survivors such as Rachel whose courage in speaking out make a real difference to legislation such as this?
Carolyn Harris
Never not give way to a Whip—I have learnt that much since I have been here, and it always helps when it is a Whip with a Welsh accent. As I had a chair at the conference and my hon. Friend did not, I will certainly agree with her and say that Rachel is an absolute inspiration and someone we should all look up to.
Wera Hobhouse
Will the hon. Lady give way to someone with a non-Welsh accent?
Wera Hobhouse
Does she agree that, in order to protect children, we need to include them in the statutory definition of domestic abuse victims and that it is disappointing that the Bill currently does not do that?
Carolyn Harris
I agree that we need to look at the definition and the impact on children. That is something that we can look at closely in Committee, and we would welcome amendments guided in that direction.
It is not just the courts that we need to look at; we also need to look at housing, which is another thing that currently allows perpetrators to control their victims. In cases of joint tenancy, only one tenant needs to end the lease, effectively allowing abusers to leave their victims homeless. The Bill needs to adopt changes to that law that would require both parties to end the tenancy and, in cases where perpetrators are convicted of domestic violence, automatically transfer the tenancy to the name of the victim. For victims who leave their accommodation by choice due to violence, the Bill needs to legislate to ensure that they automatically become a priority need for housing, irrespective of whether they have moved to emergency refuge accommodation.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an important point, which I welcome. I have had a couple of cases in surgery of people in that very situation, whether in a housing association or whatever, who cannot get out and who are struggling because of the threat they face every day from having to stay in the same place. I very much endorse what my hon. Friend is saying and would like to hear more.
Carolyn Harris
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about housing. We have grave concerns about the housing of victims, which is another issue that we will pursue in Committee.
Reforms are also needed in the benefits system to ensure that survivors do not suffer further financially when escaping domestic abuse. The introduction of separate universal credit payments by default and the abolition of the five-week payment delay for all survivors will prevent abusers from using the welfare system as a means of continued economic abuse.
Naz Shah
I thank my hon. Friend. Does she agree that the victim should be central to making decisions about housing? In Bradford, Staying Put will go in and change the locks at no financial cost to the victim and support them in obtaining injunctions and non-molestation orders, so that the victim feels empowered and the process is centred around them.
Carolyn Harris
Without question, the victim is central and we need to look closely at that.
We also need to see changes in relation to migrant women and the economic abuse that they experience due to having no recourse to public funds—a situation that often leaves them in violent and dangerous relationships, as they simply cannot afford to leave. The Bill must change the legislation to ensure that all migrant victims are eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain irrespective of the visa that they are residing here on. The law must allow them to apply immediately for access to public funds under the destitute domestic violence concession and permit up to six months for their application for indefinite leave to remain to be submitted under the domestic violence rule.
Stella Creasy
My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point. Is it not also worth putting on record that, if we wish to ratify the Istanbul convention, we have to make sure that this legislation covers the rights of migrant women, as well as the rights of women in Northern Ireland, and has a gendered definition of domestic violence? Without those, we will not be able to say that we have ratified and, after seven years, I know that the Council of Europe will want to know why we have not.
Carolyn Harris
That was a very powerful point from a well-known champion on such issues who has now taken the opportunity to put those sentiments on record.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
I am pleased to hear my hon. Friend talk about migrant women. I represent a very diverse constituency and domestic abuse is a very significant problem among that community. Will she join me in paying tribute to Welsh Women’s Aid in my constituency, who provide so much help both to migrant women and women in south Wales?
Carolyn Harris
I have no problem in congratulating Welsh Women’s Aid. I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. Support must be available to all victims and survivors of domestic abuse, with no restriction due to immigration status. Safe reporting systems need to be introduced to allow victims to report abuse to police and other authorities without fear of immigration enforcement.
Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way; she is making a powerful speech. I would like to go back to the reference that was made to women in Northern Ireland. She and her colleagues will be well aware that we have not had a functioning Assembly in Northern Ireland for over two and a half years, since January 2017, so we have no Health Minister and no Justice Minister. Would the Labour party give a clear commitment to join the Government, if we have no Assembly up and running again in the near future, to extend this much-needed legislation to Northern Ireland to protect women—and, indeed, some men—from domestic abuse in Northern Ireland? That would be a very valuable commitment from both sides of the House today.
Carolyn Harris
The hon. Lady will know of my commitment to legislation in Northern Ireland—I spoke this week on children’s funerals and gambling—and I would very much like to see the Assembly reconvened. Women everywhere—victims everywhere—need to be guaranteed every protection that we can offer them.
I have very real concerns about migrant victims when we eventually leave the EU. Under the EU settlement scheme, European citizens and their families will need to apply to secure their status in the UK. Survivors of domestic abuse are at particular risk of being left out of this by abusive partners in a bid to control and isolate them. The Government must ensure that legislation is in place to support these victims, allowing them to apply even after the deadline has passed in order to prevent a situation where survivors are forced to choose between staying with their abuser or being illegally resident in the UK. The Home Affairs Committee has already highlighted this scheme as running the risk of becoming another Windrush. We must ensure that the Bill gets it right in order to prevent that.
The Bill is vital legislation that will help some of the most vulnerable in our communities and undoubtedly save lives. Home should be a place of comfort, love and stability but, for an estimated 2 million adults, and very many children, it is anything but: it is a place of fear that brings with it pain and devastation. This is our opportunity to rectify that. The Government must ensure that they not only make the changes to the law but back it up with the necessary resources and funding.
Getting to this point today has been a rough ride, and there were times when many of us thought we would never see it happen, but we all recognise that this is our optimal opportunity to change the future for domestic violence survivors and their families. We must all commit to making the changes, funding the services and reducing the tragic consequences we are currently witnessing. We desperately need this legislation to be comprehensive, robust and fully funded so that we can start punishing the perpetrators and prioritising the victims. This Bill will go down in history as landmark legislation. Let us make it a Bill that we can all be proud of.
Mrs Theresa May (Maidenhead) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. I am pleased that my first speech on my return to the Back Benches should be on this topic—a topic on which I have worked both in opposition and in government. It is an issue on which I am pleased to say that the Government of which I was a member, both as Home Secretary and Prime Minister, took forward action, building on work that had been taken by previous Governments—and crucially, of course, a topic that is of such importance and significance to our society. Domestic abuse blights lives; it can destroy lives, and not just the life of the immediate victim but of the children and other family members as well.
I believe that this is a landmark piece of legislation. I am very pleased that we have seen, I think, more than 40 Members of this House wishing to speak in this debate. That shows the degree of seriousness with which the issue is taken by Members across this House. That view is shared across all parties in this House. It is good to hear of the co-operation and collaboration that there has been, and I am sure will continue to be, to make sure that we get this legislation right. But of course passing the legislation is only one step. This is about changing the attitude that people take to domestic abuse. The challenge for Members of this House, the challenge for the Government and the challenge for us all is to make sure that the whole of society takes this issue as seriously as those who wish to contribute to this debate today are taking it.
As I say, I think this is a landmark piece of legislation. This Bill has been described by Government—and, indeed, by charities and others involved in working with the victims of domestic abuse—as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make sure that we make a step change in the approach we take to supporting victims and to dealing with domestic abuse. I would like to thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for the work that she and all the members of her Committee did in pre-legislative scrutiny. They did that assiduously, with great care and with great commitment. That was a very important part of the process of making sure that we get this legislation right. I would also like to thank the charities and organisations that contributed to that and have continued to push us all on this issue to make sure that we are doing more for the victims and survivors of domestic abuse.
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who have championed this issue and continue to do so, and have worked so hard to ensure that this legislation comes forward and will be carried forward. It is imperative that this Bill is not lost and that we are able to see it go on to the statute book, because it will affect people’s lives—it will improve people’s lives.
The Lord Chancellor himself referred to the figure of 2 million adults experiencing domestic abuse in the last year for which there are figures. Two thirds of those, of course, were women. Domestic abuse accounts for a third of violent crime and, as we heard earlier, it is estimated to cost our society £66 billion a year. This is not something that simply takes place behind closed doors and that others can ignore; it is something that affects us all. It affects our economy, it affects our society, and it affects our young people as they are growing up. We have heard various comments about experiences that people have had. Reference was made from the Opposition Benches to the issue of young people and their understanding of relationships. I remember as Home Secretary initiating a campaign of advertisements about what a good relationship was. The saddest thing was reading some of the comments that young people, particularly young women, made when they had seen those adverts in cinemas and elsewhere: comments like, “I didn’t know it was wrong for him to hit me.” This is the sadness in our society of so many people who do not know what a good relationship is, who suffer from their bad relationship, and who suffer in silence—too many, as we have heard, suffer in silence for many years before any action is taken.
Mrs Moon
I thank the right hon. Lady—I am awfully sorry, but I am still tempted to refer to her as the Prime Minister.
When I worked in child protection, I worked with a young mother in a second marriage. She said to me: “We all expect to be hit by our husbands, don’t we? It’s just this one is so violent.” That was absolutely shocking, but not half as shocking as when we were later in court, where we were taking wardship proceedings to protect the children. The husband informed the court that I was lying—there was nothing wrong with their family or their relationship, and I was just prejudiced. The judge asked him: “Are you saying that you have never struck your wife?” After a pause, he said: “Obviously I’ve given her the odd backhander to keep her in line, but no, I’ve never been violent.” That is what we have to combat and deal with, and that is part of what this debate and the Bill must tackle.
Mrs May
I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. That is why I trust that we will pass this legislation. We will pass it in good shape, and it will make a difference, but it is only one step. It is about getting that recognition out there of what is right and what is wrong. It is very simple: it is not right to hit somebody in a relationship. But it is more than that, which I will come on to in a minute—conscious as I am of the number of Members who wish to speak, I will touch on a small number of issues very briefly.
The first issue is one that many people looking at this legislation might feel was insignificant, but it is hugely significant—the inclusion in statute of a definition of domestic abuse. Not that long ago, a number of Government Departments were working to different definitions of domestic violence and abuse. I recall that, as Home Secretary, I tried to ensure that we could at least try to get an agreement among Departments as to what a definition might be. Having it in statute is hugely important, as is having a definition that goes beyond what most people would answer if you asked them what domestic abuse or domestic violence was, which is physical violence, and recognises all the other types of abuse that take place.
It is chilling to sit and hear a woman who has been controlled by her other half for a period of time—often for years—say how it happened slowly, and that it was difficult to recognise when it started. Little by little, however, that control was exercised until that individual’s rights as an individual human being were taken away from them. That is what we are talking about when we talk about domestic abuse, so getting that definition right are incredibly important. As the Lord Chancellor said, I hope that others will use the definition in the Bill. It is referred to as the underpinning of this Bill, but I hope that others will use that definition and recognise it.
The second issue I will touch on was referred to earlier, and that is the courts. I am sure that every Member is aware of cases—indeed, the Lord Chancellor started his speech with a reference to his case 25 years ago—in which a victim of domestic abuse has not felt able to pursue, to give evidence and to go through the steps necessary to see the perpetrator brought to justice. Fear of what will happen in court often drives people, and there is also the fact that the perpetrator might well use and manipulate them to ensure that they do not give evidence in court.
I remember when I was Home Secretary talking about one case in the west midlands. An independent domestic violence advocate was describing how a woman almost did not turn up at court, even though they had done a lot of work for her to turn up. The IDVA had gone to the home to see what the problem was, and it was very simple: the perpetrator had locked the woman in a cupboard, so that she physically could not get to court to give evidence. We have to recognise the problems that victims face.
Another issue, which has been referred to by the president of the family division of the High Court, is the question of cross-examination by perpetrators. That can be an extension—in some cases, deliberately so—of the abuse that the victim has suffered. Having the prohibition of that on the face of the Bill is incredibly important.
I want to touch on the issue of children. For far too long in this country, we thought that if a child was in the room next door when someone was being hit or coerced, that child would not be affected. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the figure for children who have been in a home where there has been domestic abuse is that they are 50% more likely to endure such abuse in a relationship later in their lives. That is why I said earlier that domestic abuse does not just blight or destroy the life of the victim, but does so for those around the victim too.
This is important. I recognise the pros and cons when looking at the issue, but I do not want us to miss this opportunity to ensure that we properly look after the needs of children in a home where domestic violence is being experienced. I ask the Government to look very seriously at recommendations to do with children, to ensure that we do not pass a Bill into statute only for people to ask, six months down the line, “Why didn’t you?” It is imperative to look at that.
I will touch briefly on two other issues, one of which is the question of perpetrators. This is a hugely difficult topic to talk about. I am sure that we would all prefer not to have the necessity of talking about domestic abuse legislation, because we want to eradicate domestic abuse—we are very far from doing that—but, if we are to get to that point, we have to deal with perpetrators. We talk a lot about supporting victims, and that is absolutely right, but finding a way to ensure that people do not become perpetrators in the first place or, where they are perpetrators, that they cannot continue to perpetrate domestic abuse, is hugely important too. It is difficult. From talking to organisations that work with perpetrators, I know that finding the interventions that will have the best impact is hard.
Robert Buckland
My right hon. Friend is making an important point about perpetrator programmes. I think she would agree that we have to be careful to ensure that programmes are tested and are the right ones, because we do not want to make the problem worse.
Mrs May
My right hon. and learned Friend has made a very valid and important point. That is why I say this is a difficult topic. Sometimes it seems hard to talk about working with the perpetrators, but it is important that we identify the programmes that work, and that will not be one size fits all. I think the Joint Committee made that point when they looked at this issue, which was very welcome. It has to be done carefully, but we should not shy away from it, because if we wish to see an end to domestic abuse, we have to deal with perpetrators. That goes alongside issues such as education on what a good relationship is, so that we see those sorts of behaviours being stopped at the first sign, rather than being allowed to continue.
Some might say that the last point I want to make is slightly tangential to the Bill, but I want to talk about the police. A huge amount of work has been done with the police to train them to deal with domestic violence. Many developments are very helpful. For example, body-worn video cameras can ensure that film is taken when the police turn up to a reported incident, so that someone cannot say later, “Well, no, it was okay, nothing happened.” Such evidence is hugely important. The ability through the use of technology for a police officer attending an incident to know in advance whether there have been reports of domestic violence or abuse there in the past is another important element. Also—I am sure that others have had this experience—domestic abuse victims talk about the fact that if they get a police officer who has been well trained, it works well, but when someone reports an incident, it is the police officer who is on duty who comes, and they will hand on to the response unit that comes out, and such officers often do not have the same experience. We need to look at that very carefully.
We also need to do something else—this point was made to me by one of the people involved in one of the charities dealing with victims of domestic abuse. Police forces need to look at how they deal with domestic violence and domestic abuse within the force when police officers themselves are subject to such domestic abuse. If they turn a blind eye, that gives a message to their officers about how they should treat people outside the force who are reporting abuse. That aspect has not really been focused on previously, but we should focus on it. We should be encouraging police forces to ensure that they have, within their forces, the means to support such officers properly. There will be police officers who themselves are the victims of domestic abuse, and we need to ensure that forces have the ability to support those police officers.
As I say, this is a hugely important Bill. It will, I know, be subject to very close scrutiny during the Committee stage. There is so much that is good in this Bill. There are obviously issues that the Government are being asked to look at again to make sure that we get this into the best shape that it can be. However, as I said earlier, I say to everybody across this Chamber that passing this legislation is but one move. It is up to all of us to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make clear to our society and to the public the horrific nature of domestic abuse, the impact it has on people’s lives and the need for us as a society to say, “Stop it.”
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
I am grateful for the chance to follow the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). May I take this opportunity to take a different approach from the one we very often take on the Opposition side of the House, which is to pay tribute to her both for her approach as the former Prime Minister of this country and for her commitment and genuine passion? As the former Prime Minister, she committed her life’s work in this Parliament to making sure that the agenda of women and girls was recognised. I am sure that the successful passage of this Bill will be a legacy that she can be proud of, and that it will rightly go down in history as the landmark legislation of the second female Prime Minister of this country. I pay tribute to the right hon. Lady for the work that she has done.
To return to the point of order made by the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), may I also acknowledge her dedication and commitment to women’s rights? I think no Member across this House should have to receive the treatment she has received. I am sure—I know—that the right hon. Gentleman the Speaker of this House will do everything in his power, as a champion of Back Benchers, to ensure that all the House of Commons authorities provide her with the necessary support that she requires, because no one in this House should come under fire for ultimately doing what is right and proper and what should be done, which is protecting the rights of women.
I welcome this Bill, and I agree in essence with its main principles, because domestic abuse can ruin lives and it needs to be tackled strongly. I recognise that the primary basis of the Bill will apply only to England and Wales. However, there are some limited provisions in the Bill that will have an impact on Scotland, and it is on those grounds that I want to speak today.
As the Lord Chancellor said, 2 million people in the UK are affected. Most of them are women, but not all. This is only an estimated number. It is based on the recorded statistics we have of the number of women who have bravely come forward and undergone the process of speaking out loud and saying, “I will not accept this treatment any longer”. However, it is only an estimated number because too many more women will suffer in silence and receive this ongoing treatment day to day.
I of course have nothing but the utmost respect for the law and justice and for our ability as Members of this House to produce legislation that can make a difference, but everyone in the House knows that legislation alone will not tackle this problem. I congratulate the UK Government on going some way towards taking the approach of really driving home the point that domestic violence cannot be tolerated and cannot be accepted. It is something that we want to change so that future generations will not grow up to experience this kind of world.
On this particular occasion, I think Scotland has taken a leading stance and a really strong stance against domestic abuse. In Scotland, domestic abuse accounts for almost a quarter of all violent crimes. Again, this is only an estimated figure; we have no real idea of the true figure or of the true cost that it has on people’s lives. About one in four women has experienced or reported domestic abuse at some time in their lives. It is usually perpetrated by a spouse, partner or ex-partner. Domestic abuse often includes physical violence, mental or emotional damage, or undue control or power over another person.
The SNP in government has taken a lead and taken the issue of domestic abuse seriously. I am very proud that we have been able to do that in the Scottish Government. The multiple forms of abuse are tackled by the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, which for the first time introduced a “course of conduct” offence. This enables not just physical abuse but psychological domestic abuse and controlling behaviours to be prosecuted at once. As many from a legal background will know, that in itself is really hard to pin down. How do we even begin to quantify undue influence or coercive control? How do we recognise that, and how do we prevent it in a criminal statute? The fact is that the Scottish legislation is designed to address the emotional abuse that Scottish Women’s Aid has said is, for most victims, the most traumatic and the hardest aspect of abuse to recover from. It is a really significant and important part of this legislation, and I hope that the Government will take that into consideration when they come forward with the Public Bill Committee.
In a similar vein, the Domestic Abuse Bill broadens the scope of domestic abuse legislation in England and Wales. This is the legislation we are here to speak about today, and it would be a great shame if the Bill were to be lost. Should this Parliament dissolve or prorogue again and we do not succeed in passing this legislation, it would ultimately be against all our better intentions. We want to see the Bill successfully brought through this Parliament during this term, regardless of when this term may cease.
Christine Jardine
On that very point, as the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) has said, this is landmark legislation. All of us may have reservations about certain aspects of it and things we may want to see amended in Committee, but it is incumbent on us to support it today and get it through so that, as the hon. Lady says, it is not lost.
Angela Crawley
Absolutely. Perhaps I should use this opportunity to say that should a future Government of any coalition have to carry forward this legislation, I hope their agenda will also be to deliver on this Bill should it not succeed in this parliamentary term. It would be a great loss and a great shame were we not to see it passed in this parliamentary term, and were the right hon. Member for Maidenhead not to have it as part of her legacy, because she rightly deserves such an opportunity.
In particular, it is welcome to see the measures to protect survivors in court, including the prohibition of the examination of domestic abuse victims by their perpetrators. It seems almost unimaginable that such a procedure is even possible. The inclusion of non-physical abuse in the statutory definition of domestic abuse, the inclusion of children aged 16 and 17, and the appointment of a Domestic Abuse Commissioner are truly welcome. While these measures go some way towards tackling a broad and multifaceted problem, I believe there are several areas in the Bill that could be improved in Committee.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
The hon. Lady is making a very good case. There is another dimension, because we very often get women whose immigration status, for want of a better term, is not secure. Does she not agree that the commissioner should really have her powers strengthened to look at that?
Angela Crawley
I wholeheartedly agree, and I will come on to that later in my speech.
In 2017, my colleague Eilidh Whiteford’s Bill to ratify the Istanbul convention was very much about pressing the Government to do exactly what this Bill sets out to do. I know that she, although no longer in the House, would love to see this Bill passed and to see the Istanbul convention ratified as part of her legacy. Although the Government stated their intention to bring the convention’s provisions into law, two years later we are still waiting. The Bill is an opportunity for the Government to meet those intentions, but in my opinion it fails fully to meet the requirements of the Istanbul convention. I hope more work can be done in Committee to ensure that the Bill gets us to the point where we can ratify the convention.
Women with insecure immigration status find it virtually impossible to seek protection when experiencing domestic abuse. As the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) indicated, for many such women their visa status is tied to their partner or their partner has control of the necessary documents and evidence, so they are unable to escape. That goes against the crystal clear language of the Istanbul convention, which states that protection must be afforded to survivors regardless of their immigration status. I am worried that, should the Bill fail adequately to promote equality, including for those with insecure immigration status, it would risk violating our existing human rights obligations under the European convention on human rights, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women—CEDAW, as we all know it. In essence, we must ensure that we get this legislation right.
I am conscious that many people want to speak, so I am doing my best to wind up as fast as I can. In taking forward the Bill, we must consider the needs of people whose insecure immigration status means they have no access to public funds or housing support. Such people are routinely denied refuge spaces, safe accommodation and welfare, and therefore are stuck between becoming destitute and homeless and returning to their abuser. Every MP in the House will have a constituent, or will have supported a woman, who has had to seek refuge in temporary accommodation. That may have been their first interaction with a Government office, be it the Department for Work and Pensions or the Home Office. They need our support, so we must do better.
Frankly, the Government’s approach to welfare only compounds problems for survivors of domestic violence. Universal credit provisions, include mandatory waiting periods and payments to heads of households, create an environment that allows economic abuse and control. The SNP has repeatedly argued for universal credit payments to be processed and paid in advance rather than in arrears, and be made to more than one householder, in the form of split payments. If the Government do not make those adjustments, victims of abuse will continue to be unable to access the resources they need to leave harmful relationships.
As the SNP spokesperson for women and equalities, it is an honour to work with colleagues across the House, including the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) and many others, as a member of the Women and Equalities Committee. The Bill relates specifically to England and Wales, but some of its provisions will have an impact on the lives of women in Scotland. The picture painted by the Minister only highlights that we have so much further to go. Let us not get another 25 years down the line and be having the same conversation.
I am proud of my honourable friend Christina McKelvie, who, as Equalities Minister in the Scottish Government, is delivering this policy in Scotland. We can do better. We must do better. Too many women and their families are relying on this Government to protect them, whether through policing or justice measures or through this legislation in and of itself. I hope this Prime Minister and this Government get this right so we can deliver for women across the UK.
Mr Speaker
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady, as the House will be, for being commendably succinct. Momentarily, a 10-minute limit will begin on Back-Bench speeches, and the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) will be the next speaker. However, just before I call her to contribute, I think that the House will be interested to know what I have just been advised by the Minister on the Treasury Bench: namely, that the designate Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, is observing our proceedings today. Welcome to the House. We very much appreciate your interest in the legislation from which we hope will flow your very important responsibilities.
Hon. Members: Hear, hear.
Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
It is an honour to follow the spokesperson for the SNP, the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley). I welcome the Bill and the cross-party support for it.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor, who looks like he may be about to go and get himself a cup of tea—I cannot blame him for that—orated at length, although his speech was comprehensive, detailed and very passionate. I recall our joint work in Committee on the Serious Crime Bill; together, we introduced the coercive control measure that so many people have referred to. I remember being asked at the time, “Why are we doing something so difficult? How are we going to train the police? How are we going to do this?” If the answer is, “It’s too hard,” we will never do anything. I am very proud that we introduced that measure, and I was very pleased to work with my right hon. and learned Friend on that. I wish him well with this Bill.
I also pay tribute to some of the people who helped us get to the Bill being brought forward. They include my right hon. Friends the Members for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd) and for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), and my hon. Friends the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) and for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who both served in the same Under-Secretary role in the Home Office in which I had the privilege to serve.
However, I pay tribute above all to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I stand here making my first Back-Bench speech for seven years, having been on the Treasury Bench in that time, to find that I am following my right hon. Friend. I feel quite a lot of pressure to live up to the speech she just delivered, which showed her commitment, her attention to detail and her absolute determination to deliver on this incredibly important issue. Without her, we would not be in this place today.
My right hon. Friend spoke about the challenges with tackling domestic violence. I recall, when I was in the Home Office, looking at what we could do to change things and at how we could change society on this matter. A number of contributors have mentioned attitudes. I am pleased that the old line, “Oh, it’s just a domestic; ignore it” is gone, but it was there for far too long. The other thing on which we have seen a difference is training for police officers. It is not everywhere—my right hon. Friend mentioned that there are police officers who have not had training—but when I was in the Home Office I saw police officers being trained to believe the victim and to take belief in the victim as the first port of call. They are trained to walk in not with cynicism but believing what the victim says. If somebody has gone to the police to report domestic violence, they are not making it up; it has taken enormous strength of character for them to get to the point of reporting it, and they need to hear the police officer say, “I believe you.”
I was struck by that as a new MP, when a constituent come to a surgery appointment and told me how every police officer she had dealt with had refused to believe her. They had said, “Oh, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” and that she must have contributed in some way.
Karen Bradley
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is so important that we look not just at a pattern of behaviour but across the whole family. The troubled families programme was very good at looking at the family as a whole, seeing where domestic violence was happening and identifying its effect on children—on each member of the family.
Public awareness of the crime is another challenge we have always faced. We have talked about 2 million cases a year, but of course the number of reported cases is so much lower. Reporting is on the up, and that is very good news. We need these crimes to be reported; unless they are reported, nobody can tackle them. It is incredibly important that we improve public awareness and get an understanding of what a healthy relationship looks like versus an unhealthy relationship.
Mr Jim Cunningham
The right hon. Lady mentions something that a lot of people will be interested in: often, because the authorities do not necessarily believe them, the victim is sent back into the situation they are trying to get out of and subjected to further abuse. The other point I would make is that we should also be tackling psychological abuse.
Karen Bradley
The hon. Gentleman is right on all counts, and he takes me to my next point. One of the challenges is having the tools to tackle this crime. The problem with having only criminal measures is that the burden of proof is so high. Civil measures, which we introduced for various things, including honour crimes and domestic violence, and which of course are introduced by the Bill in the form of the new domestic abuse protection order, are very important because the burden of proof is so much lower. In the exact circumstance that the hon. Gentleman talks about, use of a civil measure means that the police can intervene earlier and prevent the crime.
Karen Bradley
I will not, if the hon. Lady will forgive me, only because I have run out of interventions. Now that I am on the Back Benches, I have to get used to not being able to take all interventions.
The other challenge is the multi-agency approach, which, again, has been talked about. We cannot arrest our way out of this problem. We have to deal with it through prevention and education. There is a role for so many agencies and organisations in ensuring that domestic violence is tackled. I recall, when I was Minister, visiting the domestic violence team at the A&E in Royal Stoke University Hospital. A nurse there, Mandy Burton, received a national nursing award for her work in bringing to the A&E department a focus on domestic violence, and on identifying it. That was revolutionary at the time —this was 2015. We need all agencies to work together to make sure that they identify domestic violence.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
I hesitate to take up my right hon. Friend’s time, but would she accept that the medical profession has a key role to play? One of the places where physical violence will first be picked up is accident and emergency; one of the first places where non-physical, psychological, violence will first be picked up is in general practice. Is there not a case for improving education, so that there is a high index of suspicion of domestic violence in both general practice and hospitals?
Karen Bradley
My right hon. Friend speaks with personal experience and great authority on this matter. He is absolutely right. So many agencies will have interaction with victims of domestic abuse. They need to understand the signs and indications, and need the ability and strength to intervene, because that may be an early point at which we can get in, before domestic abuse that may appear to some to be low-level—there is no such thing as low-level abuse—turns into something horrendous. We know the number of homicides a year; we need to make sure that we intervene as soon as possible, in order to prevent the very worst tragedies.
That brings me on to the Bill. It is right to describe it as landmark legislation. Putting into statute a definition of domestic abuse is incredibly important. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead talked about needing to have one definition that was recognised across all agencies and across the law. That is how we will help to identify this abuse, and get services and support in the right places at the right time. I referred to the civil powers; having more of them is very important. The civil powers mean that the victim can stay in her home with her children, while the perpetrator is removed. If abuse does not meet the criminal test, it may still meet the civil test, and of course breach of that civil law becomes a crime, which gives the police the power to act.
I am very pleased about the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. When I was in the Home Office, we introduced the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner, who often said things that were uncomfortable for Government, but was absolutely right to say them. It is right that we should have one person working for all victims of domestic abuse.
I am pleased to see the extension of the offence of coercive control to Northern Ireland; from my previous role, I know how important that is. That reminds me of the sentence that I have probably said far more often than any other in this Chamber in the past few years: it is time for the parties in Stormont to come back together and form a Government, and do the right thing by the people who elected them. In the absence of such a Government, it is right that we take steps in the Bill to make sure that coercive control is properly recognised and dealt with in Northern Ireland.
The Bill will make a difference only if we see outcomes from it. The outcomes in my county of Staffordshire over the past few years—since I was first involved in this field—have been really quite incredible. Our police and crime commissioner, Matthew Ellis, has really made the issue his focus during his stewardship of the police. He introduced a multi-agency approach, and the New Era service, which gives victims holistic support. Last year, it supported 25,000 people in Staffordshire. That is a great credit to him, and I pay tribute to him for the work he has done.
Victims need the power to speak openly, and the police need the tools to bring persecutions, so that perpetrators are punished. When I was a Minister in the Home Office, I recall clearly making a speech for a colleague, as we all do. I talked about my work in the Home Office. One of the people there, who had been enjoying a lovely dinner, stopped eating, and at the end of the speech she asked me for a private word. It was very emotional. She said, “Twenty-five years ago, I was a victim of coercive control, though I didn’t know it at the time. I’m out of that relationship now, but everything you described was my life.” She said, “I remember the police saying to me, ‘We know he’s abusing you and treating you in a way he shouldn’t, but there’s nothing we can do. The best we can hope for is that when he comes home drunk tonight, he kicks the door down; then we can arrest him for criminal damage.’”
We need victims to know that the police have weapons, tools and ways to help them, because they put their trust in the police—we all do, quite rightly. We need to make sure that the police have the weapons that they need, so that they can deliver. That is how we will help victims to bring things out into the open, and put an end to domestic abuse.
Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)
So what is domestic violence or abuse, and where do we get our ideas about it from? Often we see the same images and stereotypes on TV: housing estates, working-class families, drunk men coming home from the pub, women surrounded by children, and a sequence of shouting, followed by immediate physical violence or assault. But soap opera scenes tend to focus on only one or two aspects of a much bigger and more complex picture.
Domestic violence has many faces, and the faces of those who survive it are varied, too. There are 650 MPs in this place—650 human beings. Statistically, it is highly likely that some of us here will have directly experienced an abusive relationship, and we are just as likely as anyone else to have grown up in a violent household.
Abuse is not just about noticeable physical signs. Sometimes there are no bruises. Abuse is very often all about control and power; it is about abusers making themselves feel big, or biggest, but that is not how they present themselves. It is not how they win your heart. It is not how they persuade you to meet them for a coffee, then go to a gig, and then spend an evening snuggled up in front of a movie at their place. When they ask you out, they do not present their rage, and do not tell you that while they like the idea of strong, independent, successful women, they do not like the reality. They do not threaten, criticise, control, yell, or exert their physical strength in an increasingly frightening way—not yet. Not at the start. Not when they think you are sweet, funny and gorgeous. Not when they want to impress you. Not when they turn up to only your third date with chocolate, and then jewellery. Not when they meet your friends, your parents, or the leader of your political party. They do not do any of that then.
It is only later, when the door to your home is locked, that you really start to learn what power and control look and feel like. That is when you learn that “I’ll always look after you,” “I’ll never let you go,” and “You’re mine for life” can sound menacing, and are used as a warning over and over again. It is when the ring is on your finger that the mask can start to slip, and the promises sound increasingly like threats. It is then that you spend 12 or more hours at work longing to see the person you love, only to find that on the walk or tube journey home they refuse to speak a single, solitary word to you. Eventually, at home, they will find a way to let you know which particular sin you have apparently committed: your dress was too short, the top you wore in the Chamber was too low-cut, or you did not respond to a message immediately.
It starts slowly: a few emotional knocks, alternated with romantic gushes and promises of everlasting love, which leave you reeling, confused, spinning around in an ever-changing but always hyper-alert state, not knowing what mood or message awaits you. You tell yourself to be less sensitive, less emotional, to stop over-analysing every little thing. Ignore the moods—he never stops saying he adores you, right? All seems good again.
A whole week goes by: a week of summer evening walks home and maybe a drink on the way. A long weekend is booked and organised as a surprise while you are at work. The journey there is full of promise and promises—time away alone together in a place away from stress—but then it starts. In a strange city, his face changes in a way you are starting to know and dread, in a way that says you need to stay calm, silent and very careful. He goes for a walk. You sit in your hotel room and wait. You read a city guide and plan which sights you want to visit, mentally packing a day full of fun. But he seems to have another agenda. He doesn’t want you to leave the room. He has paid a lot of money and you need to pay him your full attention. You are expected to do as you are told, and you know for certain what that means—so you do exactly as you are told.
In the months that follow, those patterns continue: reward, punishment, promises of happily ever after alternated with abject rage, menace, silent treatment and coercive control; financial abuse and control; a point-blank refusal to disclose his salary or earnings, an assumption and insistence on it being okay to live in your home without contributing a single penny, as bills continue to pile up; a refusal to work, as your salary is great and public knowledge; false promises to start paying some specific bills, which you discover months later remain unpaid; and the slow but sure disappearance of any kindness, respect or loving behaviour.
You get to the stage where you are afraid to go home. After 15 hours at work, you spend another hour on the phone to your mum or a close friend, trembling, a shadow of your usual self. You answer the phone, and the sheer nastiness and rage tell you not to go home at all. So you leave work with your best friend, exhausted and shaking, and buy a toothbrush on the way, knowing that the verbal abuse followed by silent refusal to speak at all will be 100 times worse tomorrow.
Every day is emotionally exhausting. You are working in a job you love but putting on a brave face and pretending all is good, fine—wonderful, in fact. Then the pretence and the public face start to drop completely: being yelled at in the car with the windows down, no attempt to hide behaviour during constituency engagements —humiliation and embarrassment now added to permanent trepidation and constant hurt and pain. It is impossible to comprehend that this is the person who tells his family how much he loves you and longs to make you his wife.
But the mask has slipped for good, and questions are starting. Excuses are given to worried friends, concerned family and colleagues who have started to notice. One night, after more crying and being constantly verbally abused because you suggest he pay a bit towards your new sofa, you realise you’ve reached the end and you simply cannot endure this for another day or week, and certainly not for the rest of your life. Having listened intently for two whole weeks to the sound of his morning shower, timing the routine until you know it off by heart, you summon up the courage to take his front-door keys from his bag.
You have tried everything else on earth and know for certain, 100%, what awaits you that night if you do not act today. Heart banging, you hide them carefully and creep back into bed, praying he won’t discover what you have done. You know for certain what will happen if he does. You know an apology will not follow. You know for sure it will be because of what you have done and that it is all your fault. He leaves for the gym, telling you how much he adores you. He tells you to remember that you will always be his. He kisses you lovingly, as though there has not been months of verbal abuse, threats and incidents he knows you will never disclose. He tells you he will bring something nice home for dinner.
Sure enough, the next few days and weeks are a total hell—texts and calls and yelling: “You’ve locked me out like a dog”, “No one treats me that way”, “This is the last thing you will ever do”. You cry, you grieve for your destroyed dreams, you try to heal, you ignore the emails from wedding companies, but it is like withdrawal, and it takes six months.
But one day you notice that you’re smiling, that it’s okay to laugh, and that it’s been a week or two since the daily sobbing stopped. You realise you are allowed to be happy. You dare to relax and you dare to start to feel free. You realise it is not your fault and that he is now left alone with his rage and narcissism. You dare to start dating someone, and you realise that you have survived, but the brightest and most precious thing of all is realising that you are loved and believed by friends, family and colleagues who believe in you and support you.
So if anyone is watching and needs a friend, please reach out, if it is safe to do so, and please talk to any of us, because we will be there and we will hold your hand. [Applause.]
Mr Speaker
I thank the hon. Lady for that speech, which was simultaneously as horrifying and as moving a contribution in the Chamber as I have heard in my 22 years of membership of the House. Thank you.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
I echo your words, Mr Speaker. The hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) is an extraordinarily brave woman. It takes the most enormous courage to stand up in this place and say what she has said. If any of us needed a reminder of why we are here today—why it is so important that we unite across the Chamber to take this action today—she has provided it. She will have given so much hope to so many people across the country. Knowing that it can happen to someone so beautiful, brave, strong and successful—successful enough to get to sit on these Benches—will give them the confidence, self-belief and self-worth to take action and break free from the torture she had to endure. I would like to thank her, as I am sure would everyone in the Chamber and listening at home, for being so brave as to do what she has done today. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]
In the few minutes remaining, I want to raise one or two things that I would like the Minister to think about. This is an extremely good Bill. As we have heard, many Members across the House, not least my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, have spent a huge amount of time on pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and as a result it is already in really good shape.
As has been mentioned, at the heart of the Bill is culture change. The Bill starts in the right place because it talks about how we need to change our attitude towards relationships so that everybody knows what a good relationship is. That must start with every child in every school being given extremely good education about what makes a good relationship.
Lyn Brown
Does the hon. Lady agree that, as well as educating every child, we need to support children who have specific difficulties as a result of witnessing violence in their homes, and that child and adolescent mental health services need beefing up and proper funding in order to do so?
Sarah Newton
I completely agree with the hon. Lady that, in addition to education, every child must be supported. We know, as has been said today, that when children grow up in a home where there is controlling or coercive behaviour, economic control or any sort of abuse, including physical abuse, they will be affected by it. Boys and girls will think, “That’s what love looks like.” Is it any wonder that so many of those affected go on to become perpetrators or victims themselves? Of course, we need to help those perpetrators understand that this behaviour is totally unacceptable, and to help those victims understand that they can be survivors and that their lives need not follow this cycle. We need to make sure that every adult who comes into contact with children understands what domestic abuse is. That means statutory training for all people in the public sector who will come into contact with children, so that they can support them to get what they need to break that cycle.
There is a group of people who are often neglected in this debate, namely older people and people with disabilities. The briefing given to us by Age UK highlights work that is replicated—I have seen it at first hand—in my constituency. I recently attended a meeting with the excellent women’s centre, which does absolutely fantastic work in my constituency, as does an organisation called SEEDS—Survivors Empowering and Educating Domestic Abuse Services. So many older women are the subject of domestic abuse, but they are the least likely to speak out about it or to have access to services. The same goes for disabled people.
Although I very much agree with the definition in the Bill, I ask the Minister to consider gathering an evidence base of the prevalence of undisclosed domestic abuse of people with disabilities, particularly learning disabilities, as well as of those with physical disabilities and older people, to make sure that we have got the definition absolutely right. I know from the homicide reviews conducted in Cornwall that there are many more examples than any of us would like to think of family members financially, economically and physically abusing and even killing an older member of their family. Clearly, much more needs to be done to recognise those families who are at risk and really struggling, so that we can prevent those avoidable deaths.
It is not just family members; it can be people who deliberately befriend vulnerable people, including those with disabilities or older people. They can work their way into people’s affections with the sole purpose of abusing them. Often it is economic abuse. The definition really matters. I would like the Minister to consider the prevalence of undisclosed abuse. If it is the case, as I feel it is, that there are people beyond the family who become close and trusted friends of vulnerable people and commit this abuse, those perpetrators’ activities should come within the purview of the Bill.
In conclusion, people are right to say that victims and survivors have waited a long time for us to have this debate. They have been campaigning vigorously to get to this point. It is now down to all of us to take really important action through this Bill, so that we can prevent the avoidable deaths and the terrible suffering that go with domestic abuse, and make sure that we consign this appalling behaviour to the history books.
Mr Speaker
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady, and I think the whole House will be, both for what she said and for the extraordinarily sympathetic and empathetic manner in which she said it. I knew she would do that, which is why I called her.
We will have one speech lasting six minutes by the Mother of the House, Harriet Harman.
Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton). I absolutely agree with everything she said. I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), because what she said will save lives. We are incredibly proud of her, and she should be incredibly proud of herself.
There is so much hope and expectation surrounding this Bill. Every woman who has suffered from domestic violence and every child who has lived in a house subjected to the terror of domestic violence will be watching what we are doing today and wishing us forward. All those who work in the charitable sector and in refuges will be watching what we are doing and supporting it, as will all those who work in the police services. Up and down the country there are police officers who want to do more about domestic violence and are dismayed at how little they are able to do. The Bill will strengthen their elbow in their own police forces, and the same applies to the Crown Prosecution Service and the court services. The Bill will be a focus, not just as a piece of legislation but in the context of a determination to provide more support, including proper financial support—proper funding for services—and to see the whole issue in the round.
I pay tribute to every Member who is present to support the Bill, and to all the organisations that have given their support. I pay particular tribute to the Minister for Women, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who has doggedly pressed forward with the Bill. Let me also point out, however, that we would not have a Bill to provide this focus had not the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) made it a priority. It is our Bill but it is also her Bill that we are discussing today.
Men used routinely to get away with murder and be charged only with manslaughter, because a man could say that, although he had killed the woman, it was not his fault but hers, as she had provoked him. That was the provocation defence, which led to a charge being reduced from murder to manslaughter. A man would say, “It was only because I loved her: I killed her because I loved her, and she was having an affair”, or “She drove me to it, because she nagged me and wore me down, so she provoked me into killing her.” I am afraid that it used to be called, at the Bar, the “nagging and shagging” defence, while in Scotland it was called the infidelity defence.
It was as recently as 2009 that the provocation defence, used in that way, was put a stop to. Now, however, another version of “She drove me to kill her—I killed her, yes, but it was her fault” has reared its ugly head. Men are now, literally, getting away with murder by using the “rough sex” defence. Although the man has to admit that he caused injuries which led to the woman’s death, he claims that it was not his fault, as it was a “sex game gone wrong”. She, of course, is not there to say otherwise. In the witness box, he gives lurid, unchallengeable accounts of her addiction to violent sex, and explains that the bruises that cover her body were what she wanted. The grieving relatives have to listen to his version of her sexual proclivities, and see them splashed all over social media and the newspapers. He has killed her, and then he defines her. She is dead, so only he gets to tell the story. I will just say a few words about the case of the constituent of the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier)—the case of the young woman Natalie Connolly. I know that the hon. Gentleman will be talking about it in due course, but this is why we want to change the law to prevent men from being able to argue that “the injuries that she died by, she consented to.”
Hannah Bardell
On the subject of responsibilities, does the right hon. and learned Lady recognise that the way in which the details of such cases are reported in the media, and the way in which the narrative has grown around these issues, has a huge impact on public perception and on the behaviour of men, and violent men?
Ms Harman
Absolutely. I completely agree. Men are using the narrative of women’s sexual enjoyment of being injured to escape murder charges and face only manslaughter charges. Instead of being imprisoned for life, they are out in just a few years. The woman’s grieving family, though, are never free from their loss or the stain on her reputation. What an irony it is that the narrative of women’s sexual empowerment is being used by men who inflict fatal injuries. It is what I describe as the “Fifty Shades of Grey” defence.
The killing of Natalie Connolly is the worst case that I have come across, but it is far from the only case. In that case, not only were the relatives absolutely distraught, but the jurors were dismayed that the man had not faced a murder charge. They approached the relatives on the steps of the court and said, “What on earth happened?” They even approached me, which was unprecedented: jurors had never come to me before. We can change the law in the Bill. There is case law on this. In 1993, in R v. Brown, the House of Lords, which preceded the Supreme Court, ruled that if injuries are serious a defendant cannot claim as a defence that the victim consented. We need that in statute, so that it is right there under the noses of the Crown Prosecution Service and the judges.
For years, men got away with murder, claiming, “She asked for it.” Now we have to shut down this modern version of the defence. I want to say to the relatives of Natalie Connolly that we can see that she was a wonderful young woman. We can see that she was a precious daughter, a devoted mother, a twin sister, a beloved granddaughter. We recognise who she was, and that is what we want them to remember. We will get justice for her in a change in the law.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
I am extremely grateful to the Mother of the House. A five-minute limit now applies. I call the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, Maria Miller.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman). I thank her for the evidence that she gave the Joint Committee, as it helped our deliberations. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), who had enormous strength to come to the Chamber to share such a personal story. I am sure that she will take strength from the fact that those who have heard her will feel more empowered to act to put themselves into a safe position. She and I have campaigned a great deal for a number of years to get more women into the House, and I count myself lucky to have worked alongside her, given the strength and courage that she has shown today.
I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), because without her I am not sure that we would be here today. She had the vision to pull the Bill together and, along with Ministers on the Front Bench, to create an opportunity for a step change in the national response to this issue. I was privileged to chair the Joint Committee on the draft Bill, and I thank Members both here and in the other place who gave so much of their time, those who gave evidence and related their personal experiences and, above all, the staff of the House, who gave us the most extraordinary professional service.
This is an incredibly important Bill, but I would like to make a couple of points. First, the Government need to make clear what the Bill deals with. They have tabled some amendments and promised others, but I am not sure that the Bill is in its final format regarding what the Government want to do. The Minister might want to make sure that Members of both Houses are thoroughly briefed on the final Bill, including all amendments, before Report. This is an important Bill, but the Government introduced amendments midway through our deliberations with regard to the statutory duty on local authorities to provide refuge places. The consultation still needs to report, so perhaps the Minister will confirm that she will ensure that the House is fully briefed before Report.
Secondly, I make a plea not to Ministers but to colleagues. Members need to resist the temptation to use the Bill to remedy all the issues, concerns, and campaigns in recent years to do with domestic abuse. Some of them have been quite open about their wish to include abortion reform in the Bill, and while there is clearly a strong case for reform, with which I would agree, this is not the place to do it. I do not believe that we have the time in this Parliament to give that issue the attention that it demands. My plea is for a separate Bill, sponsored by a Back-Bench MP in the usual way, to deal with that, and to deal with it swiftly.
Hannah Bardell
I take the point that the right hon. Lady makes about time, but we should look at making the Bill as broad and detailed as possible. We should also look at the issue of data sharing. I have a constituent whose data was shared by the Department for Work and Pensions. She was being protected by the police from her violent partner. Her data was shared, and she had to be moved again. Those kinds of issues need to be addressed in the legislation.
Mrs Miller
I have a huge amount of respect for the hon. Lady, but we run the risk of derailing a Bill that is long overdue. I urge people to have some sense of restraint on what we might do to amend it.
Mrs Miller
I am afraid I cannot take any more interventions.
I want briefly to turn to the Government’s response to our Joint Committee report and to make one point—I should like to have made a lot of others—on the inclusion of an age in the definition. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead is absolutely right to say that the definition is key, but Committee members were particularly concerned about the issue of the age limit. We decided not to recommend a change in the definition of domestic abuse from 16 years and above, but that was not an easy decision for us, particularly given the personal testimony we heard from young people who felt that the police and other people in positions of authority did not take seriously violent behaviour that occurred in relationships under the age of 16. This is not right, and it has to be tackled. It may not need legislation in the Bill, but it needs the Government to urgently review the police’s response in these areas.
I would like to go on to certain other issues that I believe have to be looked at carefully in Committee. The first concerns migrant women, because the Bill makes no provision for that particularly vulnerable group. The Government have reiterated the importance of treating those individuals as victims first and foremost, regardless of their immigration status, but we need to look at how safeguards are put in place to ensure that the right support is there for those individuals, including by extending the three-month time limit to six months for the destitution domestic violence concession.
I want to talk about the importance of an independent commissioner. We like commissioners, but we do not make them very independent; we need to make sure that we do. The Government must also give details of how they will fund their statutory duty on local authorities for the provision of services.
Mrs Miller
I cannot give way; I have only 20 seconds left.
The Committee was also concerned about the absence of a definition of domestic abuse victims who are children. I am reassured by some of the Government’s comments in their reply to us, but that needs further thought, as does a confirmation that the Istanbul convention will be ratified as a result of this Bill being put into force.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I too want to begin by paying a huge tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for her bravery in speaking out, because that is a message not just to those across the country who experience coercive control or abuse but to everybody else, including those of us across the Chamber who think she is wonderful but who did not know all she was going through and who want to support her and other people who experience abuse, control or violence across the country.
It is also really important, at a time when this Parliament and the country can feel hugely divided and angry, that we have seen so many people from both sides of the House come together on an area that is so important and in which radical reforms are needed. I pay tribute to all on the Opposition side of the House, and also to the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for the work that she and her Committee have done on this legislation. This comes at a time when the number of people dying from domestic violence is increasing, and we should not ignore the fact that in some areas the problem is getting worse; it is not an area in which improvements are happening and we just need to go further.
I welcome the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. I raised that issue with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) in 2013, so it is good to see this happening now, but I do think that the role has to be more independent. We have seen from the experience with the anti-slavery commissioner and the immigration inspectorate that there is a need for greater independence. Many of these issues were also raised by the Home Affairs Committee in our report last October, and I welcome some of the measures for stronger powers, including prevention powers, and the inclusion of economic abuse in the statutory definition.
I want to raise four areas where I think more action is needed. First, the creation of a commissioner is not an alternative to having a proper action plan from the Home Office and the Government. The number of domestic abuse cases reported to the police has gone up by 40% in the last two years. However, over the past four years the number of cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service has gone down by 20%. The number of prosecutions for domestic abuse has gone down by 20%. A huge systems failure is going on, and we cannot just tell ourselves it is about changing attitudes, crucial though that is. Action is needed to make the system work and to address the fact that so many cases now involve online abuse, stalking and control, making them more complex.
Our police and social services are often also badly overstretched. I have seen cases in my constituency in which obvious things were not done for victims of domestic abuse: the police were too overstretched and did not gather crucial evidence from A&E departments, for example, or individual police officers—although well intentioned—did not know about the coercive control legislation introduced in 2015. It is not enough just to change the law; we need a proper action plan to deal with the reduction in prosecutions.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is so right about why we are here today to discuss the Bill. I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), who spoke so eloquently and emotively. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one reason why we cannot get to grips with this issue is that the resources and support for the support network—the wonderful women’s charities and domestic abuse charities—have dwindled and been taken away? If we do not support them, they cannot support the women who need their support.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. Refuge, for example, has faced funding cuts of some 80% of its services over recent years—that was the evidence given to the Joint Committee. We also heard that 60% of referrals to refuges were unsuccessful because of a lack of bed spaces. I hope that in Committee we can look more closely at the recommendation from the Home Affairs Committee to have a statutory duty on local authorities to provide refuge places with sustainable funding supported by Government.
I want to raise the point about what happens to serial perpetrators, including serial stalkers. We recommended in our report that the Government should introduce a national register of serial stalkers and domestic violence perpetrators. We know from the ONS evidence that around a third of victims of domestic abuse suffer from more than one type of abuse, with partner abuse and stalking being the most common combination. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust told us that 55% of callers to the national stalking helpline were being stalked by an ex-partner. We need more co-ordination between police and social services to address that.
In a case in my constituency, a man has just been sentenced to 11 years for violent assault. He tied a noose around his partner’s neck and lifted her off the ground. It was part of a series of sustained attacks. At the time, he was on bail for other attacks, including punching his previous partner in the face, trying to suffocate her and wrapping a phone cord around her neck. He also threatened to tie a rope round her child’s neck and drag him behind his van. Laura Richards of Paladin, the anti-stalking charity, warned that this particular man had abused at least four women before, including some years ago grabbing a 17-year-old by the hair and kneeing her in the face, and the following year grabbing another woman by the throat and headbutting her in the mouth. Yet this man was able to go on and commit the abuse for which he has now been sentenced. There are so many other cases that involve serial abuse, yet the onus is still on potential victims of domestic abuse or stalking to raise their concerns with the police, rather than agencies having a responsibility to manage the risk, identify those who are committing serial violence and make sure that action is taken before it is too late.
Let me briefly raise the other concerns we had. As well as seeing the commissioner be more independent, I hope the Government will also take further account of the gendered nature of abuse. Of course men and women can both be victims of domestic abuse, but the Minister will know that women are more likely to be the victims of abuse and of the most serious abuse. That is part of a wider context of violence against women and girls. We owe it to those who experience terrible coercive control, and to their children, who can bear the greatest scars, to ensure we use this Bill to make the maximum possible change in people’s lives.
Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Ind)
It is always a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). She and I do not always agree on things, but I absolutely concur with her final comments to the Minister about this being a gendered crime. Of course it happens to men as well as women, but we have to look at the reality of the statistics.
I welcome the opportunity this afternoon to get this Bill out of the blocks and use this unexpected week wisely. I must also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for her moving contribution. I wish, in a limited period of time, to concentrate on one element alone. Some may look at me with some surprise when I do this, and fear I find myself in the role of gamekeeper turned poacher, rather than the other way round. I am sure the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), does not need reminding of the meeting that she and I attended in May, alongside the Minister for countering extremism and my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), then an Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Justice. I was pleased to see him on the Treasury Bench for the opening of this debate. He made the point during that meeting that when considering domestic abuse it is imperative that we consider people as victims first, rather than alongside any other considerations that the Government might have. That meeting was attended by Southall Black Sisters, Imkaan and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who has not yet spoken in this debate but who has such a wealth of experience and expertise on these issues.
I was pleased to hear my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor talk about the need for a cross-Government approach. The meeting that I chaired and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle, attended was a cross-Government one, but, as I said to those agencies represented, it was not sufficiently cross-Government. There was no representation from the Department for Work and Pensions or the Department of Health and Social Care. If we are going to address domestic abuse in all its forms, we must have all bodies around the table.
Chris Bryant
I just wonder whether we should be looking at one other Department, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, because in my constituency and in the south Wales valleys the worst spikes, when there are so many instances of domestic violence that the police are simply not able to cope, occur when there is a big rugby or football match. I simply do not understand why all the sporting bodies cannot come together to run a major publicity campaign to try to tackle this.
Caroline Nokes
I welcome the comments that the hon. Gentleman makes and those that my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), a former Culture Secretary, made when she said that she was trying to do what he suggests. Of course the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government must also be involved. We have heard much about health, relationships and sexual education in schools, so the Department for Education also of course has a role to play.
I urge the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend Member for Louth and Horncastle to do what she can to make sure that we are doing more for migrant women, bearing in mind that the destitute domestic violence concession is currently available only to those who come here on a family visa. We must consider those who are here as partners of refugees, those who are here en route to settlement but who have not yet got their protected status, and those who are here on tier 4 visas. We have heard much about older victims, but younger people, those who might be here as students, can also suffer from domestic abuse.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making a valid point about the breadth of this issue and the need for Departments to co-operate. One of the most disturbing cases ever brought to my surgery—we all know how disturbing surgery cases can be—was that of a disabled man whom I had known in a different context as a cheerful, light-hearted person but who had been abused for years by his wife, who was of course much stronger and more powerful than him. Disabled people and other vulnerable people need to be taken into account here, which is one reason why we need to work across Government.
Caroline Nokes
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right; we must work across Government and we must consider all vulnerabilities.
We have heard this afternoon about the varied forms that domestic abuse takes. It might be physical, financial, emotional. We have heard about coercive control. However, there is also the controlling behaviour that relates to immigration status. A victim is a victim first, and the law and agencies must recognise that.
The role of the Minister is not simply to speak—it is to listen; it is to understand. Earlier, I mentioned the cross-Government meeting held back in May. As I said, it was not cross-Government enough, but I certainly listened very carefully that afternoon to the voices of Southall Black Sisters, the End Violence Against Women coalition, and Imkaan, and their message was that we had to extend the domestic violence concession and must not allow immigration status to be weaponised—as we know that, by perpetrators, it very much is weaponised. That can be physical, in the sense of a passport being withdrawn, but it can also take the form of the simple threat that a victim is in this country only because of the status of the perpetrator, and that if they were to approach an agency they would do so at their peril, and might then be excluded from this country.
The hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who is no longer in her place—I venture into this space with some trepidation—spoke of the EU settled status scheme and EU citizens. I urge hon. Members to make contact with Home Office officials and talk to them about the amazing amount of work that has gone into the resolution centre in Liverpool. When I was a Minister, I visited the centre and spoke to a wide range of brilliant caseworkers there. I hesitate to name her, but the awesome Gabi, who was passionate about helping those in the most vulnerable situations, spoke about recognising that there will be people who apply to that scheme who no longer have their passport, and who have no paperwork evidencing their stay in the United Kingdom, because their controlling partner has seized that from them and prevented them from having access to it.
We heard this afternoon about Government data sharing. Again I hesitate to go there, but there are occasions when data sharing can actually be a force for good. I would highlight the EU settled status scheme, which can combine evidence from the Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC in order to draw a picture of someone’s life in the UK that enables those who are vulnerable, who have been victims, to pull together sufficient information. There is a call centre. I sat in on some of the calls, which were handled in the most compassionate and understanding way so that victims were not put through a gruelling process but were helped to obtain their status. When I left office, there were in the region of 1,500 people working on the scheme. I hope to goodness that there remain 1,500 people working on it today, because it is absolutely imperative that we get that right for all EU citizens who are in this country.
I know that the Minister takes this matter very seriously and I am delighted that she has seized the opportunity provided by a day that we were not expecting to be in Parliament to give the Bill a Second Reading and allow us to make progress. I urge her to continue listening to the words of current and former Ministers. I know that the current Chancellor of the Exchequer was very passionate about ensuring that the review on migrant women enabled the Bill to cover more ground and enabled us to consider the domestic violence concession and do more.
I hope that the Minister heeds that, and that when the Bill moves into Committee we can all play an active part to ensure that we make it every bit as good as it can be, embracing as many individuals in this country who have been subjected to domestic abuse as possible, to give them the help that they need.
Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and others—especially my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), who is no longer in her place; I hope she is getting a nice cup of tea after making that incredibly moving and inspiring speech.
I declare my political approach: I am, as I have called myself many times, a professional feminist, and have been for 32 years; and I have been involved in domestic violence work for 32 years. That is the value that underpins my involvement, for all those decades, in anti-domestic violence work. That is not an accident; it is because the nature of domestic violence is incredibly gendered. We can acknowledge two things at once: we can acknowledge the gendered nature and at the same time acknowledge that there are male victims, and victims in same-sex relationships. I also work with the Men’s Advice Line, which supports male victims, and with Respect, the national organisation for work with perpetrators. As a perpetrator group worker at DViP—the Domestic Violence Intervention Project—I am very proud of what I learned there and hope to bring that to my speech today.
I first got involved in this work 32 years ago, as I said, in a refuge for young Asian women in Manchester. One of the things that used to break my heart was that the young women themselves would say, “What is there to try to fix him?” When I went on to work at the Women’s Aid national office in Bristol in 1991—that is what brought me to Bristol—women used to say, “What is there that might change him?” To be fair, so did the perpetrators themselves—men who use abuse. Many of them, not all, wanted to change. Professionals I worked with—police officers, social workers and refuge workers—would say, “Why isn’t there anything that we can at least try?”
I became wary of the idea that something would always be better than nothing, and so, indeed, it proved to be, as I went on to develop the country’s first accreditation standard and a system of inspection for perpetrator programmes. The Minister is very kind, as she graced me with her first meeting as a Minister to talk about exactly this issue. She will probably recognise some of what I am going to say today. I am grateful to her for her continued interest in this matter.
We found in our work, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that separation alone does not increase safety for survivors and, sadly, this is often the time of highest risk for homicide, serious injury, stalking, murder of children and further harassment. Women wanted the programmes because they wanted their partners to be held to account. They found that, otherwise, their partners were going to mainstream therapy, marriage guidance, drug and alcohol services, or anger management. All of those services have something to offer, but none of them has the specific focus, skills, knowledge and understanding that is necessary to do good quality work with domestic violence perpetrators, and to do it safely, because, as I have said, something can be worse than nothing—a bad programme can do more harm than good.
I declare an interest. As I have already mentioned, I helped to develop the first accreditation system, along with my colleagues Neil Blacklock and Jo Todd. I feel incredibly proud that we decided to aim high. We decided that we should aim for, not one size fits all, but a programme that, whatever its shape, conformed to a very high set of standards. We make no apology for that. As Neil reminded me on the phone only this morning, for most things which are potential causes of risk such as schools, healthcare facilities, old people’s homes, and places for vulnerable people, there are regulations and a strong system of monitoring enforcement. No system is perfect—we know that—and there are people who will not benefit from perpetrator programmes, which by definition are managers of risk and places where dangerous people are at work, and who will continue to be violent. It is vital, therefore, that we have a good system on a statutory footing, so I urge the Minister to consider my plea that the accreditation system, which I am so proud to have helped to develop, is put on a statutory footing by some means during the passage of this Bill. I say that because colleagues in the women’s sector who work with women victims of domestic violence—I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) will confirm this—are rightly sceptical. They challenge us to do the best that we possibly can. Being held to account by the women’s sector is, in my view, essential for any decent perpetrator programme.
I knew that, when I turned up to co-facilitate a group of violent men, I could not do that without a proper linked safety service for women and ex-partners, as well as partners, and without there being proper evaluation and monitoring. While I was at Respect, I helped to commission research that evaluated the effectiveness of good programmes. I am pleased to say that, contrary to what some people say, there is good evidence on good programmes doing good and effective work. There is also evidence that bad programmes do bad work. I urge all hon. and right hon. Members, and particularly the Minister, to grasp this opportunity in both hands and to develop a really good, sound, meaningful strategy for perpetrator programmes so that we do not have the gaps that currently exist, and to ensure that the domestic abuse protection notices can have the meaning and purpose that I and—I am sure—the Minister want them to have. I thank all hon. Members for their attention and hope that, if they want to know more, they will join the all-party group on perpetrators of domestic abuse.
Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), chair of the all-party group on perpetrators of domestic abuse. I am sure that her work is extraordinary and really important.
I also follow the speech a little earlier of the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who talked about my constituent Natalie Connolly. Natalie Connolly, as she so rightly said, would be 28 years old now. She has a young daughter and she comes from a family of loving parents, loving grandparents, a loving sister and, of course, a loving daughter.
Natalie Connolly fell into a relationship with John Broadhurst in 2016. She was, I guess, impressed with him. He was a millionaire and she came from a relatively normal background. One Saturday afternoon, they went off to a rather extensive party. That evening, they were driven home by his driver. They went back to their house, which they were renting while their main one was being renovated, and indulged in intimate activities of an aggressive nature, which were allegedly consensual—I believe were consensual.
When John Broadhurst went to bed that night, he stepped over the bleeding, unconscious body of Natalie Connolly on the steps of their house and went upstairs, leaving her there. He came down the next morning, stepped across her now lifeless body, went and had breakfast, washed the car and called the emergency services, telling the police and paramedics that she was “dead as a doughnut”—which seems extraordinary.
Broadhurst was obviously charged with murder—the Crown Prosecution Service was going to maintain a murder case. The trial happened at the end of last year and was quite high profile at the time. The injuries that Natalie suffered were unbelievably extensive, extraordinarily intimate and, frankly, utterly, utterly brutal. She had lost a lot of blood from her injuries. But the problem was—this is where the law comes in—she bled into a carpet, so it was impossible to measure the extent of her blood loss. As a result, whether she died as a direct result of the injuries, or as a result of overuse of alcohol and possibly narcotics, could not be absolutely confirmed. The charges were therefore dropped from murder to manslaughter by neglect, owing to the fact that Broadhurst had left her behind to bleed to death overnight.
The problem was that to get this change of charge, someone had to sit down and talk to the family. I have met the family—an immensely kind and loving group of people. I sat down with them and we had a conversation about their daughter, who had been besmirched by this vile man. Their last memories of her will be of the court case—people discussing what he alleged about her and her hideous, unbelievable injuries. As I sat with this family, I looked at a group of people whose memories of Natalie should be of buying her first Snow White costume or Barbie doll when she was a child—all the stuff we want to do as parents who love our families. Being asked to understand the risk-balances of complicated legal issues put this family in an intolerable position, as they had to work out the right way forward to get a prosecution.
One of the unbelievably brilliant things about this House is that we are actually not divided when it comes to this sort of thing. The Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham, reached out to me before Christmas and said, “Are you aware of this case?”, so the two of us worked together. I am not a lawyer, so I do not particularly understand these legal issues, but she does; this illustrates how good we can be as a House. We visited the Attorney General to see whether there could be a retrial, but he said, “Actually, no. In this particular case, the sentence was right because of the reduction of the charge.” So together—actually, me being led by her and learning from her—we want to table a couple of amendments.
Caroline Nokes
My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point, and I think it is imperative that he is allowed the time in which to achieve that.
Mark Garnier
I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend.
There are two points. The first is that “she was asking for it” cannot possibly be a defence when somebody dies. Apart from anything else, the individual does not have the ability to defend themselves, and their reputation is being destroyed in front of the people they loved, the people who care for them and their friends. That is absolutely wrong. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” defence cannot be allowed.
The second point is that victims’ families are not qualified to make the decision about changing the charge so that there can be a better chance of a conviction. We need people who are brilliantly clever at this—brilliant barristers who are brave enough to fight these cases on behalf of the victims. But what we can do is ensure that the decision is made by somebody who really understands the process, so that the Director of Public Prosecutions is the one who is consulted if a change is going to be made in a case pertaining to this type of injury and homicide in a domestic abuse setting. In that way, these families will get the support they need.
Natalie Connolly would have been 28 now, with a young daughter growing up in a warm family, but she is no longer with us. If there is any way in which we can remember her, we have to do something to make sure that this can never happen to anybody ever again.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
There have been many days recently when I have not been particularly proud to be a Member of this House, but today I am intensely proud, particularly following that wonderful speech, which I will find it difficult to follow, and the contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and from the Mother of the House and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. Each and every one of them has made us feel something.
There have been too many times in this place when we have had to be hardened and stoical or put on a brave face. Today I am not going to put on a brave face. Today we have a huge opportunity to make a difference for victims of domestic abuse in our constituencies. We all know them and care for them, and I do not think there is a woman alive in this country who has not experienced some of that behaviour or who knows somebody well who has. Now we have a chance to do something about it. This is a good day.
I will be resisting, though, those who say that we should show some restraint and not try to widen the Bill. This could be a rare opportunity. We might not get another such Bill for some time. We need to look to Departments other than the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office, such as the Department for Education, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Department of Health and Social Care, to find out what we can do more broadly to support victims of domestic abuse.
I have seen the journey in my constituency that this field and the women’s organisations that support victims have been on. In 1976 in Darlington, we first had what was then called a refuge for battered wives. Thank God we have come a long way since then. It is now a safe haven for survivors. I want to take the opportunity to celebrate those who worked together to provide that vital service. They were the Rev. John Wright, Harry Cass, Val Portass, Louie Hutchinson, Isobel Hartley, Dot Long and Lillian Elliott. They are heroes, because if they had not done what they did then, my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) and for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) would not have had the opportunity to make the impact that they have. Those people were pioneers and they deserve that recognition and to be celebrated.
I am very worried that the Bill is limited to abuse experienced by people over the age of 16. I would accept that as appropriate if Ministers could show us where abuse under the age of 16 is sufficiently dealt with in other legislation. If it is dealt with adequately in other Acts of Parliament, fine. I just do not believe that it is at the moment.
Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)
I very much agree that children are often massive victims themselves, which can often have lifelong consequences for them. Does the hon. Lady agree with the Children’s Commissioner that the lower age limit of 16 should be removed from the Bill?
Jenny Chapman
I do not know whether I agree with that or not, but this issue needs to be examined in great detail as the Bill progresses. This is the first opportunity that we have had to raise it in this place in this way. It needs further thought and consideration, and I am certain that it will get it.
Mrs Miller
I understand the point that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) made, but does the hon. Lady agree that this issue is the best argument for every child in this country having relationship education and that we should absolutely dismiss anybody who says otherwise?
Jenny Chapman
I completely agree, but relationship education is not enough, because I am afraid that the horse has already bolted. The University of Central Lancashire has done some research that will reinforce what I think everybody, particularly if they have teenage children, will know in their gut. Half of young people in relationships between teenagers are reporting emotional abuse and a fifth are reporting physical abuse. A third of girls have reported sexual violence. A quarter of boys have reported some form of sexual violence. Over 50% have reported abuse via new technology. Controlling behaviour through surveillance and being pressurised into sexting is the most common form of abuse reported by girls. If there are two teenagers and one of them is insisting that they check the other’s phone and use apps to monitor their location, that is a red flag if ever there was one.
The fact is that we are not adequately supporting young people and intervening. Given my background, I understand very well about not wanting to criminalise young people—I completely get that—but I am not seeing a framework, criminal or otherwise, for intervening and adequately tackling these kinds of problematic behaviours. This must not be dismissed as somehow less important because it is about two people who are under the age of 16; in fact, it is more important. There is an opportunity to intervene that we are missing repeatedly.
The problem with this Bill is that we are focusing on how the system should work. In the Bill Committee, we will receive assurance after assurance from Ministers saying, “Your worry will be taken care of because of this or that measure.” I have been through this far too many times to take those kinds of assurances at face value. We must be forensic and persistent, and we must continue to debate this in the way we have this afternoon.
I have high hopes for this Bill—I really do. I think it could be Parliament at its very, very best. But we must be persistent, we must be clear about what we want, and we need to work with those heroes outside this place who really do know what they are talking about, and who we will have to go back to when we have completed this process and say, “We’ve done our best by you.”
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. We have heard two of the most powerful speeches I have heard in my time in Parliament. First and foremost by a country mile was that by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield). It was one of the bravest and most powerful speeches I have ever heard not just in this place but anywhere. Her contribution to this debate will be remembered for an awfully long time, and this debate will be remembered for her contribution to it. Following hot on her heels was my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), who also made an incredibly powerful speech regarding his late constituent. If those examples do not force us into some kind of action, nothing will. It is a pleasure to follow their speeches.
I want to make points that I do not think anyone else will make, which is often my role in these debates. In all this consensus I want to try to stop the idea that we have had throughout this debate that domestic violence is a gender-based crime. It is not, and we would be doing a huge disservice if we were to run away with that idea and make this legislation work only on that basis. Men are perpetrators of domestic violence; men are victims of domestic violence. Women are perpetrators of domestic violence; women are victims of domestic violence. I will go through the figures in a second to show why it is not gender-based. We in this House have a duty to treat everybody equally before the law. I hope that it does not matter whether the perpetrator is a man or woman—they should face the full rigour of the law regardless—and whether the victim is a man or woman, they should have exactly the same safeguards from this House. I hope that that is what this legislation will do and I do not want to hear any ideas that it should not be like that.
For the record, the latest official figures that are available show that someone is one and a half times more likely to be a female victim of domestic violence in a lesbian relationship than in a heterosexual relationship. We should not be leaving behind those victims of domestic violence by running away with the idea that it is gender-based. In fact, 5.1% of men reported being victims of non-sexual partner abuse with a male partner, which is exactly the same level as women have with a male partner. Men are just as likely to abuse a male partner as they are a female partner. So this is not gender-based violence—it is unacceptable violence by all sorts of people and we should treat them all equally before the law.
Mrs Miller
My hon. Friend needs to accept the fact that women are more affected by domestic violence than any other group. Does he not agree with the Joint Committee recommendation that, rather than putting it on the face of the Bill—perhaps for some of the reasons he is talking about—we should take the approach that the Government have accepted and have statutory guidance to ensure that those who commission services are clear about the need to reflect the needs of women in the services that they provide?
Philip Davies
I want all victims to get the services that they need, but we have just been hearing on our Women and Equalities Committee about instances of male victims of domestic violence. We heard very moving accounts of that recently. We all want to ensure that they get the services that they require too. This is not about either/or. I want to see everyone who is a victim of domestic violence get the treatment and support that they need. I do not care whether that is a man or a woman, and nor should anyone in this House. We should want to provide those facilities and services for everyone—whether someone is in a majority or a minority category is irrelevant.
Having got that on the record, there is much in the Bill that I support and some things that I would like to be added to it. In the time available, I want to mention the two things that I would like to see added. In recent years, one of the things that I have been increasingly troubled by is the level of parental alienation, where one parent tries to turn the children against the other parent, using the child as a weapon in their dispute. That is a growing phenomenon, which I see in my surgeries and is well documented.
Clearly, in some cases, in particular when domestic violence is taking place, it is right for the parent to be removed from the whole family. I am a hard-liner on crime, as most people know, and I would have the courts treat perpetrators of domestic violence much more severely than they are at the moment. However, where there is no good reason for a parent to remove the other parent’s contact with the child, that parental alienation should in itself be seen as a form of domestic abuse. One thing that has come out in this debate, rightly, is that often the people who are the biggest victims of domestic abuse are the children. When a child is deliberately turned against the other parent for no good reason, that should be included in the definition of domestic abuse—[Interruption.] I am surprised that the SNP think that is a particular problem, but that is a matter for them to explain. They ought to meet some parents who suffer from parental alienation and then they might realise what a massive issue it is for them; often it leads to suicide. The SNP ought to think about those people.
When people make a false allegation of domestic abuse—which is also a very serious thing—the Government should consider that to be a form of domestic abuse as well in this legislation. That is one of the most terrible things that someone can be wrongly accused of.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
After the terrible scenes in the House last week, it is reassuring that this House can also be a force for good. However, there remain things on which we passionately disagree, and I refer to what the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) has just said. But I have a limited amount of time, so I will concentrate on what I want to say about the Bill.
I can testify personally to the importance that the Bill holds for survivors of domestic abuse, both in my constituency and further afield. It is a progressive reform that should be celebrated, but the Bill could go even further to protect survivors. and I am disappointed—I have mentioned this before—that children who have witnessed abuse have not been included in the statutory definition of domestic abuse victims.
People know that I am passionate about the issue of adverse childhood experiences and preventing them. Witnessing domestic abuse in childhood is a traumatic experience and we must recognise that. Adverse childhood experiences greatly increase a child’s likelihood of ending up in the criminal justice system, or of being part of an abusive relationship themselves. This is not about when they are directly abused, but about when they are witnesses. That in itself is such a traumatic event. For that reason alone we must make sure that children are included in the statutory definition. I urge the Minister to look at that again.
The Bill fails to safeguard survivors against homelessness. Under the current system, survivors of domestic abuse are not automatically placed on priority needs lists for social housing. Instead, they are required to undergo a vulnerability test—they have to go through traumatic evidence of their abuse to prove that they are vulnerable. We have already heard testimony about how retraumatising certain things are when people have to relive their experiences. We must not retraumatise survivors. This approach means that all too often survivors end up homeless because they do not want to go through the retraumatising event. Recent studies suggest that 12% of homeless families cite domestic abuse as the reason for their homelessness, while only 2% of priority housing lists are made up of domestic abuse survivors, so we can do better: we can have a system that assumes that survivors of domestic abuse are all vulnerable, as all our evidence on the subject suggests, and ensures that they are prioritised in housing allocations, therefore keeping survivors off the streets. We can do better.
Another part of the legislation I worry about—it has been mentioned—is the use of polygraph tests. I understand it is only a pilot, but its use even only to determine an offender’s licence after release is troubling. Polygraphs are not reliable and the inclusion of polygraphs in this legislation goes against the grain of the Bill, confusing modern reforms with outdated methods.
I disagree that the cost of domestic abuse prevention orders should be shouldered by the police force taking those orders to court. That undermines the whole idea of domestic abuse prevention orders. It puts policemen in the position of having to use resources that simply are not there, or convincing a victim to go to the courts on their own because they do not have to pay. We can do better. We can use proven methods to determine if rehabilitation has worked and we can create funding methods that do not place burdens directly on to local police.
Finally—I have already said this today—I must mention the Istanbul convention, which is still unratified by this Government. Ratifying the Istanbul convention would go a long way towards addressing the concerns about the Bill. It would also prove that this Government are not afraid to match global standards on care for survivors. Ratification would mean that support systems were not just promised but guaranteed for survivors. It is time that this Government step up not only with warm words, but with meaningful actions.
The Bill will allow many more survivors to seek justice, but alone it is not enough. We must try to support survivors beyond the courts to rebuild their lives.
Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the many fantastic and powerful speeches that we have had today. When I have spoken before in this place about domestic abuse, I have talked about the fact that it can happen to anybody. Over the last year, a number of people have come forward with very similar stories, including that they have subsequently found out that the person involved was a repeat offender, and they were perhaps the second, third, fourth or fifth individual that that person had got to, abused and then discarded.
There are some really important measures in the Bill; I will not go through them all for reasons of time. We have been working for a long time with organisations such as Women’s Aid on cross-examination in the family courts. Although this does not particularly need legislation, I would also like more awareness in the family courts of cluster B personality disorders, such as narcissistic personality disorder, so that people hearing the evidence are not taken in by a perpetrator’s superficial charm.
We have talked about economic abuse. I commend the work of organisations such as Lloyds bank, which is offering extra support to people it discovers are experiencing financial, economic and domestic abuse. It is so important that we educate others, including GPs. We heard from the former Secretary of State for International Trade, my right hon. Friend for—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Wendy Morton)
North Somerset.
Paul Scully
My hon. Friend could have intervened and given me an extra minute, by the way.
My right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) talked about the advice GPs have given about perpetrators. In the case of Luke and Ryan Hart, the GP explained that he thought their father, who went on to shoot their mother and sister in broad daylight, was a fine, upstanding member of society. Clearly, he was totally taken in by that gentleman’s narcissistic personality disorder.
The Bill’s measures on secure tenancies raise a few more questions. Crisis raised with me and other Members the fact that people who flee abusive relationships and request emergency housing have to keep telling their story at every level. It would be fantastic to have a single advocate with whom those people could go through that process, easing the burden on them. There is nothing worse for people than having to rehash their story time and again. Not everybody is as bold and brave as the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and can use their story for such powerful advocacy. Extraordinarily, the perpetrator often stays in the property; the person fleeing has to give up everything rather than being supported to stay in their house.
I welcome the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, which means we can start to talk about awareness. We are working on an awareness campaign that talks about entry-level red flags to stop people getting into abusive relationships in the first place. That is being led by the Daily Express, along with my former staff member, Robyn Thackara, who has become a formidable campaigner on emotional abuse issues and in particular highlights narcissistic personality disorder. They are doing a wonderful job to explain those basic things to stop people getting involved.
There is no domestic violence without emotional abuse in the first place, whether that is gaslighting or projection. Often, women—although, as we have discussed, this is not necessarily solely about women—are less like a frog in boiling water, which will leap out when it first senses danger and pain, than a frog in cold water that is heated up slowly. Women are often drawn into an abusive relationship over a period of time, until it is too late—until they have been brainwashed and, in effect, kidnapped in plain sight.
It is important to understand that, when we highlight narcissistic personality disorders and cluster B disorders, we are talking about people who cannot easily change. We therefore need to put the emphasis back on ensuring that people do not get involved in the first place and that all the organisations around them, and all of us, are aware. We need to talk about these things in the same way we talk about things such as “stranger danger” so we can look out for each other and people do not get in this position in the first place.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
May I start by saying how much I and many others present appreciate the consensual nature of the debate? As well as praising the leadership of my own party’s Front Benchers, who have been fantastic on this issue, I thank the Government Front Benchers for the remarkable leadership they have shown. In particular, I thank the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who has met me many times to discuss this and other issues. She was the first Member from the 2015 intake to go into government, so I see her as an ambassador for all of us in that intake, and she has done very well. The Minister for Health, the hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), was previously in the Ministry of Justice. Although he has now been moved to another Department, he is back here supporting the Bill. Those things do not get noticed by people observing us from outside, but they really matter to those of us who are here.
I was made very aware of the problem of cross-examination by perpetrators of domestic violence when a woman came to see me at a surgery soon after I became a Member of Parliament. She had suffered so much abuse—she had been raped multiple times, she had been knocked unconscious and she had been hospitalised more than a dozen times—but the perpetrator of those crimes, from prison, summonsed her to family court on three separate occasions. She told me that on the third occasion she had to ask the taxi driver to stop on the way home so she could vomit in the gutter because of the experience of being cross-examined by the perpetrator of the crimes against her. She told me that if she was summonsed a fourth time, she would capitulate and give him whatever he wanted. She was broken, not just by the criminal who raped and abused her, but by the system that allowed her to be cross-examined by him, and that allowed the abuse to continue under the nose of judges, and in front of police—the very people the state appoints to support and protect women like her.
After a huge campaign, both from Members from across the House and in the media, the Government finally gave way and agreed to make a change. I credit Mr Speaker with granting me an urgent question on the subject in January 2017, almost three years ago, at which the Government relented for the first time and promised to change the law. The right hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald), then Minister for Courts and Justice, said in response to the urgent question:
“This sort of cross-examination is illegal in the criminal courts, and I am determined to see it banned in family courts, too.”
He reiterated the urgency thus:
“work is being done at a great pace…the urgency is there.”—[Official Report, 9 January 2017; Vol. 619, c. 25-27.]
That is important. The woman I mentioned cried with joy at the news that there would be a change. In her words, she felt liberated; a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
However, we must recognise the scale of the suffering that there has been since the Government gave that commitment almost three years ago. While we celebrate the Bill finally bring brought in, there has been much suffering as a result of the delays. As Lord Justice Munby said on Radio 4 recently:
“Every day that passes exposes more victims to what is intolerable. Today, in court somewhere in this country, there will be someone—a frightened victim—being let down by the system. It must stop”.
I pay tribute to Lord Justice Munby for the support that he has shown for the changes.
In the time left to me, I want to mention quickly the role of Domestic Abuse Commissioner. It is essential that we get that role right. We have seen how Brexit eclipses everything in this Chamber; we urgently need an independent, strong voice for victims of domestic violence that can rise above that.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend share my concerns about how this place can scrutinise the new commissioner? I have absolutely no doubt that they will work in the best interests of all our constituents, but perhaps we are not yet sure how we will find that out.
Peter Kyle
My hon. Friend raises an incredibly important point. The Home Affairs Committee, after much deliberation, wanted the commissioner to be independent of Government and to report directly to Parliament, and I agree. The Joint Committee on the draft Bill suggested that there be Cabinet Office involvement to avoid conflicts of interest in the Home Office reporting line. It is important to stress that the Children’s Commissioner is independent of Government and Parliament. The Information Commissioner’s Office is independent, even though it is supported and sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. The independence of those organisations, even though they report every year to Parliament, is absolutely essential. That kind of independence would give a credible, powerful, unignorable voice to victims of domestic violence.
We hope that Brexit is in its endgame, but even if Parliament passes a deal, we will then enter years of negotiation and turmoil in this House. We need to make sure that we never lose our voice on domestic issues such as this, and particularly on support for victims of violent crime such as domestic violence. As the Bill moves into Committee, I urge a detailed re-examination of the reporting line to the commissioner, to ensure maximum independence for them, the greatest voice for abuse survivors, and maximum benefit to our body politic from the commissioner’s role. The commissioner-elect is here; I say to her and others observing the debate that I am not criticising her role but making sure that she has all the powers she needs. If she uncovers something that needs to be voiced and that needs to change, and we are too busy, or the media are too occupied, to listen to her voice, and if that is buried in the normal Home Office reporting line, that will be to her detriment.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I am delighted to follow my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), but I am also rather daunted—daunted because I am not a woman, because I am not Welsh and because whatever I say I am fated, along with everybody else, to be in the shadow of the outstanding contribution from the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield). If ever anyone needed evidence that domestic abuse takes on many guises, puts on many faces and can insidiously target anyone in any place, it was her emotional, harrowing and brave contribution.
I agree with everything that has been said, and I very much welcome the Bill. I want to comment on a few things that are not in it, however, rather than on what is. As we have heard, this is not just about changing legislation; it is about changing culture and the way we look at domestic abuse. We must demonise it wherever it rears its ugly head.
I want to concentrate on the impact on children. As we heard from the former Prime Minister, that is often overlooked. When I was Children’s Minister, I was shocked to find that over three quarters of safeguarding cases had domestic violence at their heart. Incredibly, one third of domestic violence cases start during the pregnancy of the woman victim. When women are abused in the home, the impact can traumatise the children. When they are forced to flee, the disruption to the lives of those children, particularly if they are of school age, is immense. Refuges tell us that around half of their residents are children, while 770,000 children live with an adult who has experienced domestic abuse in the previous year, according to the Children’s Commissioner. It is the most prevalent risk affecting children in need.
I was very proud, along with the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), to be part of the “On the Sidelines” report by the London domestic abuse charity Hestia, in collaboration with Pro Bono Economics and the “UK Says No More” campaign. It highlighted that one in four women and one in six men experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, but that the millions of children exposed to it in their homes are too often considered merely witnesses to the abuse, rather than victims themselves. When children are exposed, they can suffer in the short, medium and longer term, and it is also intergenerational, as we have heard in so many cases. Over half of people suffering domestic abuse as an adult experienced it as a child: “Well, it happened to my mum when I was growing up, so inevitably it’s going to happen to me, isn’t it?” That is an extraordinary culture that we absolutely must dispel.
Children need to feature more prominently in the Bill. Domestic abuse is the single most common factor that leads to children requiring support from local authority children’s services—and we know the pressure they are under. I have spent a lot of time on the doorstep with social workers. I spent a week being a social worker in Stockport. I met a fantastic and very experienced domestic violence specialist social worker who was the linchpin of that safeguarding team, a great authority who joined together various agencies. It is, however, a postcode lottery whether that experience is available in local authorities.
We need to embed in local authority delivery domestic abuse specialists able to draw together all the agencies involved to ensure an effective and comprehensive local offer. I welcome the national Domestic Abuse Commissioner, who started two weeks ago, but there is also a case for local domestic abuse commissioners—high-profile figures who can ensure that local authorities are living up to their duties to provide a local service. I believe that can be done only by including in the Bill a statutory duty on funding. By working with this cohort of expert frontline providers, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner could have a stronger role in strengthening planning at local and national levels to ensure that all are protected from abuse. That would help to embed the impact of domestic abuse on children in local safeguarding teams as well.
As an aside, I believe that health visitors have an important role to play, too, as an early warning system of trusted professionals going into houses to meet new parents. I reiterate, therefore, that it is a false economy to have reduced the number of health visitors by 30% since the excellent work the coalition Government did in building up their numbers by more than 4,000 by 2015.
Karen Bradley
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend. He was an excellent Children’s Minister and speaks with great authority on these matters. I was struck in the briefing document by the cost of domestic abuse and the fact that just a 0.1% decrease in the prevalence of domestic abuse would pay for the measures in the Bill. As he says, it is a false economy to stint on this.
Tim Loughton
As with so much to do with child safeguarding, getting it wrong is the most expensive thing.
We need to do much more work on prevention. We should task the Domestic Abuse Commissioner with looking at not just how we respond and making sure that perpetrators are locked up, but how we can prevent it in the first place, and better education in schools about what constitutes an appropriate relationship is an important part of that.
I want to make a few other quick points. Proper funding of refuge places, which has been promised by the Government, is essential. There was still a shortage of refuge places last year. It is not just a question of money, though; technical factors are also impeding the availability of urgently required beds. Women without children who are fleeing violence and who seek safety in refuges are not automatically considered to be in priority need of housing. I have been told by refuges that in some cases women are staying in hostels for several years, which is again a false economy, when they could be in independent housing, living safely with their children. We also need to give children who are living in refuges priority access to schools, as we have done for children in care and adopted children.
We have to look holistically at the issue. It is not just about better funding for refuges; it is also about making sure that we have better services across the board, including specialist domestic abuse service providers, child support workers, outreach workers and especially better joined-up working for women fleeing local authority areas when they have to go to a refuge. We need a network of refuges across the country.
This is a fantastic Bill. It can be improved. It is long overdue. Let us not ruin it by making it too complicated.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (LD)
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who concentrated on and spoke eloquently about the impact of domestic abuse on children. I, too, want to concentrate on putting children first and will focus my remarks on how domestic abuse is considered in the family courts.
Members will recall the debate I secured on this issue in September 2016. In my speech I referred specifically to a tragedy suffered by my constituent Claire Throssell as a way of illustrating as powerfully as I could the need for reform. Claire is with us today, sitting in the Under-Gallery, and I welcome her to the debate. I make no apology for recounting again in this Chamber her account of what happened on that dreadful day when her boys were murdered at the hands of their own father. I only wish the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) was in his place to listen.
“It took just 15 minutes on the 22nd October, 2014, for my life and heart to be broken completely beyond repair. I had warned those involved with my case that my happy, funny boys would be killed by their own father; I was right.
My boys were both with their father on that October day, and at around 6.30pm he enticed Paul, nine, and Jack, 12, up to the attic, with the promise of trains and track to build a model railway. When the boys were in the attic, he lit 16 separate fires around the house, which he had barricaded, so my sons could not get out and the firemen could not get in.
Only 15 minutes later…the doorbell rang at my mum’s. (We were staying there temporarily after the separation.)
‘It’s the boys, they must be early,’ my mum said—but I knew that wasn’t right. The boys would have run into the house and straight into my arms; they always did after a visit to their dad. They were frightened of him—he was a perpetrator of domestic abuse. The statutory agencies involved in our case knew this.
I opened the door. Blue lights were flashing.
‘There's been an incident at your former home; the boys have been involved in a fire…’
Running into the hospital, the first thing I saw was Paul receiving CPR. A doctor, drenched in sweat and exhausted, told me they were withdrawing treatment.
I held Paul in my arms. I begged him to try, to stay, to not leave me.
He looked at me, smiled, and the life left his beautiful blue eyes. His hair was wet with my tears as I kissed his nose. Then Paul, my boy, was taken out of my arms and into another room. There was no further chance of touching him; his little body was now part of a serious crime enquiry.”
I can never read those words or hear them—and I know the Minister feels the same, because she has sat with me and listened to Claire—without feeling the enormous loss Claire has suffered. But Claire is brave. She has chosen not to turn in on herself but rather to embrace love as a means of dealing with her tragedy. She has chosen to protect all children, if she possibly can, by making sure that the law is changed.
By that I mean reform of the family courts. We need access to special measures in those courts to separate survivors from the perpetrators, as well as special protection rooms, entrances and exits, and screens and video links. Clause 53, in part 1, provides for that to apply in the criminal courts, but we need to amend the Bill to ensure that it is extended to the civil and family courts.
Jess Phillips
Does the hon. Lady agree—and Claire’s case speaks to this more loudly than almost any that I have ever heard—that the presumption of access by an abusive parent has to end?
Angela Smith
I completely agree. Indeed, I was about to say exactly that.
We need to extend the ban on cross-examination by perpetrators to the family courts, because the Bill does not do that at present, and, more than anything else, we need to change the culture of the family courts. Claire’s children died after their father won the right to unsupervised contact. The domestic abuse that she had suffered from Darren Sykes was not taken seriously by any agency, or by the courts themselves. It was assumed that his children would be safe in his care. The judge who made that judgment is still practising in the family courts in Barnsley.
The research on this indicates clearly that a man who abuses his wife or his partner is more likely to abuse his children. We therefore need to end the assumption of contact when there is a risk to a child from domestic abuse, as called for by Claire and by Women’s Aid, and we need a ban on unsupervised contact when a father is awaiting trial, or is on bail, for domestic abuse offences. The Bill, as it stands, does not deliver such a provision. We also need to ensure that the definition of domestic abuse in the Bill includes coercive control as a source of harm to children. That point has been made by many other Members today.
The Bill needs to be amended along those lines if it is to be fit for purpose. That is the legacy that Claire has campaigned for—a positive legacy that would stand as a tribute to her children—and, in the name of Jack and Paul, we have a moral responsibility to secure these protections for all our children. Let us not miss this golden opportunity to secure the change that we need.
I support the Bill, but it can be better, and I hope that the Minister will agree when she sums up the debate.
Trudy Harrison (Copeland) (Con)
It is very difficult to follow the speech of the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), who talked of the terrible tragedy that happened to Paul and Jack, and to Claire Throssell, who is here in the Chamber today. I commend her bravery and courage in coming forward, and that is actually quite relevant to what I am going to speak about.
I am particularly pleased to speak in such a collaborative debate about such an important subject, and I commend the Government for introducing this landmark Bill. We have heard about harrowing cases today, and all of us will be supporting survivors of domestic abuse in all its forms in our communities. I welcome the focus on supporting survivors, because I have seen in my own constituency the enormous, positive difference that effective support can make.
The Ministry of Justice recently funded the brilliant Women Out West centre in Whitehaven, which was founded by the equally brilliant Rachel Holliday, and it is in that centre that I have met domestic abuse survivors. The recurring theme that I find so awful is the family courts system, and, specifically, the most dreadful cases in which mothers have been victims and, as survivors, have bravely and courageously sought help, only for a secretive family court to decide on the cruellest act, which is to remove their children. There can be no stronger bond than the bond between mother and child, and to have that bond torn apart is unthinkable, but it is far too often the outcome for mothers who seek help, or flee an abusive home and an abusive relationship. In some cases, the children are placed—by the state, by the family courts—directly in the hands of the perpetrator, with devastating consequences, as we have just heard.
I have been working with Safelives. I support its calls for cultural change in children’s social care, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service and the judiciary, and for the prohibition of unsupervised contact for any parent who is on bail for domestic abuse-related offences or undergoing the hearing process. The fear of social services is too often cited as the single main source of stress, and the cases of perpetrators of domestic abuse going on to abuse and even murder the children we are supposed to protect are a tragedy of our times.
At my local women’s centre, I learned of a survivor of domestic abuse. She is a qualified nanny who can continue to look after other people’s children, but her own children were taken away from her by the family courts and placed in the care of the perpetrator, who has no biological connection with them,. I commend the work of everyone who is campaigning to #getmhome. In support of the Bill, I commend all those—the organisations, the survivors and everyone else—who have worked hard to shape it and steer it to be as effective as possible. I reiterate the requirement for specialist domestic abuse training before cases reach the family courts which, I add, need to be looked at seriously.
Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)
I am pleased to be able to speak in this important debate. It is really pleasing that the atmosphere is one of unity, dignity and calm, as we all work together to get this Bill through and improve it.
I pay tribute to many hon. Members in the House who are strong champions of fairness and equality, who refuse to allow the Bill to die. Many of them have been in the House a lot longer than me, and should be proud of their record. I specifically want to mention my hon. Friends the Members for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), who is no longer in her place. Her contribution this afternoon was amazing, and many people outside the House will take heart from it.
The Bill has the potential to transform our response and reaction to domestic abuse. We have an opportunity to make history and genuinely protect those who need our solidarity, and to raise up those who have been ignored for too long. However, the Bill as it stands falls far short of meeting and achieving its full potential. One in four women experience domestic abuse in their lifetime; two women a week are killed at the hands of their partner or ex-partner; three women a week die by suicide as a result of the abuse they have experienced; and 2 million people experience domestic abuse in England and Wales every year. I make no apology for restating those shocking statistics. They are why it is essential that this incredibly widespread, devastating form of abuse is given the attention that it deserves, and that we use the Bill to deliver the reform that we all know is well overdue.
To deliver those reforms we need to improve the Bill, which must be amended to include reforms to universal credit and to housing and immigration law. Most importantly, the statutory definition of domestic abuse must be amended to reflect the reality of this crime—namely that women make up the overwhelming majority of victims and survivors, and more than 25% of victims are over 60. The Bill must be amended so that all survivors are protected from the traumatising practice of being cross-examined directly by the perpetrator. Can we imagine how horrific and intimidating it must be to have broken free of an abuser and come face to face with them once again in the courtroom?
I hope that the Government will advance the Bill through the House and the other place as swiftly as possible. The Minister must guarantee that it receives the attention and support that it deserves. Opposition Members and, I suspect, many Government Members will hold the Government accountable until the Bill receives Royal Assent and the funding from the Treasury that it needs and deserves.
Lastly, I would like to say a word about strong women: the strong women on the Opposition Benches to whom I pay tribute for their activism, campaigning and championing of this issue; and the victims of domestic abuse, to whom I say, “Stay strong, ask for help, and Members of the House are with you.” With a strong Domestic Abuse Bill, strengthened in Committee, we will be able to prove that inaction, apathy and ignorance will come to an end once and for all.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I have sat here listening to this debate and been taken to thoughts and memories of my own, which has led me to cross out almost the entirety of my speech, to the great frustration of my staff. I have probably wasted a lot of their afternoon. I often find in this place, particularly when I end up with a very short time to speak, that I need to skip things that would duplicate what others have said. Perhaps I will stick to talking about personal experiences.
I want to pay tribute, as many others have done, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) for her incredibly considered, experienced and passionate speech. Although many people have worked on this issue, the Bill should be considered a flagship and a real bastion of her time in No. 10. It is a hugely important legacy for her as an individual, as well as for the House. I also want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for her incredibly passionate and moving speech, which took me back to an experience that I will mention shortly. Her speech has every right and reason to lead the news later, but it will not do so because Brexit will once again kick other news off the agenda. Her speech was incredibly important in its own right and it will help people, even aside from this legislation.
I said that the hon. Lady’s speech reminded me of something. I recently ran the Mansfield 10K, which also made me cry, albeit in a slightly different way. That was a painful cry, but I survived it none the less. I ran the 10K to raise money for the charity Nottinghamshire Independent Domestic Abuse Services—NIDAS. I have been working with it for two years, since I was elected. Like so many charities around the UK, it helps people in their time of need, and it has helped more than 5,000 people in Mansfield and Ashfield over the past five years. That is an area of roughly 180,000 people, and the fact that it has supported 5,000 people in five years just goes to show the extent of this issue in my part of the world. We have some of the worst figures for domestic abuse anywhere in the country.
The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), came to visit NIDAS, and we both had a really interesting time hearing about the services it provides. It was also a very emotional visit. I find myself feeling increasingly emotional since I had children —I do not like to admit how much that is the case—and I sat in that room crying as I listened to the accounts of some of the women who had been supported by the charity. In particular, a piece of creative writing that one of the women had done through her therapy, supported by the charity, was really moving. The contribution from the hon. Member for Canterbury brought that back to me, so I thought I would recount that experience.
Many of the Bill’s obvious benefits have been discussed in this debate, including preventing victims of domestic abuse from being cross-examined by their perpetrators, and the creation of the new Domestic Abuse Commissioner role, which I hope will ensure that the focus of scrutiny continues long after we stop talking about the Bill in this place. Another example that brought me back to a personal experience was the idea of broadening the domestic abuse definition in law.
The hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on the Opposition Front Bench mentioned older people and talked about how the over-75s do not necessarily get the same support. I can give the House an example from a working-class community that I represent. For a lot of people who were married in the 1950s or 1960s, the husbands would have had the money and paid their wives a housekeeping allowance on a weekly basis. In many parts of my community, that is still the case. It is something that we do not necessarily see or recognise, and these days we in the Chamber would all probably think that it was unacceptable, but it persists and we do not even notice it in many cases. I was reminded of it by a point made by the Opposition Front Bencher, and it is something that we can now prevent, hopefully through the passage of this Bill and by providing a clear definition to help some of those women to come forward and say, “Actually, I now realise that this is not right.” Obviously there is a more detailed debate to be had throughout the community if we are to get all this right. As was mentioned earlier, even a tiny reduction in domestic abuse will make the Bill pay for itself. If these measures make anybody feel safer or bring perpetrators to justice, the Bill will have done its job, and for that reason I trust that it will have unanimous support in the House today.
Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
I would like to put my thanks on record for the leadership shown by both Front Benches on this important Bill.
For me, the debate is very personal, because domestic abuse has shaped everything I stand for and is what put me on the journey into Parliament. It is brilliant that once the Bill goes through women will have services available and we will have enshrined the definition of abuse in law. That was not always the case, and some women experienced so much abuse, when the services were not there, that they were driven to kill. Twenty-seven years ago, there was such a woman who killed her abuser and went to prison for 14 years. That woman was Zoora Shah, and she was my mum.
Jess Phillips
Does my hon. Friend agree that the recent case of Sally Challen has given voice to the issue? Hopefully, legal change will continue through the Bill to allow people to understand that some of these issues are not simply black and white, but the reality of the lives of people who have been terribly abused. The worst that can happen to a family can easily happen, as she is saying.
Naz Shah
I agree with my hon. Friend and thank her for that timely intervention.
Twenty-seven years ago, when Zoora Shah did not have the right services, she went to prison for 14 years. At the time, she did not tell her story. I am talking about this in this debate because I want to talk about specific services for BAME women, especially specialist services that understand domestic abuse, as my former colleague on the Home Affairs Committee mentioned.
It is more complicated for women of BAME heritage. My mother did not talk about being abused because of the concept of honour. I have talked about honour crimes before, and I shall give an example. Had Zoora Shah been arrested by an officer who was non-white, she might have had a different experience. Had she been arrested by a woman of colour, or even a woman of her background, they might have understood her experience of abuse, which drove her to kill. Had she been represented by a female solicitor from her cultural background, she might have had a different experience. Had her case been dealt with by a judge with an ethnic background or who understood her culture, the outcome for her might have been very different. The outcome of my life might have been very different, and that of my siblings and my family.
That is why it is important to have a reflective workforce. It is about having specialist services for women from black and minority ethnic backgrounds who understand the culture. When a lady called Tahmina rang me on a Saturday morning three years ago to say that a girl in Pakistan had been murdered, I could identify it straight away as an honour crime. That girl was not just murdered and buried: she became a campaign and a cause, ensuring that we talk about honour crime and about her rape, and continue to try to seek justice for her.
I have an understanding of honour and the impact of it on me. I will describe it in the words that my dear friend Sal used to me last week:
“Izzat”—
honour—
“is the shroud that covers me, weaved from the threads of my identity, integrity, values and the decisions that I make.”
I am emphasising honour because my mother served extra time in prison—she could not speak up because of the impact of honour. It is a code of conduct in my community by which we behave.
It is apt today that I talk about honour in a different context. Yesterday, The Guardian reported that in my election campaign in 2017 I had felt suicidal because I was dishonoured. My opponent, having a background from my community, knowingly ran a campaign in which a man in the community stood up and actually said, “When we buy a dog, we check its pedigree. Look at Naz Shah’s character, look at her demeanour, her chaal chalan”—as he put it—“and how she presents herself”. What The Guardian did not report was that in this email I equated that to honour abuse, and I do not say that lightly, as a daughter of a woman who at one point in giving evidence about her abuse referred to herself as having become a “mattress” to men. When someone who comes from that background ends up being a Member of Parliament and the shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, sitting on these Green Benches and able to represent the voices of those who are dead and buried thousands of miles away—
Peter Kyle
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for her speech, which is very wide ranging. She is cramming a huge amount into a short time, but we are learning a huge amount. She has mentioned the importance of having staff who are trained in issues relating to different ethnicities and BAME backgrounds and cultures. Does she agree that now that the Government are finally recruiting more police officers, it is essential that these issues are taken into account, as we have the opportunity to get more people into police enforcement?
Naz Shah
I thank my hon. Friend for his comment. I absolutely agree with it, which is why I am so passionate. I teach and deliver the diversity session at the national police strategic command course, because I want my experiences to influence that change so that we have a reflective workforce—the police officer, judge and solicitor I mentioned—for all these women.
Importantly, we must recognise that the experiences of women from BAME backgrounds are different. They impact upon us differently and they have ramifications for us. I was literally feeling suicidal during that campaign because my very fabric was being attacked publicly—honour really does play a part. When we talk about men who kill women because of “honour”, because they have been “shamed”, because it has impacted upon their izzat, I want this House to recognise the severity of that—of what it means. Even today, as a woman, I did not recognise my own forced marriage until I was in my 30s. I did not recognise that I was involved in marital rape until I was in my 40s. That is what domestic violence is.
As a proud survivor, I will say this to this House: we may be taking this into account and putting £300,000 into BAME specialist services, but that is not enough. We need much more for those women. We need that specialist service, in order to understand the experiences of migrant women—the experiences of women who do not have English as a first language. We need specialist services.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and to take part in this landmark debate. We have heard so many memorable contributions from all around the Chamber. This Bill has been a long time in coming, and although there has been much prior scrutiny it is very welcome. It provides the framework for tackling a crime that has scarred people’s lives for generations. The personal cost is enormous and the impact upon society is devastating. Good work is already being done, whether by the Waveney Domestic Violence Forum or the police and crime commissioner for Suffolk, Tim Passmore, but in many ways they are working with one arm behind their back. We need to empower them. This Bill can do that, but to be fully successful it must be underpinned by adequate funding, proper support for victims, and the promotion of a cultural change in society and across the whole public sector.
The Lord Chancellor and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), must take great credit for doing an enormous amount of preparatory work on this Bill. They have done much of the heavy lifting, but, as he stated, this Bill must not be viewed as the sole responsibility of his Department; it must be owned across government. We need to take down those departmental silos.
Refuge draws attention to one of the unintended consequences of universal credit that must be addressed—the need to reform those aspects of UC that currently facilitate and exacerbate economic abuse. Those reforms would include paying universal credit separately by default and abolishing the five-week delay for survivors. Refuge is also seeking an amendment to protect survivors of domestic abuse from the trauma and intimidation of being directly cross-examined in court by their perpetrator, which is inappropriate and wholly unacceptable. SafeLives urges the need for reform in the court system, and highlights the need for specialist support for adult and child victims through the family courts. It also emphasises the need for better funding of a larger number of independent domestic abuse advisers.
Nowhere—no home, no workplace—is a guaranteed sanctuary from domestic abuse. No one can be sure that they will never be a victim, but there are those who are more at risk—women, rather than men; children, who will carry the devastating impact throughout their life; and, as our society ages, older people, as my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) highlighted. That is a concern that Age UK has also highlighted. To age-proof the Bill, it has made four recommendations as to how it can be improved; I hope that the Government will take those on board.
The Bill has a great deal to commend it. It provides the framework in which we can eliminate a stain on society that has been there for too long. It must be a catalyst for change. This debate has provided an opportunity for the House to be seen at its best, led by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and ably supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) and the hon. Members for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) and for Bradford West (Naz Shah). We need to put aside our differences, come together and put in place a new way of doing things that can mean such a great deal to so many.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
This has been a very hard debate to listen to, with some truly remarkable speeches.
When I became the MP in Hull North, I was told that it would be possible to fill the local football stadium, which holds 25,000, with all the domestic abuse perpetrators in the city, and that in a class of 30 pupils, you could expect three or four to be living with domestic abuse at home. This morning, a constituent emailed me to say:
“I was abused domestically for 30 years which included physical abuse—including getting my head smashed against a wall. I suffered the range of coercive control in which for periods of time I could not access money.”
I know that police in Hull respond to 800 calls per month around domestic abuse. I am very aware how important this Bill is, therefore, and I was very pleased to be asked to serve on the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee. That Committee made strong recommendations, and the Bill would be better if all of those were accepted.
However, the Bill is only part of the solution. We need to ensure that work on domestic abuse is properly resourced, and that it co-ordinates with the ending violence against women and girls strategy that the Government have put forward. Hon. Members have spoken about many issues. The need to ratify the Istanbul convention and the needs of migrant women must be addressed, as must our concerns about the DWP, especially universal credit, and the role of the health service.
I want to comment on two issues. First, the recruitment of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner is widely welcomed; the commissioner could be a very powerful agent for change. However, I have already expressed in the House my surprise that the Home Office went ahead and recruited to that post on the basis of the December 2016 job description, which was a part-time post with accountability to the Home Office alone. The scrutiny Committee’s recommendation was that it should be a full-time post, and that accountability should be looked at and addressed. When we took evidence from the Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner, we heard from him that the best way of doing that was to put the accountability on the Cabinet Office and have the reporting mechanism into the Cabinet Office, not the Home Office, to provide that cross-Government approach to this issue. I hope that the Minister will reflect on that, because I am sure that amendments will be tabled in Committee to that effect.
My second point relates to women who are suffering domestic abuse and having their lives controlled. In particular, I am referring to their fertility being controlled and to them being coerced into unwanted pregnancies. This, of course, goes to the heart of women’s bodily autonomy. The Bill before us is an opportunity for us to recognise this particular problem. As the Minister knows, sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 says that, where a woman procures an abortion, she faces life imprisonment. The Abortion Act 1967 allows abortion in certain limited circumstances, but we know from Women on Web, which provides assistance to women who are seeking terminations, that the current law is not working for women, particularly for women who are suffering domestic abuse. Between May and June 2019, of 100 women who came forward, a third were not able to access abortion services because of domestic abuse and controlling behaviour, seven were hiding their pregnancy from a non-supportive partner, and one had been raped.
A few weeks ago, this House agreed to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, which means that sections 58 and 59 of the 1861 Act will no longer apply from early next year. We now need to do the same in this Bill to protect the women in England and Wales who could face the full might of the law under sections 58 and 59 of the 1861 Act and ensure that women, including those in very desperate circumstances, are not criminalised. I am sure that the Minister will expect that, at some point during the passage of this Bill through the House of Commons, this issue will be raised, and the House will be asked to a vote on it to put women in Wales and England in the same position as, hopefully, women in Northern Ireland.
Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)
It is a real privilege to speak in this debate. Over the past few weeks, the House has been criticised for some of our performances. Much of that has been set right by many of the speeches that have been made across the House today.
As other colleagues have mentioned, the majority of the Bill is devolved. However, just two weeks ago, when I was visiting Connect Alloa, a new youth club in my constituency, I was asked by a young person to raise the profile of domestic abuse, which is why I am speaking in this debate. There are several issues in the Bill that are pertinent to Scotland and I will come on to them shortly.
I am lucky that my constituency of Ochil and South Perthshire covers the two counties of Perth and Kinross and Clackmannanshire. In Perth and Kinross, we have below average rates of domestic abuse—incidents per head are far below the Scottish average—whereas rates in Clackmannanshire are consistently higher than the Scottish average. In fact, in Clackmannanshire, we have the highest incidence of domestic abuse per head in all of Scotland, so we have an issue. This is something that I have raised in this House before. I have also raised it when visiting Women’s Aid, locally and nationally, and local women’s refuges. My office works regularly with police and community groups to help various constituents with many different issues, which manifest themselves not only in deprivation, but in domestic abuse.
One of the problems we have when we come into this is that constituents not only face truly harrowing situations and real difficulties, but find it difficult to navigate a system that often relies on local government authorities to supply the majority of support, and the standards in different local authorities are inconsistent. For example, a constituent who moves between Clackmannanshire and Perth and Kinross will sometimes experience different levels of support in those two counties. Furthermore, we have many examples of people who have been married in the south or in Northern Ireland and swap into different parts of the UK. The transfer becomes an issue as there are issues about support and agencies are not talking to each other. When people are at their lowest point, the services are not delivering the level of support that they require. There are also issues about protection and about trying to provide people with a proper opportunity to start again when, of course, they are leaving a seriously abusive relationship.
A lot of this policy is devolved and, as many people in the third sector have said, some of the legislation in place in Scotland has set a gold standard, for which I praise my MSP colleagues. It is good that England, Wales and other parts of the UK will now be joining that standard. One thing to note, though, is that there is currently no commissioner in Scotland. When going through the Bill, there was an element of disappointment and frustration on my part as someone who has raised this issue in the House and Westminster Hall several times, and had promises from the Dispatch Box that the UK commissioner would cover the entire United Kingdom. This is important because of the transfer issues that I just mentioned—the fact that many constituents live their lives day to day, not through different levels of government.
People transfer between the counties of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland on a very regular basis, and we need to ensure that they are getting the same level of support and the same standards wherever they are in the UK. I hope Ministers will address that when summing up, and tell us how they are going to take this forward in the next stage of the Bill. Indeed, I will be working with colleagues across the House to table amendments to ensure that the UK commissioner is UK-wide—not in order to take powers away from anyone, but to maintain and promote good practice through the way in which the role is defined in the Bill.
My final point is a minor one about the extraterritorial powers included in the Bill. Obviously it is incredibly important that the legislation pertains to the entire United Kingdom, and I hope that all the national agencies will co-operate. Domestic abuse has an enormous impact on our constituents and their families’ lives. Everyone should be entitled to the support and services that are available across the United Kingdom. When people are at their lowest point, they should have access to services that support them when they need it. We must ensure that no constituent is left behind.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It has been a privilege even to sit and listen to the debate, never mind to contribute to it, particularly given the contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and for Bradford West (Naz Shah). It took extraordinary personal courage to make such contributions, and I know that they will resonate with the individual experiences of a lot of people watching at home and make a real difference to their lives.
Like many colleagues present today, I have been waiting eagerly for this debate over the last couple of years, since the Queen’s Speech in 2017. We thought for a while that we might not see the Bill in this Session, but happily we are here today. That is a testament to the lobbying and campaigning efforts inside and outside this place; and, I have no doubt, to the persuasive efforts of Ministers too. I think it is important to recognise the extraordinary leadership of the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), and the now Minister for Health, the hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), in getting us to this point. I hope that the Minister will take my comments today in that spirit as we seek to build on this work.
If we rewind the clock seven days to pretty much exactly this time last Wednesday, hon. Members will remember that we had a very difficult session in this place. We all have our version of events and our reasons why we think it was as it was. But collectively we know that, whatever those reasons, we all left with our reputations diminished. More importantly, the reputation of this place was diminished, and that is bigger than all of us. It is therefore really good and important that a week later, we have shown that when we come together in a spirit of co-operation and compromise, sharing our mixed and diverse experiences, we truly make an impact. It shows that the best days for this place are truly ahead—no more so than with this Bill.
This Bill will stand up for thousands of people across the country who are currently suffering abuse, and will hopefully avert it for many thousands of others. My views on the Bill are a matter of public record. I was lucky enough to serve on both the Home Affairs Committee when we had an inquiry on the Bill, and on the Joint Committee so ably chaired by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), so it is pretty clear what I think about the Bill and where we should go next, but today I want to focus briefly on three things.
Refuges are a precious national asset, and we ought to think about them as such. They are literally the difference between life and death for a vulnerable individual. High-quality, accessible provision is critical, but it needs to be a national network too, because a woman in my community in Nottingham is as likely to need a refuge in Birmingham tonight as they are to need a refuge close to home. But at the moment there is a toxic combination of a reduction in support—Refuge reports cuts to 80% of its services since 2011, at an average of 50%—and significant demand, with almost 60% of all refuge referrals being declined. This does not and will not work, and the Bill is a golden opportunity to get us to a position where we have a fully funded national network underpinned by statutory status. It is therefore disappointing that the Bill does not have a legal duty to provide. I hope that the Minister will expand a little on the thinking behind that, because both the pre-legislative Committee and the Home Affairs Committee majored on the value of this duty, which I believe is shown by the evidence.
There is also scope to be clear about the need for specialist services. I was lead councillor for commissioning in my local authority for three years. Local authority commissioners are under extraordinary financial pressures, which pushes councils to more generic commissioning, which is cheaper and more flexible. That will not work for refuges, so we should be clear in the Bill about our expectations.
Mr Speaker
Order. From now on, if we have interventions, it will mean that other people will not get in, which would be a great pity, so it would be better not to intervene at this stage. If the hon. Gentleman insists, he will of course be in order, but he will be stopping other people speaking.
Alex Norris
We heard in both Committees about the dangers that single payments were creating. We know that split payments on request will not work. No one is going to march their abuser down to the jobcentre and ask for split payments. If the Bill is not the vehicle for addressing split payments by default, what is that vehicle? If the change does not require primary legislation, why do we not get on to it?
With reference to having a gendered definition, it is welcome to have a statutory definition of domestic abuse for the first time, but it is a failure to define it and not even mention women or girls. Of course men are victims too and require the best possible support, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that domestic abuse is a gendered crime. It is gendered in the volume of victims, in the level of violence perpetrated and what it leads to and, crucially, in its root causes. I have heard Members from across the House today talk about our noble and lofty goal to eradicate domestic abuse. I join Members in that cause, but if we think we can do that in a Bill that does not talk about why domestic abuse happens or what we are doing when we condition our young boys and men to value themselves differently from women, we will never eradicate it.
We must take a stand. I remind Ministers that, in both the pre-legislative Committee and the Home Affairs Committee, we came up with workable solutions after great discussions. I hope that they will consider adopting them at the next stage in the Bill’s progress, because this is going to be a great Bill. We are coming together, we are doing a great job on it and I cannot wait to see it proceed.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
I welcome this Bill. Having sat through the whole of this debate, I want to pay tribute to the many Members from across the House who have made such moving speeches, which I cannot even begin to follow. I want to record my support for the Bill and the support that it enjoys across the House. It has been a privilege to be here today. Last week we saw the House at its worst; today we have seen it at its very best.
I agree with colleagues from across the House who have said that we should learn from reviewing the role of the anti-slavery commissioner and ensure that the Domestic Abuse Commissioner is truly independent of Government. I agree, too, with the many Members who have said that we must remember the impact of domestic violence on children. We must help to break the inter- generational cycle of abuse.
The Joint Committee on the Bill said:
“The cost of domestic abuse to the health service is high. We believe that a campaign to raise awareness and challenge behaviour should be undertaken…Such a campaign could be targeted particularly on online pornography sites.”
I want to touch on that point, because I want Ministers to give more thought to the fact that watching pornography online, particularly violent pornography, is clearly recognised as a causal factor in domestic abuse. I hope that the Government will take action to counter it through amendments to the Bill, but there is also—if I may mention it in this debate—action that Ministers can take today.
The Government have rightly said that one of their achievements is having
“committed to introduce age verification for viewing online pornography through the Digital Economy Act”.
However, there has been an unfortunate delay in the implementation of that world-leading legislation because of a failure to notify the EU. The Government acknowledged that on 20 June. As it happens, the three-month standstill period with the EU ends at midnight tonight. Assuming the EU does not come back tonight with any serious concerns—I think it might be preoccupied with other matters—can the Minister assure me, or perhaps obtain urgent assurance from her DCMS colleagues, that the British Board of Film Classification age verification guidelines will be laid before Parliament tomorrow, so that the implementation date can be three months from tomorrow, on 3 January? This is really important. Last week, the BBFC, which is and will be the age verification regulator, published a summary of research. It is a concerning document setting out that young children are coming across violent pornography and feel that it is affecting their views of relationships and the opposite sex. There are many other findings confirming this. In 2017, the UK Council for Child Internet Safety reviewed the 2017 internet safety strategy Green Paper and said that
“there is…evidence that viewing extreme pornography may be associated with…coercive behaviour.”
The Joint Committee that reviewed the draft Bill said that
“the access young people have to often extreme online pornography…can shape their view of what a normal sexual relationship might be.”
Young people’s access to online pornography needs to be tackled now. There should not be any further delay in the implementation of age verification. The Women and Equalities Committee inquiry into sexual harassment of women and girls concluded last October. There is significant research suggesting that there is a relationship between the consumption of pornography and sexually aggressive behaviours, including violence. The Government should take an evidence-based approach to addressing the harms of pornography. This is an opportunity for them to do so.
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for her work on the Bill, and also for today stating that this is not a Bill to have tagged on to it the issue of abortion. That is right because, leaving aside the question of under what circumstances abortion should be available, reform of the technical aspects of the law underpinning abortion is extremely complex and should not be undertaken by using Back-Bench amendments to an unrelated Bill. To learn our lesson on this, we need only look to the unforeseen circumstances now about to play out, sadly, in Northern Ireland later this month, with a five-month lacuna in the law on abortion there about to start because this place rushed through, with completely inadequate scrutiny, amendments to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Bill.
Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab/Co-op)
It has been an absolute honour and privilege to be part of this debate. Certainly, no one was unmoved by the contributions by my hon. Friends the Members for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and for Bradford West (Naz Shah). These personal contributions make so much difference to women outside this place.
In attempting to write my speech, and also listening to contributions from other MPs, what strikes me is the names of women and children throughout the year, and years previously, who were murdered as victims of domestic abuse. This Bill could not be more needed. The Home Secretary said yesterday at the Conservative party conference that the Conservatives are now the party of law and order once again. I would gently encourage Conservative Members to say to the Home Secretary that the way to bring murder numbers down is by committing 100% to this Bill.
We need to encourage the Government to accept the gendered nature of domestic abuse, with women being twice as likely to experience domestic violence and men far more likely to be perpetrators. As the Istanbul convention says,
“it should not be overlooked that the majority of victims of domestic violence are women and that domestic violence against them is part of a wider pattern of discrimination and inequality.”
I urge the Government to think again about ratifying the Istanbul convention.
I want to congratulate the family of Clare Wood for creating Clare’s law, including Clare’s dad, my constituent Michael Brown. The domestic violence disclosure obligation is vital in fighting domestic violence, but the heartbreak is that it is a postcode lottery, and only 45% of requests are granted. Early disclosure could save a woman’s life, so it is heartbreaking that this right to know and right to ask is a postcode lottery. When women are desperate—when they do need to get away—the Government must accept this obligation.
As my colleagues have said, refuges must be available. Over 400 women a week are denied a place of safety because there is not capacity. This is absolutely criminal. They go back to situations and we know what the conclusion is. We have heard their names today. We need greater clarity on the definition of domestic abuse, including distinctions between intimate partner abuse and other forms of family abuse. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West that BAME victims of abuse must also have extra special resources to support them.
In the short time remaining, I will mention some of my constituents. Lucy, a young woman with a son, has suffered. The hon. Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison) alerted us to the Kafkaesque nature of the family courts. Her son has been taken from her and placed with the dad, and the mum is really concerned about the son’s welfare. We must support these women to ensure that no child suffers because of the arcane nature of some of the family courts.
Jess and Kirsty were victims of economic abuse, driven to the brink by partners stealing from them and blocking legitimate sales of joint properties. The problem is that the banks have no legislation and cannot support. The police cannot support because no legislation is in place. These women are therefore pushed into poverty, often on to benefits and into temporary bed and breakfast, and the children suffer, all because the men in their lives are able to afford to drag them through the courts and strip them of their hard-earned cash and safety net. The Bill needs to go further with the banks so that they show flexibility and understanding when survivors are struggling to get out of financial agreements, such as a joint bank account or mortgage.
I pay tribute to my own council, Kirklees, in particular cabinet member Councillor Viv Kendrick, for taking a proactive approach to the issue. Just this week, Kirklees launched its own domestic abuse strategy based on a model used by the SafeLives charity. The partnership approach recognises that domestic abuse is not just a criminal problem or problem affecting children. It brings together, holistically, the police, clinical commissioning groups, safeguarding groups, community rehabilitation companies, the probation service, housing associations, drugs misuse services and more to tackle the problem, sharing information and pushing prevention and early intervention.
I must also mention meeting a young woman who was a victim of domestic violence and was saved by Sure Start. I also encourage the Government to think about those services for women with children.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin). I echo all hon. Members who rightly said that, following what we might describe as the rumbustiousness of previous days, today we have seen the Chamber at its best, with some amazing, moving and powerful speeches, not least that of the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield).
I strongly the support the Bill, but I want to raise an aspect that is not covered by it, which is that of coercive control in a professional relationship, specifically the relationship between therapist and client. This relates to the traumatic case of a constituent of mine. Her daughter was one of a group of young women—all from very affluent backgrounds, not coincidentally, because they were targeted as such—who in 2008 attended an art school in Italy, where they came into contact with a self-appointed therapist or, as she called herself, life coach.
The therapist practised dream therapy and professed to specialise in personal development. Over the course of the next year, the therapist saw up to a dozen of those women for regular therapy sessions. By early 2014, only three women were still seeing the therapist, one of whom was my constituent’s daughter. By that time, two of the women had broken off all contact with their friends and families, and had rejected their inheritances. The reason was that the therapist had used a tactic known as false memory placement. She placed into the minds of those girls, those impressionable young women, false memories of being abused by their own mothers. That has been proven and substantiated since, but when the case came to the Crown Prosecution Service, it had to conclude that legislation did not cover that specific outrage.
The current legislation refers to abuse in a domestic setting, and this is the Domestic Abuse Bill—I entirely understand that; nevertheless, in the case of my constituent, there was a crime—call it what one might, but it was theft, the theft of love. The love between mother and daughter was indoctrinated out, being replaced by false hate based on false memories. This is a terrible story, which previously received quite some media coverage, but I will not name anyone because parts of it are still ongoing.
The key thing is that, for me, it would be preferable if the definition of A and B in the Bill was confined not just to family members, partners or ex-partners, but to other types of relationship where coercion and control can happen. I can tell the House that I am aware from other parliamentarians that this problem is not restricted to the case I have mentioned. There have been other cases. The hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) has tried to bring forward a Bill connected with the qualifications of therapists. Previously, Lord Garnier tried to amend the Bill so that it could be a crime to use coercion and control in a professional setting. That is certainly what I would like to see.
I do appreciate the fact that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins)—she is doing brilliant things—has previously seen me about that case. I understand that the desire in the Home Office is to focus on the domestic context, but the fact is that the incident has had profound domestic ramifications, as hon. Members can quite imagine. The good news is that my constituent’s daughter did eventually get in contact and has returned, but there are many ongoing implications of the case.
As I say, I know from other parliamentarians, including Lord Deben, that there are many other cases like that one. I hope that, in the course of the Bill’s passage, we can look at the specific, relatively niche cases in which the crime of coercion and the use of certain psychiatric tools can emerge but that would not be covered by the Bill as it is currently drafted. I hope to be able to explore that at a later stage, if at all possible.
Jo Platt (Leigh) (Lab/Co-op)
May I take this opportunity to thank those on both Front Benches for their work on this Bill? I would also like to thank colleagues, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), for their contributions.
Before I talk about the Bill, I would like to pay tribute to Leanne McNuff. Leanne was the sister of my soon-to-be brother-in-law. Leanne was murdered in 2012 by her ex-partner in the most horrific circumstances—in front of their then four-year-old son. I know how this has affected the lives of all involved, and that grief will never go away, but I would like to think that this debate and any legislation passed by this House will go a long way to protect victims—and give Leanne’s family some comfort—so that crimes like this do not happen again.
May I welcome the broad intentions behind the Bill? It is a step in the right direction to give victims greater support and protection, but it is only a small step. A recent local case has exposed just how enormous the burden is that victims of stalking are expected to carry, and it has displayed gaps in support that these proposals will not fill. My constituent Nikita contacted me after she was subject to a horrific stalking ordeal, which included threats to her life and her children. Her perpetrator has now thankfully been moved to a psychiatric intensive care unit, but this has not been the end of her ordeal—far from it. He has been placed in an NHS unit less than a third of a mile from Nikita’s house. She has bumped into him in a local shop, and she has found him outside her house. Nikita can also see the NHS unit from her bedroom window.
Understandably, this is causing Nikita severe anxiety and concern for her safety and the safety of her family, but instead of moving the perpetrator away, Nikita finds herself offered new housing by the local authority, and she is expected to accept this move away from her support network. The expectation seems always to be on the victim to change their life. Indeed, when I wrote to the local NHS about their decision to place the perpetrator so close to Nikita’s home, it referred to its policy of placing individuals where they are close to local connections with friends and family in the community that they are familiar with.
The system has totally failed Nikita, and I am concerned that the Bill may become a lost opportunity to implement meaningful reform that protects the victims of domestic abuse and stalking. That underscores why we need a whole-system approach from across society not only to provide immediate support, but to prevent the unacceptable guilt or sense of wrongdoing that many victims feel when they are expected to change their life so dramatically. While this Bill contains many steps in the right direction, even if they are long overdue, it should go further. Until every victim of domestic abuse is given the protection, support and justice they deserve, we cannot rest. I hope that stories such as Leanne’s and Nikita’s bring to light just how far we have to go before society treats the victim with the dignity, compassion and basic respect that they deserve.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
One of my frustrations with being in this place is that I am often harangued by constituents who tell me how appallingly behaved the House is, but when I give them examples of the House at its best, they have rarely seen them; they tend to watch only when the House is full and in a rather febrile mood. I very much hope my constituents have watched what has unfolded this afternoon. It is heartening to have such cross-party support on such a vital issue, but it has also been incredibly moving to listen to hon. Members talk bravely about their own experiences.
I have always promised my constituents I would never break out into applause in the Chamber, but such was the feeling I had when the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) spoke that I did so for the first time. I also pay great credit to the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her bravery and for shining a light on issues for particular groups that, to be frank, it is very difficult for me to talk about in the same manner. She represents her community so well. I pay tribute as well to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). It is much easier to say “the Prime Minister”, and I wish I was still saying it, but it was remarkable to hear our former Prime Minister talk about this Bill, which she worked so hard to bring forward. I pay great tribute to her for all the work she has done to serve us.
It is hugely important that we not only shine a light on domestic abuse but do something about it. It is important that we raise awareness and understanding, but we must also improve the justice system and strengthen delivery for victims of abuse. If we do that, we will give them a voice and the ability to vanquish those who ruin their lives. It is essential that the Bill delivers for victims.
That is why I want to focus on what may occur in Committee. It is essential that the Bill remains roughly in a shape that allows it to succeed. There is a great danger that if it is overloaded with too many amendments, it ultimately will not deliver in the way we have discussed. Therefore, although I agree strongly with my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) about abortion reform, which I very much favour, I do not believe this is the right Bill to deliver that reform. I will vote for that reform when it comes, but I worry that there would be an impact on this Bill if it were used in that manner.
I also note the understandable desire to look again at the definition of domestic abuse. It is absolutely right that we recognise the disproportionate impact it has on women, which is understated, but if we insert that in the definition, we may well lose sight of what should be the definition in legislation. It is more important that we have strict guidance that ensures that, for example, local authorities take that disproportionate impact into account when making funding decisions. I look to Ministers to ensure that the Bill is strong enough that services reflect the disproportionate impact of domestic abuse on women.
There have also been calls for relationships between under-16s to be included in the definition of domestic abuse. If we did that, we would need to be very aware of the impact of criminalisation on under-16s and ensure that there were age-appropriate consequences. If the perpetrator is over 16 and the victim is under 16, that is child abuse. We must ensure that we do not lose sight of that.
On barriers to justice, it makes a great deal of sense to extend the prohibition on cross-examination by perpetrators to family courts and, indeed, civil courts. However, I have received petitions suggesting that we would need to think very carefully about how our family court system, for example, would look if we also prohibited cross-examination where domestic abuse was alleged rather than demonstrated, and if we widened the definition to include online abuse.
I am very concerned about the difference in local authority funding for statutory and non-statutory services. We are losing far too many non-statutory services, which are often those to do with prevention and early intervention, and which prevent us from needing statutory services. Looking closely at statutory requirements in the Bill would help us to deliver its aims.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
I pay massive tribute, as everybody has done, to those who have spoken, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), and the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), whose contribution was so moving. When we in this place talk about these things, people really are watching. Victims of domestic abuse will today feel that we care about them, and even if that is all we achieve today, that is a good thing to have done.
I notice that during this debate, Prorogation 2.0 has been announced. Somebody sent me a tweet saying that there is a view that Parliament will prorogue—sorry, shut down—again. I want assurances from the Minister, when she sums up, that we will use Standing Order No. 80A—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
I am delighted to be able to confirm that. Indeed, the carry-over motion is on today’s Order Paper. The Bill is carrying on.
Jess Phillips
Super-duper. I am delighted to hear that.
As everybody else has said, it has been an honour to work on the Bill over the past three years—I wish it had been only one or two—not only with Front Benchers on both sides on the Chamber, but with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and others who are no longer on the Front Bench, including the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes). She spoke of having listened; I feel delighted to have been in the meeting about migrant women under the Bill that she spoke about so eloquently. Also, I should mention the people sitting in the Box—the civil servants we have worked with to get the Bill in front of us today, and to carry it over. It has been a real privilege to help ensure that this place recognises the effect of domestic abuse on our communities.
For the past three weeks, I have been fighting for us to come back to this place just for the sake of this moment, this day—just so that we could get this Bill back into this place. I found myself in the treasured position of defender of the Domestic Abuse Bill, as though it were mine. It is not mine; it is a Government Bill, and that needs saying. However, as a defender of the Bill, I will defend the point that improvements certainly need to be made to it.
As the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North stated, in the Bill’s next stages we absolutely must aim for it to be for all victims and all women—I am not afraid to say “all women” in this context. I truly mean that. It does not matter what a person’s status is; if my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury has taught us anything today, it is that it does not matter who someone is; the primary thing we should see when they first disclose abuse is what happened to them. It should not matter if they were born in this country, if they are here on a spousal, student or refugee visa, or if they are an EU citizen. What we should see in front of us is the person, and we should ask what we can do to help them. The Bill needs a huge amount of work in that area—not just around migrant women, but around disabled and older women and LGBT people.
With all the good work being done in here and across Departments we still need to stop essentially just seeing a benefit-dependent woman with a couple of kids in a refuge. Disabled women are being turned away. I ran refuges and I think we had two disability access beds out of hundreds of beds. It is simply not enough any more. We live in a society where we have to take need into account, no matter what. We have to take into account the likelihood of someone being abused if, for instance, they are a carer or have someone caring for them who can easily control them.
I want to say one final thing—I could speak for weeks and weeks, but I won’t. The statutory duty on refuge accommodation is so welcome. I had to explain to my husband what it was when the Ministers rang to tell me they were going to do it. I was not allowed to tell anyone, but I really wanted to tell someone. My husband was slightly nonplussed. We were promised at the time of that brilliant step forward that there would be £90 million in the next comprehensive spending review. We have now had that comprehensive spending review and it was not in there. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us where the cash will come from.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
It has been a true honour to listen to this historic debate. It is a landmark Bill and this needs to be a watershed moment, not only in how we protect victims of domestic abuse, but in how we stop that abuse happening in the first place.
I would like to put on the record my deep respect for my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who never forgot the importance of this work, despite the many other responsibilities she had as our Prime Minister. I also thank the Minister and my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), whom I enjoy working with on the Select Committee, and I particularly thank the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for letting us into her heart today.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a barrister who spent decades specialising in family law cases and who shared with me many examples. We spoke about some of the specifics of the Bill—the importance of a legal definition, the practical support—but what he said was most important was the overall message it would send: that domestic abuse is simply not acceptable, that society stands behind the victim, and that we will not tolerate giving a hiding place to perpetrators.
As a constituency MP, over the past couple of years I have often had victims of domestic abuse come to speak to me because they do not know where else to turn. They are fearful of their abusers and that if they speak out the system will be loaded against them. Those who are brave enough to call for help are fearful during the investigation and in the court process, especially if they have to give evidence in front of their abuser, because they have heard that witnesses can sometimes be intimidated. That fear leads them to suffer for years in silence. It is the fact that the Bill takes action to address these issues that has been welcomed by so many organisations that support victims up and down the country. I would especially like to put on the record my thanks to Safer Places in Essex.
Many Members have called for action in specific areas, and I would like to mention three. First, I have had cases of parents or siblings who suspect that their son or daughter, or brother or sister, is the victim of violence—they have seen the evidence with their own eyes—but who do not know where to go for advice, and if they report the situation, they find themselves powerless to protect their loved one. Can we look again at these cases of family members who want to help?
Recently, I had a case of a couple where the victim was renting a shared private property with her abuser. Both tenants needed to give permission to cancel the tenancy, so one tenant could not get out of the property without the other’s approval, meaning they were trapped in their home. Can we look at the tenancy law in these cases?
Finally, we have seen time and again how online abuse tips over into real-world violence. I recently met representatives of the Revenge Porn Helpline. They are helping thousands of people, and nearly all of the cases involve women. They explained to me how threats of revenge porn trap the victim of violence in the abusive relationship. They shared their concerns that, as the internet moves into deepfake videos, it will be possible to superimpose someone’s face on to another person’s actions, send the video over the internet and use it as a threat to hold that person in an abusive relationship.
The digital world is evolving at an exponential rate. Time and again we explain to people that we are working on online harms in order to keep people safe, but the work in that space has to accelerate.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
It is a privilege to participate in this debate, and I congratulate all colleagues who have been involved in bringing the Bill to this point.
I will speak briefly about a particular group of women who have experienced domestic abuse and violence: women who offend. According to Ministry of Justice data, 57% of women in prison and under community supervision who have had an assessment are, or have been, victims of domestic abuse. Research suggests that the true figure is, in fact, likely to be very much higher. Some women are particularly vulnerable—for example, those with learning disabilities—and, as we heard earlier from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), some will suffer traumatic brain injury, a situation disproportionately reflected in women in the penal system.
The Prison Reform Trust report of 2017, “There’s a reason we’re in trouble”, makes clear that for many of these women it is specifically the abuse that drives them to offend. Many offend as a result of coercive control or abuse or threats by an intimate partner. That can lead them to commit offences such as shoplifting, theft, fraud or dealing in illegal substances. The Crown Prosecution Service and sentencers do, of course, take account of that context for a woman’s offending behaviour, but the approach can be patchy and inconsistent. It would be appropriate, therefore, to consider introducing, through the Bill, statutory protection in such circumstances.
We have a precedent for that in the Modern Slavery Act 2015, section 45 of which provides victims of human trafficking and modern slavery with a statutory defence if they are compelled to offend. That opens up a route to proactive early case management. It allows all agencies, including the courts, to become more adept at recognising and responding to circumstances that should indicate either that there is no public interest in prosecuting a case or that a statutory defence should apply.
We do not have equivalent statutory protection in relation to victims of domestic abuse who are driven to offend in not dissimilar circumstances. There is a common law defence of duress, but it applies only in restrictive circumstances. Introducing for victims of domestic abuse a new statutory defence equivalent to that in section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act would lead to improvements in how they are dealt with in the criminal justice system, including identification of victims and provision of support. It would also help the UK meet its international legal obligations.
I understand that Ministers are considering that possibility. Indeed, it was pleasing to hear the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), who has responsibility for prisons and probation, refer specifically to that at the Prison Reform Trust’s recent transforming lives conference. As the Bill continues its parliamentary passage, I hope that the option will be taken to include statutory protection for survivors of domestic violence and abuse who offend. I look forward to hearing from the Minister, in her final remarks, the Government’s attitude to that proposal.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Let me add my congratulations and thanks to everyone who has been involved in the Bill’s introduction. Let me also pay tribute to the many moving speeches we have heard today. The debate has brought out the best in this place, but I want to mention in particular the moving accounts given by my hon. Friends the Members for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and for Bradford West (Naz Shah).
We need to recognise that, although we are taking a momentous step, it is sad that we need to be here to introduce a Bill such as this. It is a sad indictment of our society. Given that leaders have such an important role in determining the culture and tone of society, we have to ask what that says about the quality of our leaders and our leadership. Although we have legislation which says that women are equal to men, we all know that that is not the case. Unless we address the power inequalities that women face in their jobs, whether they relate to gender pay gap or glass ceilings, it will be a challenge to tackle the power inequalities in their relationships. We need to address the two together. I should like to hear from the Minister how the Government will go about adopting the whole society approach—not just a cross-departmental approach—that has been recommended by Women’s Aid.
In the remaining time that I have, I want to add to the comments that have been made today, and also to ask specific questions about our public services and, in particular, our social security system. We need to ensure that the system is supportive, and does not impede women—or men—who may want to escape from abusive relationships. We have already talked about universal credit and the single household payment that is the norm. I know that the Minister will refer to the alternative payment arrangements that are available, but someone in an abusive relationship may have problems with access to those. The wait of at least five weeks for universal credit is a penalty in itself, but women in refuges may wait for double that time, especially if they have had to leave without any paperwork. One of my constituents, Suzanne, was very brave and left an abusive relationship, but was moved from tax credit to universal credit because of her changed circumstances—the so-called natural migration—and is now £400 a month worse off. The two-child limit is another issue that must be addressed.
I also want to say something about disabled women. As I told the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities when it was investigating breaches in the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities back in 2015, disabled women are twice as likely to experience domestic abuse as non-disabled women. That abuse may be physical, emotional, sexual or financial, and the abusers may be personal assistants or, in many cases, carers. We must ensure that that is recognised.
Finally—I am being quite brief today, Mr Speaker, which is not like me at all—the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said that there needs to be a statutory approach to ensure that public services support both men and women, and has drawn particular attention to the importance of the social security system, which I have already mentioned. That needs to be a human rights approach, and those services need to be adequately funded.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (LD)
In my time as a GP and also as a forensic medical examiner, I learned very quickly never to make assumptions about who are the victims of domestic abuse, or about how much courage it takes to come forward because of the extent to which such abuse isolates and terrorises its victims.
I pay particular tribute, as others have done already, to the hon. Members for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for sharing their deeply moving personal stories. They will have done so much to encourage others to come forward and take that first step to safety—and this is about safety. Two women a week are killed at the hands of their current or former partners. We also need to do something about the under-reporting of the number of women who take their own lives as a result of being in abusive domestic relationships. We must ensure that there is proper reporting, and also better reporting of the gendered nature of this crime.
It is the job of this House to do all those victims justice and to make sure that the services are there to meet them when they come forward. Likewise, we must ensure that the criminal justice system responds rapidly and sensitively, and that services are also there for perpetrators and we do more on prevention and early intervention, because this crime goes through cycles of generations. Those who have witnessed terrible abuse may be more likely to become abusers themselves.
I will touch briefly on protection orders, on tackling variation, and on alcohol and services. I welcome the change in the Bill to domestic abuse protection orders rather than orders for domestic violence prevention. Those provisions will take us a lot further. It is encouraging that the Bill gets rid of the 28-day limit and that there will be an increased number of settings in which people can apply for the orders and more individuals who can do so.
There is much to welcome but, as the Minister has set out, that takes time. The Stalking Protection Act 2019 received Royal Assent in March, but sadly it will not come into force until the new year. However much we welcome the legislation, we know that there will be a delay. When the Minister responds to the debate, will she explain how we tackle variation in the existing orders? She will know from Home Office data that there is huge variation. For example, three orders were applied for in one assessment period in Cambridge, as opposed to more than 250 in Essex. There can be no reason for that kind of variation. Some data from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary show that the use of the orders had gone down. Will the Minister set out what we are going to do to encourage the uptake of existing orders while we are waiting for the improved version to come into force?
I would particularly like to touch on the role of alcohol, because I do not think it has come up in the debate so far. Of course, alcohol is never an excuse for violent crime, but typically 25% to 50% of perpetrators have been using alcohol at the time of the offence. In particular, we know that there is a link with the very violent forms of domestic abuse—in those cases, alcohol is twice as likely to be involved. Will the Minister look at how we can take an evidence-based approach to alcohol in our policy? Will she set out what she is going to do to review alcohol policy so that we can make a difference to domestic abuse, as it is a significant factor?
Services must also be available for perpetrators. We are going to introduce protection orders, and it is welcome that there will be positive as well as negative requirements. If people are referred, those services need to be in place so that they can respond. I am out of time, so I shall conclude.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to make a contribution to this important debate. It has been my privilege to be here for the whole debate and to hear many brilliant speeches, particularly the amazing speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), whose courage in speaking about the domestic abuse and coercive control that she suffered will give others the hope and courage they need to speak up and get away.
I pay tribute to the Mother of the House for raising the issue of the “S&M” defence in relation to the terrible death of Natalie Connolly, which was the subject of a powerful speech by the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier); and to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), who spoke courageously of her own family experience and the needs of BAME women under the Bill.
I particularly want to raise the effect of domestic abuse on children and their inclusion in the Domestic Abuse Bill. Under the Bill, the definition of domestic abuse would not extend to relationships between persons under 16 years old, but this subject have been hotly debated. The Children’s Society is arguing for a wider definition and suggests that an age limit of 13 years would be more appropriate, to include teenagers who are in relationships and experiencing violence or abuse and to allow for an early response to prevent abuse from escalating. This view is supported by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, but opposed by Action for Children to ensure that abuse of under-16s is always regarded as child abuse. However, the NSPCC makes the point that child abuse can include the emotional impact of being exposed to harm as a result of witnessing the abuse of one parent by another. It says that by failing to recognise children as victims in law, the Government are missing a crucial chance to give young people an extra layer of protection.
At the Labour party conference last week, I met a representative from Barnardo’s. She was delighted that the Bill was going to be discussed, and she welcomed the Government’s commitment to it. However, she talked to me about the impact of domestic abuse on the lives of vulnerable children. Living in an abusive household is hugely traumatic for children and can cause long-lasting emotional scars. Without the right support, children in this situation are at risk of becoming trapped in a lifelong cycle of violence. These children need access to vital services such as counselling and mental health services so that they can recover from the harm they have suffered and work towards a positive future.
Research demonstrates that specialist children’s services reduce the impact of domestic abuse and improve children’s safety and health outcomes, which is why it is so concerning that dedicated support for children and young people is falling. The Joint Committee supported retaining the age limit of 16 because of concerns that a consequence of lowering it would be the criminalisation of perpetrators under 16 years old. However, the Joint Committee recommended that the Government conduct a specific review of how to address domestic abuse in relationships between under-16-year-olds, including age-appropriate consequences for perpetrators, and I hope to see the results of that review and that guidance colouring the way in which we debate this Bill.
Women’s Aid has recently launched a website called LoveRespect to support teenage girls at risk of relationship abuse and to challenge myths around the nature of coercive control. Teenage girls may not realise that they are experiencing relationship abuse, and they are less likely than older women to call a helpline. Researchers found that two thirds of teenage girls who had been in abusive relationships did not recognise the behaviour as such. This highlights the importance of educating young people on what healthy relationships should look like. Having a bad boyfriend should not be seen as an acceptable rite of teenage passage. We need to get the impacts of coercive and controlling behaviour into the Bill, given that it will inform efforts to address domestic abuse and guide the response of agencies and statutory services. It is vital that the needs and experiences of children are reflected on the face of the Bill.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate and the spirit in which it has been conducted across both sides of the House. There has been an atmosphere of support, particularly to those who have experienced coercive control and violence, and that is very welcome.
I also very much welcome the bravery of my hon. Friends who have spoken out about their own personal experiences. We need people to recognise across the House and across the country that this can happen to anyone, and that everyone can need our support at some time. I hope that the atmosphere of this debate can feed through into a zero tolerance of domestic abuse and coercive control, because these things are happening too widely. With 2 million adult victims and millions of child victims, this is happening in a substantial number of households across every constituency and across every walk of life.
There are so many areas that we need to cover in the Bill, in other Bills and in other Departments, as I said to the Secretary of State in an intervention earlier. From my personal experience on the Work and Pensions Committee, I can say that the first is the way in which the benefit system does not support women who are leaving violent or coercive relationships. They can be left without even the fare for a taxi to get away from the household they are living in. It is welcome that each Jobcentre Plus now has a domestic violence specialist, but unless people are prepared to come forward and declare that they are a victim of domestic violence—or exhibit the signs strongly enough for it to be recognised—it will not be recognised.
The former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions declared that universal credit payments should go to the main carer in the first instance, and I hope that that will be done. Just 60% of payments go to the main carer, and that is not good enough. It means that for 40% of parents on universal credit the money does not go to the main carer, and it is important that that happens.
Other hon. Members have mentioned the two-child limit, the benefit cap, and the local connection rules for housing, which often mean that women who have escaped a relationship simply cannot get by and have to return to a violent environment. That is just not good enough.
We also need to make sure that employers support victims of domestic abuse. I worked for the shopworkers union, USDAW, and the reps did some fantastic work learning about the signs of domestic abuse and how to support victims. We are still seeing employers seeking to avoid giving paid leave to victims of domestic abuse; failing to allow them flexible working; and refusing to allow them to change to another branch of the firm if they have had to move away from their original address. Those are all simple ways in which employers can support victims of domestic violence.
We also need to make sure that those who work on the frontline are protected from third-party harassment. In a shocking case, one of my constituents had been abused in a long-term relationship. She left the relationship, and her ex-partner came to the shop where she worked to threaten, harass and violently assault her. Even though she had a protection order against him, her employer told her that it was not good for the image of the company for her harasser to turn up, and if she did not stop him doing it, she would lose her job. We cannot have victims of third-party harassment from any member of the public—and, particularly, victims of abuse—not receiving protection under the law. I hope that the Minister will look at including that protection in this Bill or another that comes forward very soon.
We need to make sure that victims of domestic abuse feel that they can come forward in any situation, whether they are claiming benefits or in work. I hope that the Bill will enable us all to make that happen.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to be the final contributor from the Back Benches in this amazing debate. It has been a fantastic debate in which we have heard the personal stories of my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield)—and how moving were their accounts.
I want briefly to pay tribute to three of my constituents who are experts in this field. The first is Harriet Wistrich, a barrister from the Centre for Women’s Justice, who led the work on the Sally Challen case. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West will appreciate the work that Harriet has done in driving forward legal change so that other women who have been forced into a situation in which they have killed their husbands or partners receive a fair trial and access to the law.
The second person I briefly wish to mention is the outgoing chief executive of Solace Women’s Aid, Mary Mason, a constituent of mine and an expert in her field. Her life has been dedicated to improving the situation for women, and I am sure everyone in this House would like to thank her for the years and years she has given to women who have been facing violence.
The final person I wish to mention is a woman who has tragically passed away but who also did an amazing amount of work. I understand that she worked closely with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) in developing not only the beginnings of this Bill but the Modern Slavery Act 2015. I refer to Denise Marshall, who tragically passed away due to cancer a couple of years ago but who did an incredible amount for Eaves, a fantastic charity that works closely with government to promote better services for women.
Each of us will have a domestic violence charity or statutory sector service in our constituency, and mine is Hearthstone. What is wonderful about it is that it is based in the local authority but it has its hands on the allocation of housing. Before, when best practice was considered to be in the voluntary sector or civic society, it could be an advocate, but being based within the council allows Hearthstone to keep a close eye on allocations. It is therefore in a great position to assist women who are escaping domestic violence.
I wish to make two quick points that we have to consider when we finalise the Bill. The first relates to women and families who have no recourse to public funds and the second relates to women on different spousal visas. A number of Members have mentioned that today, and I want to mention it so that we can be assured that it is looked at once again before Third Reading. I would be grateful if the Minister clarified what view she is taking on different immigration arrangements, as there are women who are trapped in violent relationships because of their spousal visa arrangements. We desperately need that element of the Bill to be sharpened up before it goes to Third Reading.
Matt Western
My hon. Friend is making some extremely important points. Does she agree that there are two issues here? The first is about access to accommodation, particularly for women who have been in refuges. There is a lack of capacity in council house provision, so authorities are struggling to place women out of refuges and those women are then spending considerably longer than expected in refuges. The second issue is the lack of provision within local police forces of specialist officers who can deal with victims of domestic abuse.
Catherine West
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead put it well in her good speech: this is not just about the legislation. We have to have resources, more police and more services at local level. We can have the best legislation in the world, but if we cannot enforce and we cannot prevent, what is the point of our sitting here and having beautiful legislation?
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
It is a privilege to reply to the debate this evening, which has shown the House of Commons at its very best. I wish to start by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who made what I believe to have been her first speech from the Back Benches since leaving office as Prime Minister. She set the tone of the debate and said that domestic violence was not something that should ever be viewed as being “behind closed doors”. That attitude was prevalent in the past and we must do all we can to ensure that it is not prevalent in the future.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for making a courageous and extraordinarily moving speech. Not only did it have a considerable impact on everyone in the House who heard it, but it will have an extraordinary impact on everyone outside this House and give them extraordinary confidence about speaking out in the dignified way she has done today.
I also pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and to the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), for their remarks about the harrowing Natalie Connolly case. I am sure that amendments will be tabled in Committee that relate to the issues that were identified in that case.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) for her remarks about serial perpetrators; to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), who drew on her experience of working in the domestic violence field in the past; to my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman), who spoke very well about the Bill’s potential impact; and to my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), who spoke very well about an issue to which I shall return—the cross-examination of victims in the family courts by their perpetrator.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) spoke about the various people who have had an impact on the Bill’s coming into being. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her extraordinarily moving contribution, both about her mother and her experience as a survivor. Her speech, too, will reverberate far beyond this House. Her achievements are an inspiration to others.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), who spoke about controlling behaviour; my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), who spoke about refuge funding; my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), who also mentioned the need for reform of the family courts; my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Jo Platt), who spoke very movingly about the experiences of Leanne and Nikita; my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), not just for her speech but for all her extraordinary work in this area; my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who spoke very movingly about experiences in prison; my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), who talked about the importance of a whole-society approach; my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), who spoke about the impact of domestic violence on children, and my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George), who spoke about reform of universal credit. It was fitting that my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) ended with a tribute to charities in this area, who do so much across all our constituencies to make lives better.
The Bill has produced a remarkable degree of welcome consensus in the House today, but it will clearly need work in Committee. I will start with the definition of domestic violence. I agree with the former Prime Minister, who said that it was clearly a step forward to have a statutory definition. Reading clause 1, though, it seems to me not to include abuse perpetrated by a person in a position of trust. I believe the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) mentioned an example of it, but there may be other examples in the domestic context that are not quite covered by clause 1. I ask the Minister to go away and look at that issue. Hon. Members across the House have picked up other issues, including the impact on children and the gendered nature and impact of domestic abuse, that need to be considered as the Bill progresses.
I welcome the appointment of a Domestic Abuse Commissioner, although I consider that person should be full time. The commissioner must obviously have the powers to provide the strategic oversight that we need, and to hold public authorities in this area properly to account.
I welcome the domestic abuse protection notices and domestic abuse protection orders, and the extension of special measures for complainants mentioned both by the Lord Chancellor and the Chair of the Justice Committee in their opening speeches. I consider that the domestic violence disclosure scheme should be on a statutory footing, and I am pleased to see that in clause 55. As many hon. Members have mentioned, one of the issues with domestic violence is that it is often the victim who ends up homeless. I welcome in the Bill the suggestion of new secure lifetime tenancies in England, which is a step forward.
I return, though, to the issue of cross-examination in the family courts. It has been the case for some time in the criminal courts that perpetrators of domestic abuse could not cross-examine their victims in person. It is high time that that protection was extended to the family courts. However, as I think the Joint Committee picked up, it does not seem to be mandatory; it still seems to be at the discretion of the court. The last thing we would need is for that to be inconsistently applied; it should be consistently applied across the system. That point that has been picked up already.
There are other issues, of course, that are not a part of the Bill as it currently stands. There is, for example, no statutory duty to fund refuges, but we all know that refuges are in dire need of more funds. There also needs to be a whole look across Government at other policies that have a huge impact in this area, including, for example, to whom universal credit is paid and the five-week wait, just to mention two particular issues that clearly have an enormous impact on domestic violence that the Government need to consider.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), in an intervention, mentioned migrant women, which is a very important issue. They are too often denied the chance to apply for indefinite leave to remain and prevented from accessing the public funds and the services they require. I urge the Government once again to go away and look at that situation.
This Bill before us today clearly contains a series of measures that will be welcomed across the House, but I urge the Government to keep an open mind in Committee about various issues that will arise in the course of this Bill. If the Government are willing to be constructive, we can, together, make it a much better Bill. I do pay tribute to those on the Government Front Bench and, indeed, to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for the work that they have done so far. I urge them to continue working together to make this a truly historic Bill of which we can all be proud.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
I hope that colleagues will forgive me if I depart from what Ministers normally do in winding up—which is to look at our files and the prepared speeches that our wonderful officials write for us—and speak from my heart because this has been an extraordinary debate. We have had the most compelling, the most heartfelt, the most heartbreaking examples of domestic abuse laid out before us. I cannot hope to do justice to those accounts in the short time that I have, but I will do my best. Any points that I have not been able to cover, I will, of course, write to hon. Members and put letters in the Library.
There have been 38 Back-Bench speeches in this debate and every single one has had an extraordinary contribution to make to the Bill. I should say that I am particularly grateful to the Lord Chancellor, who joins me on the Front Bench. I also want to record my thanks to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), who is replacing—if he can be replaced—my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar) in working through this Bill. I want to record my thanks to them.
In those 38 speeches, many, many experiences—horrific experiences—have been put before us. Hon. Members have very much drawn us into the lives, the suffering and, as I have said, the heartbreak of millions of our fellow citizens, whether constituents or not.
There are a few names out of an incredibly long list that I will mention because they have caused such an impact in the Chamber and, indeed, outside the Chamber. The first is that of Natalie Connolly. My hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) and, indeed, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the Mother of the House, set out the agony that the Connolly family have gone through in the case coming before the court concerning their dear daughter, Natalie, the facts of that case and of similar cases. I cannot help but be horrified by some of the experiences that victims of sadomasochistic sexual acts, which defendants then claim as a defence in court, have gone through. It is extraordinary and I will very much go away and reflect on the matter. It may not be this Bill that deals with that, but I do think that we must look at it very carefully and see what more can be done.
The next set of names that I think the House was touched by—I am very mindful that Claire is here in the Gallery—are those of Claire, Jack and Paul Throssell, represented very ably by their Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith). I have had the privilege of meeting Claire and listening to her experiences at first hand. I would challenge anyone not to be incredibly moved by Claire’s story and not to be haunted by her story for many, many days after they have heard it, so I thank and salute Claire for being here today and working on behalf of other victims.
The hon. Member for Leigh (Jo Platt) mentioned Leanne and Nikita. I thank her for bringing their experiences into this debate.
Then we move on to our friends and colleagues who have themselves been incredibly brave in describing their own experiences. My friend the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) talked about her mother Zoora, and of course about her own experience of forced marriage. I am very keen that we all understand that although the words “forced marriage”, “FGM” and so on are not in the Bill, they are examples of the categories of behaviour that we have set out in the definition, and they will be in the statutory guidance, so people should be under no illusion: we consider those acts within intimate relationships to be examples of domestic abuse.
Then, of course, there was the account of our friend the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield). I sat here listening and thinking, “She is doing a very good job of representing her constituent. This is a terribly sad tale.” It was not until she said, “and then you introduce him to the leader of your party” that I shook myself a bit and thought, “My goodness—are we on a journey different from the one that I had anticipated?” She used words that every person who works in the field of domestic abuse will recognise, such as “hyper-alert” and “abject rage”. She spoke of bills piling up and finding out months later that they were unpaid. And then there was the final phrase: “emotionally exhausting”. The hon. Lady has done more to further the cause for victims of domestic abuse today than we have seen in a very long time, and I thank her sincerely for her contribution.
This Bill is truly groundbreaking, and I am delighted that we have agreement on that. I fully accept and acknowledge that we are not all agreed about parts of it, and of course that will come through in the scrutiny of the Bill. But we have this Bill before us today because of the determination, commitment and grit of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I think it is extremely telling that, after some 20 years on the Opposition and Government Front Benches, she has chosen as her first contribution to speak in this debate about a cause that is very close to her heart. I am extremely grateful to her not just for her contribution today, but for the fact that we have this Bill and are driving this work forward in Government.
There are other colleagues I feel obliged to mention, because I see this as a Bill that is owned by the entire House. I must thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), who started the journey by bringing in, with the Lord Chancellor, the controlling or coercive behaviour offence. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), who was my predecessor in this role and who insisted on the terminology of economic abuse being included in the definition, because our understanding of it is so much better than it was even a few years ago. Though wanting to spare the blushes of a member of the Whips Office, I must also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) because when he was on the Front Bench in another guise, he worked hard on the secure tenancies provision that we now see in the Bill.
As I say, I consider this to be a Bill that is owned by the whole House, and I thank colleagues across the House for their work not just today, but in the run-up to Second Reading. That includes, of course, the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). I tried to learn some Welsh before I got to this part of my speech, but I am afraid that it is beyond me. I also thank the “professional feminist”, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), who does so much work —work that we are now much more comfortable talking about—tackling the perpetrators, including serial perpetrators, to stop the cycle of abuse.
I also thank the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for his work on cross-examination—it is always a pleasure to work with him—and, of course, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who has been and continues to be a staunch advocate for victims of domestic abuse. I look forward to grappling with some of the more difficult issues with her in due course.
I am delighted that the Bill received the level of pre-legislative scrutiny that it did through the Joint Committee, which was chaired so ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller). Her leadership and that of others on the Committee has meant that the Bill is in a better place than it was before they scrutinised it. We have accepted many of the Committee’s recommendations and there are still recommendations that we are working on and may add in Committee. I thank every member of the Committee and its Chair.
The hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) asked Ministers to be open hearted. We are absolutely open hearted in admitting that this Bill is not yet in the place that it should be. It has to be perfected through scrutiny. In particular, hon. Members have rightly raised the issue of refuges. Hon. Members may recall that, when the Bill was introduced, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s consultation on refuge accommodation was still live, so by definition we could not make amendments to the Bill or add clauses at that stage. However, we are working through the consultation responses and I am confident that we will be able to move amendments in Committee, which I very much hope will meet with hon. Members’ approval.
I am conscious, too, of the comments made by the hon. Member for Bradford West and others about specialist services. I myself have been on a learning curve when it comes to the particular requirements of women who are perhaps suffering cultural difficulties as well as abuse, in the more conventional sense that we would understand, in the home. That will very much form part of our review of those services.
Colleagues have also rightly been holding me to account on funding. This year’s spending review, being a one-year review, is unusual, but we are clear that funding will be a priority in the 2020 spending review and we will push for appropriate funding for all the important services that hon. Members have mentioned.
I also acknowledge the concerns about migrant women. Women—all people who are suffering domestic abuse—must be viewed as victims first and foremost. We have not got it right yet with migrant women, but we are conducting a review, as we told the Joint Committee we would. We are looking at everything and will do our very best to bring forward those proposals in Committee. There might be things that we can do that do not need to be in primary legislation. The House should bear with us while we work through the review and we will see what more we can do.
Colleagues have rightly mentioned the definition. There have been many thoughts about whether it goes quite far enough. I am very conscious of the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who raised the impossible situation that a constituent and their family found themselves in with a person—a therapist—in a trusted position. There are concerns about positions of trust. [Interruption.]
I have just had my dress tugged, because if I do not sit down before 7 o’clock, the Bill will fall, so forgive me if I stop mid-sentence, Madam Deputy Speaker. I very much hear colleagues’ concerns about the definition and, if I may tackle the gendered point, we absolutely acknowledge that domestic abuse predominantly affects women. However, we are conscious that, of the estimated 2 million victims in our country, about a third are male. We cannot ignore those victims. In fairness, I do not think that anyone is suggesting that we should, but we are going to make the gendered nature of the crime apparent on the face of the statutory guidance, which I think will be significant.
To sum up, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead said, this statute is only part of the solution. There is consensus that we all have to ensure that people begin to understand what domestic abuse entails, that the relationships that they are entering into are not healthy and that girls growing up can expect much better from relationships in their adulthood. That is absolutely what this law and the non-legislative measures are directed at. The Bill is vital, but there is so much more that we need to do to ensure that everybody understands that domestic abuse is everyone’s business.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Thank you. What an excellent, thoughtful, constructive, calm debate. I sincerely hope that those who observe our proceedings will see just how well Members of this House behaved when we were bringing about an important piece of legislation that actually affects the lives of millions of people.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Domestic Abuse Bill (Programme)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),
That the following provisions shall apply to the Domestic Abuse Bill:
Committal
(1) The Bill shall be committed to a Public Bill Committee.
Proceedings in Public Bill Committee
(2) Proceedings in the Public Bill Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Thursday 21 November 2019.
(3) The Public Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
Proceedings on Consideration and up to and including Third Reading
(4) Proceedings on Consideration and any proceedings in legislative grand committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which proceedings on Consideration are commenced.
(5) Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
(6) Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on Consideration and up to and including Third Reading.
Other proceedings
(7) Any other proceedings on the Bill may be programmed.— (Mr Marcus Jones.)
Question agreed to.
Domestic Abuse Bill (Money)
Queen’s recommendation signified.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 52(1)(a)),
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Domestic Abuse Bill, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of:
(a) any expenditure incurred by virtue of the Act by a Minister of the Crown; and
(b) any increase attributable to the Act in the sums payable by virtue of any other Act out of money so provide.—(Mr Marcus Jones.)
Question agreed to.
Business without Debate
Wednesday 2nd October 2019
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Notices of Amendments as at Friday 4 October 2019 - (7 Oct 2019)
Welsh Language
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
Diolch, Madam Deputy Speaker. Rydw i’n falch iawn o gael y cyfle i wneud araith am yr iaith Gymraeg yn San Steffan heno. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak about the Welsh language here in the Palace of Westminster tonight.
I tabled my request for this Adjournment debate for several reasons: first, because I believe the Welsh language to be of such importance that it should be on our agenda here at Westminster at least once in every Parliament; and for the rather more selfish reason that this may well be my last speech in the House of Commons before I retire at the forthcoming general election, and I wanted to speak on an issue of special personal interest and importance to me.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
First, on a personal level, I want to wish the hon. Gentleman very well in his retirement. I have always enjoyed debating with him over the years we have been together in this House. Secondly, I commend him for his choice of topic for this final debate. Many parents in my constituency—increasing numbers, actually—seek Welsh-medium education for their children, and it is great to see him here putting that forward on a national stage.
Glyn Davies
It is good to find myself, and anticipate finding myself, in agreement with quite a few Members in the Chamber, which is probably quite pleasant.
I speak with a special personal interest in that Wales and matters Welsh have been absolutely my focus as an MP, my overriding interest, and almost at times, I think, my obsession since being elected in 2010, as they have been throughout my 40 years in public life before that. Other hon. Members will have their own perspectives, which will inevitably sometimes be different from my own. The first half of my comments will be about the history of the Welsh language and where it has touched on my own life, before I share thoughts about attitudes and investment for the future.
I was born in Montgomeryshire, or Sir Drefaldwyn in Welsh. I have always lived there, and I have no ancestors who were born anywhere except in Sir Drefaldwyn—at least that I know of. More unusual is that I think every single ancestor spoke Welsh as their first language. Again, that is as far as I know, but I have gone to a lot of trouble to try to find out.
There were two main reasons why my five sisters and I were the first generation not to be bilingual—we were Davieses, Lloyds and Evanses, and everyone was bilingual until my generation. First, my parents moved from the Welsh-language villages of Llanerfyl and Pontrobert to the predominantly English-language villages of Castle Caereinion and Berriew. The second reason was more significant and pertinent to this debate. At that time, and for some time before, Welsh was seen as the language of failure. It was simply not encouraged. It was the age of the Welsh not. I do not remember hearing my parents, both first-language Welsh speakers, ever speak Welsh in front of the children. That is not in any way a criticism; it was not at all unusual at the time. That had an impact on all of us.
I left education aged 16, to join my father on the family farm, during a long period of his illness. However, I fancied myself as a writer, and in the early 1960s I wrote an essay for an eisteddfod competition, “The Future of the Welsh Language”. We could write in either English or Welsh, it was 20,000 words—quite significant—and it involved weeks of research. My reward was to win the chair and to be crowned bard, but the key point that I want to make is that my essay predicted the end of Welsh as a spoken language—not at all an uncommon belief at the time. Many academics would have taken the same view. But time has proven my conclusion to be too pessimistic. The future, as it so often does, decided to take a rather different course.
Throughout the period of my youth, the inevitable reaction was a strong pro-Welsh language protest movement, in response to the long-term decline. There were marches and protests, and even properties burnt down. There were Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine, Gwynfor Evans and others well known in the history of Wales. There was also the early development of the political voice of Wales, and of Plaid Cymru. In fact, as I have admitted in this Chamber before, the first time that I voted it was for Plaid Cymru, as it happens—[Interruption.] I have told my own party, so it will not come as a shock.
Crucially, from the mid-20th century, there was a change of political attitude. I have no desire to make any partisan or political points, except to record my pride that my party played a significant and proactive part in that change. Mrs Thatcher’s Government established S4C with what I shall call encouragement from the great Gwynfor Evans, who went on hunger strike to support the cause. The biggest advance, in my view and that of many others, was the Welsh Language Act 1993, when Lord Wyn Roberts was such a key player.
Today, we have reached the stage in the recovery of the Welsh language at which the Welsh Government have formally adopted the aim of there being 1 million Welsh speakers in Wales. That is beyond the imagination of any of us 20 years ago. I do not know how realistic that aim is, but 20 years ago it would have been laughed out of court. We can now have that sort of serious prediction, which is unbelievable for those of us who care so much about the language.
Today, yr iaith Gymraeg is in a far better place than anyone could have predicted in the middle of the last century, but those who want to see the Welsh language succeed cannot be complacent. Across the world, there is always ongoing pressure on all minority languages. Survival depends on continuing support, battling against political and economic pressures.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Rydw i’n ddiolchgar iawn—I am grateful to my hon. colleague and, in particular when talking about Welsh, friend. I would like to raise with him the great significance for the future of languages of the increasing digitalisation of our means of communication. With the Government looking at digital by default, it is essential to ensure that the language is not only available but accessible. Someone should be making sure that Welsh speakers are encouraged to use the Welsh language by default. In some instances, such as the Disclosure and Barring Service scheme, we need to look at how to ensure that happens—we are looking at the future now. I briefly congratulate the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that we will have a few more speeches from him, but this is a very worthwhile one.
Glyn Davies
The right hon. Lady makes a very good point, which could be spread to quite a lot of other areas as well. Our means of communication change so much, and we always have to be looking forward to different ways of ensuring that the language has its place.
Glyn Davies
I will take another intervention. I will allow others, although I would prefer them to be on the Minister later because I want to finish my comments.
Jim Shannon
May I add my thanks to the hon. Gentleman for all the debates he has been involved in, and for his work on the all-party groups in which I have sat alongside him? I thank him for his contribution.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned minority languages. As an Ulster Scots speaker and one who loves the language, I believe there is something beautiful in speaking with our cultural and historical tongue. Does he not agree, however, that it is inappropriate to use any of our historical languages as a political weapon—it is very important to take them forward as something we love because of what they mean, rather than to try to use them for any other purpose—and that any attempt to do so must be vehemently and actively opposed by any true historical linguist?
Glyn Davies
Again, I very much agree with that point.
Because Welsh language policy is devolved, I accept that our role here at Westminster is largely, though not exclusively, a supportive role. The main policy levers lie with the National Assembly for Wales, but in my view it is important that the UK Government make clear policy statements that we support constructive policy objectives, rather than just pay lip service. Over time, we have seen some objections to interventions designed to grow and protect the Welsh language, because they do carry responsibility and cost. However, I hope we can all support a policy that all children should have meaningful contact with the Welsh language, and that we can support increasing opportunity to use Welsh outside the education environment, particularly in the workplace. Personally, I believe we should encourage more learning of Welsh through sport and culture, and where young people take their forms of entertainment.
Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. I know that he has indicated his intention to stand down at the next general election, so although he and I do not always agree on a lot of policy areas, there are some areas in which we stand united—our love for Wales, for example—and I thank him for his service to date.
I am a Welsh learner, but my husband is a Welsh speaker naturally, so I know how important our national language is and how much we all still welcome the Welsh Language Act 1993 and its amendment, the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. Will the hon. Gentleman join me in highlighting the immense pride many Welsh speakers feel, and the need to maintain its parity and equality with English and to encourage as many people as possible in Newport West, Montgomeryshire and the whole of Wales, as well as the rest of the United Kingdom, to think about learning Welsh?
Glyn Davies
I thank the hon. Lady, and I would like to return to that point, if I may, in the last sentence of my speech.
Welsh language policy is devolved, but devolution is not totally clearcut in all areas. There are opportunities within the devolved settlement to promote the language here at Westminster. Today, I believe the Secretary of State for Wales has committed Government investment to mid-Wales as part of the mid-Wales growth deal— £55 million towards a total investment of £200 million. The programmes will be guided by Ceredigion and Powys County Councils, but I hope the investment will be able to take into account the impact on the language and support the language. I very much hope that there will be an opportunity for input from the MP for Montgomeryshire, and even perhaps from an ex-MP for Montgomeryshire—who knows?
Finally, I want to finish with another personal reflection on life, and what happens in life when we grow older and start to ask ourselves who we are as an individual and where we come from, perhaps when sitting by the fence in the garden, enjoying a glasiad o gwrw and thinking about life. For me, it was when a lifetime of playing rugby and squash and running was coming to an end, and perhaps it was the lectures from my nain about the disgrace of my not being able to speak Welsh striking home after 40 years, and not being able to communicate with all of my family. I remember not being able to communicate at all with great-nain, who lived in Dolanog and was monolingual Welsh. She was one of the very last people who could speak only Welsh. I do not know whether there is anybody left now, but she died when she was 97 and she was one of the last, and I could not speak with her.
Anyway, I decided to learn Welsh, and because I became sufficiently fluent to appear on Welsh media quite a lot, many people now engage me on the street in Welsh, in Welshpool, Newtown and all over the place. It is incredibly satisfying. It is just reward for struggling over to Millbank or College Green on a cold, wet, frosty morning at half-past 7 to speak to the audience of “Post Cyntaf”. To me it is a huge reward and makes it all worthwhile. I am going to miss it when I am not here.
We Welsh MPs must resist a “devolve and forget” attitude. I sometimes think it is so easy for Ministers, when the pressure is on them to deal with what is on their desk that day, to devolve something and then suddenly take it off the agenda and forget about it. We must not do that. Welsh language policy may be devolved, but we retain a responsibility for it. We must not just put Welsh language policy in a box. It is an issue for every Department, not just the Wales Office.
Welsh is a Great British language. It is older than English. Backing the Welsh language is backing the Union. I hope that is not seen as too controversial. It is what makes Wales special. Yes, we have wonderful Welsh landscapes, wonderful mountains and really wonderful Welsh people, but other parts of the United Kingdom have special landscapes with special people and special mountains. In my view, where Wales is unique in the UK is that we have our own distinctive, widely spoken Welsh language. We must never, ever forget that.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Kevin Foster)
Diolch, Dirprwy Llywydd. [Interruption.] I thought it was worth an attempt. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) on securing a debate on this important issue. He is a known champion of the Welsh language and campaigner for the right to use Welsh in the House; the Secretary of State for Wales has worked alongside him to see Welsh spoken in the Welsh Grand Committee.
This debate is timely as this is UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages, the purpose of which is to raise awareness of the critical risks historic languages face and their value as vehicles for change, knowledge systems and ways of life. Indigenous languages play a crucial role in enabling communities to participate in their countries’ economic, cultural and political life.
My hon. Friend was absolutely right to say that this cannot be a matter of “devolve and forget”. The UK Government are committed to supporting the UK’s indigenous languages. As he touched on, Welsh is recognised as an official UK language and is one of the oldest living languages. It is also one of the greatest inheritances for our Union as a whole, so we have a responsibility to protect it and develop a strong future for it. We also have a duty to represent the communities we serve and to understand that, for many people, both fluent speakers and learners, the Welsh language forms an integral part of their identity—their British identity as well as their Welsh identity.
It is good to see that, far from what my hon. Friend’s essay concluded back in the 1960s, almost 30% of Wales’s population aged three and over now say they can speak at least some Welsh. We are therefore seeing progress towards the aspirations of Cymraeg 2050, which aims for there to be 1 million Welsh language speakers by 2050 and for the Welsh language to be part of everyday life in Wales, empowering and representing Welsh speakers and their communities.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) on his fantastic speech. In counties such as mine—in Staffordshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire, which border Wales—huge numbers of our constituents go on holiday to Wales and enjoy Wales. We would like at least the opportunity to learn Welsh in our areas. We would like it at least to be offered as an option in some of our schools and colleges. It is vital. I have tried to learn Welsh; I have not had much success so far, but as I too am stepping down at the next election, it is something that I hope to do in the future.
Kevin Foster
Putting my Union hat on briefly and speaking as Minister with responsibility for the constitution, it would be wonderful to see more of the culture of our Union being spread across it, including opportunities to study the Welsh language—and Welsh law, given the nuances that there are, following the devolution of law-making powers to the Welsh Assembly. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire would be happy to help my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) learn a bit more Welsh after their joint retirement from this place. It would be good to see schools offering to teach Welsh. Certainly the Office of the Secretary of State for Wales will at every opportunity look to promote the ability to learn Welsh, and not just in Wales, so that people in the rest of the Union can get an understanding of the language, and the rich culture attached to it.
The UK Government will continue to support the targets I have outlined, and will use every opportunity to promote them. My Department is proud to have lead responsibility for the Welsh language in the UK Government, and for ensuring it becomes the language of success, rather than what it was once described as being.
Jane Dodds (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)
Diolch yn fawr iawn. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies), who is a good friend, I hope, for the work that he has done in Montgomeryshire. I thank him for his service to his constituency. I am sure that he would agree that there is a real need for more Welsh teachers. I was lucky enough to attend a Welsh school, and to have a nain who lived with us who was monolingual and could not speak English. For me—I am sure the Minister will agree—the important thing was to have Welsh teachers in my Welsh school. I hope he supports the initiative being taken to promote the recruitment and training of Welsh language teachers.
Kevin Foster
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. Of course I support the work being done in Wales to recruit more Welsh teachers. Immersion in a language is the best way to learn it. There is only so much that can be learned in a classroom. It is important to see the language used, and be able to use it for real, not just, as was touched on in one or two interventions, in an educational setting. It is important to be able to see it online and in media, and obviously to be able to speak it with friends.
As part of the work being done by the Office of the Secretary of State for Wales, at the National Eisteddfod in August, the Secretary of State, together with the Welsh Language Commissioner, Aled Roberts, launched new guidance for UK Government Departments when planning and delivering bilingual communications targeted at audiences in Wales. This guidance, endorsed by the Government Communication Service, is the first of its kind for the UK Government. Included in this guidance are recommendations and good practice on designing and creating quality bilingual content in areas including events, consultations and campaigns. This guidance will support people working across both Governments, in Wales and in Whitehall, to help us achieve the Cymraeg 2050 ambition, ensuring the Welsh language is visible, audible and, above all, accessible.
My Department has also promoted Welsh as part of Wales Week in London. I was proud to see every aspect of Welsh cultural life represented, alongside showcases of Welsh culture and identity, tourism, and food and drink products; I particularly enjoyed the latter two. We also celebrated our champions of the Welsh language. My Department has sought a commitment from all UK Government Departments to preserving and promoting the Welsh language. I am pleased to say that 11 UK Government Departments now have a Welsh language scheme, including most recently the Cabinet Office. As some may be able to guess, there has been a series of bilaterals between me as Under-Secretary of State for Wales and me as the Minister with responsibility for the constitution. I found very persuasive my argument that the Cabinet Office, as the Department that very much takes the lead for constitutional and Union matters, needed to resolve the issue and get a Welsh language scheme in place.
It is not just the Office for the Secretary of State for Wales taking the initiative in promoting Welsh language and culture. My colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have encouraged its network of posts to mark St David’s day across the overseas network. This year’s activities included a digital campaign highlighting Welsh culture, including the Welsh language.
Bringing Welsh to a global stage does not stop there. The Department for International Development launched Connecting Classrooms through their Global Learning Programme, which connects Welsh pupils and teachers with schools all over the world. The FCO and DFID are examples of Departments playing their part in promoting the Welsh language.
The UK Government are also funding award-winning creative output, providing bilingual services and developing initiatives where Welsh plays a central part. This includes the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which has announced that Welsh language programming will benefit from up to 5% of its young audiences content fund and audio content fund, with the aim of stimulating the creation of dynamic and distinctive Welsh language productions from the independent sector.
The UK Government have also committed to maintaining S4C’s funding at its current level for 2019-20. S4C does not just make a contribution to the promotion of the Welsh language; it also makes an important contribution to the creative economy in Wales. It recently moved its headquarters from Cardiff to Yr Egin in Carmarthen, and I am proud that through the Swansea Bay city deal we will be supporting the next phase of this move, which will generate major and positive change to the creative and digital economy of Wales. This will ensure the Welsh language will be seen and heard not only throughout Wales but beyond its borders.
The UK Government are also supporting civil servants to learn Welsh. For example, the DVLA is one of many departments registered as an employer with the National Centre for Learning Welsh, and as a result over 280 of its staff have registered to undertake online Welsh language training courses. It is also championing Welsh in its service provision and has developed a new “Welsh language call handler of the year” award category in its annual contact centre awards to recognise the importance of providing excellence in this service.
The UK Government are constantly looking to improve our Welsh language services. Most recently, the Department for Work and Pensions implemented a Welsh version of the universal credit online system and is ensuring that all its digital services are in Welsh as well as English. It has also undertaken a number of Welsh language-specific recruitment exercises to ensure it has enough Welsh-speaking work coaches. This has been considered a leading case study of best practice for Welsh language recruitment, and it has been sharing its experience with other UK Government Departments.
Welsh language considerations are also being embedded in other Departments. The Home Office has Welsh language champions who raise the profile of the Welsh language across the Department and its arm’s length bodies. It has also run successful campaigns in the Welsh language on forced marriage and female genital mutilation. I hope this gives the House a flavour of the UK Government’s passion for and commitment to the Welsh language.
I would like to end on a personal note. It is sad news that my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire will be standing down at the next general election. The £55 million announced today for the mid-Wales growth deal is perhaps another example of what he has achieved for his constituents during his time in the House. I know that his support for the Wales Office has been greatly appreciated by me, my predecessors and the Secretary of State for Wales, and he will be greatly missed in this Chamber. The House will also lose a great champion of the Welsh Language. That said, we will be delighted, I hope, to welcome back in his place another champion of the Welsh language, Craig Williams.
Question put and agreed to.
Westminster Hall
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Community Pharmacies
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the role of community pharmacies.
May I say what a pleasure it is, Sir David, to serve under your chairship this morning, and to have you join us for this important debate?
Between the ages of 14 and 18 I worked in a local chemist shop two evenings a week and some Saturday mornings. There were the usual first job responsibilities: restocking shelves, cleaning, and meeting and greeting customers and patients who were not always well, for a variety of reasons. I loved it, because there is never a dull moment in a pharmacy. I remember a frantic mother handing me dead headlice taped to a piece of cardboard, and someone asking me to run a pregnancy test on a bottle of cough medicine, before discreetly letting me know that it was actually a urine sample rather than cough medicine and that that was the only secure way she could find of transporting it to the chemist shop.
The shop was exactly what it said on the tin. It was a community pharmacy, and the whole community would walk through those doors for advice, medication and reassurance. I remember the older people, whose relationship with the pharmacist was the longest-standing and most trusted relationship they had with a clinical professional. I remember a long-term recovering addict, who would bring his daughter with him every day. We watched her grow up, and supported him as he worked hard to stay the course on his journey to recovery.
That is why community pharmacies matter, and it is why they work. However, it appears from the community pharmacy contractual framework announced in October 2016 that that was not appreciated. There was a reduction from £2.8 billion in 2015-16 to £2.68 billion in 2016-17 and £2.59 billion in 2017-18. That represented a 4% reduction in funding in 2016-17 and a further 3.4% reduction in 2017-18. When inflation is factored in, as well as all the services that pharmacies already offer free and whose costs they absorb, that was a near fatal blow to the service nationwide. The then Minister, the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), told the all-party parliamentary group on pharmacy that he expected between 1,000 and 3,000 pharmacies to close, as they would no longer be viable in the face of the cuts, with multiples and chains of pharmacies best placed to survive, and independent and more rural chemists left at a disadvantage.
In March this year the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee found that 233 community pharmacies have closed in England since the Government funding cuts were introduced. Sixty-nine were independent pharmacies and a further 22 were independent multiples. The number of closures anticipated by the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire has not yet been reached. However, I have spoken to people in pharmacies, and others contacted me ahead of the debate, and many are operating at a loss, clinging to the hope that the funding arrangements will improve, but with a business model that, as the right hon. Gentleman predicted, is not viable.
The impact that the funding cuts have had on patients is really difficult to justify. The cost of delivering prescriptions to those who find it hard to leave the house was previously absorbed by local chemists, but that is no longer possible. Boots was the last of the big four chain pharmacies to start charging for delivery over the summer, with all patients having to pay £5 for delivery, or £55 for a 12-month delivery subscription, by the end of the year. All have some exemptions for particularly vulnerable customers, but Boots, LloydsPharmacy, Rowlands Pharmacy and Well have all reduced free deliveries, or started charging for delivery.
There is no funding for arranging drugs in trays. When I worked in a pharmacy, it was a big undertaking to arrange medicines in trays by time and day, predominantly for older people who needed that degree of support if they were to live well for longer by taking their medication at the right time and in the right doses. Pharmacies were delivering a degree of invaluable social care, and that is no longer possible in the present financial climate. We can all see what the consequences will be. Ultimately the result will be more costly clinical interventions.
In addition to the financial pressures that pharmacies face, drugs shortages are now becoming debilitatingly resource-intensive across the NHS. Pharmacies have no ability to absorb the costly hours spent sourcing drugs or speaking to GPs about possible alternatives. A Bristol GP, Zara Aziz, recently wrote in The Guardian of her experience of medicines shortages. She explained that EpiPen users in Bristol are now being told to use their old EpiPens up to four months after the expiry date. She also tells the story of a patient in acute distress from arthritis pain when a commonly used anti-inflammatory, Naproxen, suddenly became unavailable. Eventually, a very small quantity was found, but the patient was forced to use it sparingly, not as she had been prescribed, as none of the alternative anti-inflammatories would have been suitable for her.
My hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) shared with me a photo of a poster from Pharmacy Magazine, which has gone up in her local hospital. It says, “Please don’t blame us for the NHS medicine shortages. It is a nationwide problem. Please ask your local MP to help.” The poster included contact details of local MPs handwritten on the bottom. We very much hear those concerns, and we are here to ask the Minister to get a grip on this problem.
Shortages are caused by a combination of different issues. The implications of Brexit are inevitably a factor that will play out over the coming weeks and months. However, we know that the NHS and the UK are potentially losing out to more profitable and attractive markets. In addition, the stockpiling, as a precaution, of certain drugs that are harder to source, coupled with the deliberate and more alarming manipulation of the markets by some wholesalers to deliberately push up prices, is having a detrimental effect. New regulations are also having an impact on manufacturing processes.
On top of that, cash flow is a massive challenge in community pharmacies. Community pharmacies pay out for drugs and are reimbursed by the Government the following month. The situation is made even tougher still, however, because they are not always reimbursed what they have paid out for drugs, particularly for drugs that are in short supply. By law, pharmacies have to do everything in their power to source a drug and dispense it, even where prices have become inflated due to a shortage. Let us take Naproxen as an example. One of my local pharmacies tells me that earlier this year the cost of a box shot up from about 26p to about £15. The tariff price paid by the Government to reimburse pharmacies for Naproxen peaked around February, at £12.50 a box. The medicines shortage is having the perverse effect of forcing pharmacies to dispense at a loss. In previous budgets, there might have been just enough for the pharmacy to absorb this cost. Those days are long gone. The system is clearly no longer fit for purpose.
Earlier this year, the Government introduced the serious shortage protocol in the Human Medicines (Amendment) Regulations 2019. It was intended to be a safety mechanism to help cope with any serious national shortage. It gives pharmacists the ability to dispense a reduced quantity, alternative dosage form or generic equivalent to that stated on the prescription. There would be a small payment to pharmacies for undertaking that process. Despite pharmacists and GPs feeling that they are spending unprecedented amounts of time sourcing medicines or researching alternatives, not a single drug has appeared on the list, which means that pharmacies and GPs do not get paid any extra to compensate them for the time they now have to dedicate to that element of dispensing.
Although there are no drugs on the serious shortage protocol, there is a separate concessions list, which acknowledges that, due to a shortage of a drug, the price has changed. At the end of September, there were 45 drugs on that concessions list. Again, inclusion on that list does not acknowledge the time involved in having to source the drugs, which is becoming the largest part of the pharmacist’s day. Nor is there any attempt to fund that work.
There was some hope for community pharmacies more broadly in the community pharmacy contractual framework published in July, which takes effect from October 2019 through to 2023-24. The five-year deal commits to not cutting the budget any further. However, when inflation is taken into account, it will still see pharmacies unable to meet costs, for all the reasons I have outlined.
Strangely enough, what the framework does do is realise the potential for pharmacies to alleviate pressures on the wider NHS, paving the way for a much more integrated approach. The 111 service is now able to refer a patient directly to a pharmacy for an appointment. The framework seeks to expand the delivery of clinical services in pharmacies. It is all great stuff, which is very welcome, but I return to the clear warning given by the then Minister back in 2016 that between 1,000 and 3,000 pharmacies will not be viable and will be forced to close if overall funding does not increase.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. Given the pressures all our A&Es and acute hospitals face, does she agree that the community pharmacies in many areas across the UK do a magnificent job—particularly those specialised pharmacists who relieve the pressure on A&Es? If community pharmacies are put at risk and we lose them, there will be even more pressure on our A&Es and acute hospitals at a most awkward time for our society.
Holly Lynch
I could not agree more. I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that important point. It was very welcome that in the community pharmacy contractual framework—for the first time, I think—the Government really did understand that. However, the funding to allow pharmacies to survive long enough to deliver those services has not been forthcoming. For all its aspirations to deliver more clinical services, a pharmacy that has been forced to close can deliver diddly-squat. Does the Minister accept that community pharmacies’ potential will be realised only when they are funded to survive?
Like many colleagues, I am incredibly concerned about the impact of medicine shortages, both on the NHS and on patients themselves. It is contributing to the mix of factors that are piling unbearable financial pressure on our local chemist shops. I hope the Government have a plan to respond and keep our trusted, effective community pharmacies open.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir David Crausby (in the Chair)
Order. I will call the three Front Benchers at 10.30 am. Several Back Benchers wish to speak. I will not put a time limit on speeches, but if hon. Members keep them to about seven minutes or less, everybody will get an opportunity to speak.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing this important and pertinent debate and for giving me an opportunity to raise an issue of great concern to residents of Heywood and Middleton.
We know that community pharmacies have struggled with the funding cuts that the Government have introduced since October 2016. As my hon. Friend pointed out, figures compiled in March by the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee show that 233 community pharmacies in England have had to close since those cuts were introduced. Evidence from local pharmaceutical committees across England supports the picture of community pharmacies struggling financially. Independents are being hit the hardest and have been forced to cut hours or staff as a result.
A consequence of that was highlighted to me last week by my constituent Karen, who told me that her local independent community pharmacy was to start charging £5 for the home delivery of medicines. As my hon. Friend said, the same measure has already been adopted by the four multiples: LloydsPharmacy, Rowlands, Well and—the latest to join—Boots, which recently announced that it would charge a one-off fee of £5 or a 12-month subscription fee of £55 for delivery of prescriptions ordered in branch.
The actions of those multiples seem to be having a knock-on effect on our local independent community pharmacies as they struggle to cope with year-on-year funding cuts. With the cost of a prescription now at £9, the additional charge bumps up the total cost to a hefty £14 for those who pay for their prescriptions and makes an absolute mockery of free prescriptions for those who qualify. If someone is on free prescriptions but cannot get to their local pharmacy because of illness or disability, the delivery charge means that their prescription is no longer free.
As a result of these decisions, some of the most vulnerable people in our communities will suffer, including many who rely on the delivery service to access much-needed and essential medication. Sadly, many people in our communities suffer from chronic loneliness and simply do not have the social contacts to ask someone to collect their medicine for them. I would be interested to hear the views of the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies), the Minister for loneliness, on this draconian measure; I will write to her after this debate, when I hope I will have received some response from the Minister who is present.
I urge the Minister to look carefully and seriously at this really important issue, which appears to be a growing problem. The Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies says that continuing challenges to pharmacy funding are not helping the situation, with the five-year funding cap not covering
“inflation, volume increases and national minimum wage increases.”
The five-year period will be increasingly painful for many pharmacy businesses already under heavy financial pressure. It is only to be expected that many pharmacies will reassess all their existing costs, including the costs of services that they currently deliver for free. The financial model is simply unsustainable for the next five years. I ask the Minister to think about the impact that the changes will have on vulnerable, lonely and housebound people, and to consider approaching the Chancellor to request funding for this vital service and bring an end to this tax on the sick.
Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing the debate. I have a non-financial interest to declare: I chair the all-party group on pharmacy.
Community pharmacies play a major role in supporting the prevention agenda, which is a key development in the NHS long-term plan. As an integral part of the NHS, they are also a valued community facility with a positive track record of improving access to healthcare services. Compared with GP surgeries, there are more than 11,600 community pharmacies across England, and 89% of the population are estimated to have access to one within a 20-minute walk. That percentage rises to 99% in the most deprived areas of our country. We should recognise that community pharmacies are crucial.
There is still much more that could be done to unlock the huge potential of pharmacies and to further integrate them with emerging local healthcare networks. For example, service commissioning is patchy across the country, meaning that not all patients can access the same services from their local community pharmacies. More than 95% of community pharmacies now have a private consultation room from which they can offer advice to patients and a range of nationally commissioned services, such as the flu vaccination service. In 2018-19, 1.4 million flu vaccinations took place in community pharmacies. Two years ago, when the service was first introduced, other parts of the medical profession did not like the idea of pharmacies moving into that area, but the figures show that it was a good idea.
The new medicine service allows pharmacies to provide support for people with long-term conditions who have been newly prescribed a medicine to help improve medicine adherence. My hon. Friend mentioned it in relation to the elderly. I am sure we all know that more than 70% of NHS expenditure in the UK is on people with long-term conditions in the acute or primary sector. It is important to recognise that. Many pharmacies are commissioned to offer public health services by local authorities and the NHS.
On the new national services in 2019-20, my hon. Friend mentioned the community pharmacist consultation service, which is something we should look forward to, with the community pharmacists as the first port of call for minor illness or for the urgent supply of medicines. Pharmacies will offer patients a consultation to help manage their minor illnesses or provide an emergency supply of medicine. The service will take referrals from NHS 111, but in years to come such referrals could come from other settings such as GP practices and the NHS online. That is a progressive move so that we can access services far better than we can at the moment. We will see how it goes.
The other national service is hepatitis C testing. Pharmacies will offer testing for people using pharmacy needle and syringe programmes to support the national hepatitis C elimination programme. There will, however, be an extension of the reach of the six mandated public health campaigns that community pharmacies have to take part in, and many community pharmacies will also choose to take part in the pharmacy quality scheme. This year, that might involve preparing for engagement with primary care networks, which is crucial. When I first talked to my local primary care network about where the pharmacy fits in with this, they were not at all sure. We also have: carrying out audits on prescribing safety for lithium, on pregnancy prevention for women taking valproate, and on the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; checking with patients with diabetes whether they have had annual foot and eye checks; reducing the volume of sugar-sweetened beverages; complete training and assessment on look-alike, sound-alike errors, which is crucial for us all; updating risk reviews; completing sepsis online training and assessment, along with risk mitigation; and completing the dementia-friendly environment standards.
From April 2020, all pharmacies will be required to be able to process electronic prescriptions and to have attained healthy living pharmacy level 1 status. Accreditation will mean the pharmacies are local hubs for promoting health, wellbeing and self-care, and providing services to prevent ill health. That is the real move we should be seeing in community pharmacy now, to promote population health and reduce health inequalities. Pharmacies have a major role to play in that.
With regard to other future pharmacy service developments, as part of the five-year deal community pharmacies may also be able to support the appropriate use of medicines through the expansion of the new medicine service to other conditions. In addition, the NHS will use the national pharmacy integration fund to pilot services for potential roll-out. These include a model for detecting undiagnosed cardiovascular diseases and smoking cessation referrals from secondary care. That is crucial—this is a matter for another day—when we see the reduction in smoking cessation services here in the UK, yet still more than 85,000 of our fellow citizens are dying prematurely each year from smoking-related disease.
Further services include: the use of point-of-care testing around minor illnesses to support efforts to tackle antimicrobial resistance; routine monitoring of patients, such as those taking oral contraception, under an electronic repeat dispensing arrangement; activity to support primary care network priorities, such as early cancer diagnosis and tackling health inequalities; and a service to improve access to palliative care. These are the ideas that the community pharmacy has got and where it is going to move in the next five years. That is crucial.
Once again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax for securing the debate and providing this opportunity. The issue of expenditure has been mentioned, although I will not go into the history of it now. The Minister will be acutely aware that when we had the pharmacy integration fund, it was set aside after the cut. In fact, it was not used very well and lots of money was left in there. We are now moving into areas where that money should have been used. It is crucial that we get the money now on the table into frontline pharmacy services.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Thank you, Sir David; it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on securing the debate and thank her for doing so. Community pharmacies are an important issue in my constituency, as they are in hers, and indeed in the constituencies of everyone who is here to contribute. Elected representatives who keep their ear close to the ground will know that community pharmacies have a critical role to play, why is why I wish to touch on them here.
It is a pleasure to see the Minister in her new post. This is only her second debate in Westminster Hall, and the first in which she is going to have to answer some hard questions, but I have no doubt that she is up to it.
I have spoken numerous times about the importance of community pharmacy funding, especially in rural areas, because it is absolutely essential. For people who are rurally isolated or ill, knowing that their local pharmacy will collect their prescription and have it ready to collect—or even deliver it, as they often do in my constituency—is very important. That point cannot be emphasised enough. It makes all the difference to an ill person and it is critical that we have that system in place.
I agree with the NHS protocol that does not allow GPs to prescribe annually, but I also know the strain that it puts people under to undertake to have a new prescription allocated, collected, left at the pharmacy and then further collected. It is time-consuming and means a lot of effort for those who are ill and rely on public transport. Community pharmacies take much of the legwork and stress out of this.
We all know the problems of getting community transport in rural areas, whether buses, taxis or even getting friends to help with collecting prescriptions. They are as important to our ill and vulnerable people as any other NHS service, and the funding cuts have put too much pressure on that service already.
I assume that all the elected representatives here today have received letters similar to those that I have received outlining the difficulties facing community pharmacies in Northern Ireland. I will highlight those that frighten me the most—I use the word “frighten” because that is exactly what they did. They hail from a rural constituency with stretched service provision. One such letter states:
“The results illustrate the cumulative impact of the funding and the workforce crisis as stark.”—
these are strong words—
“Aside from pharmacy staff leaving by choice, a significant proportion of pharmacy owners, 39%, have been forced to reduce their workforce as they can no longer afford to cover the salary costs. To try to compensate for staff losses, 95% of pharmacy owners have increased their own working hours”.
In other words, they are now working longer hours just to ensure that their pharmacies cope. Some report regularly working 80 to 100 hours a week, which I suggest is above and beyond the call of duty. In addition, the letter states that
“93% of contractors report being forced to reduce the level of additional services they can offer, with 41% reducing or applying to reduce their pharmacy opening hours.”
Those figures illustrate the issues: 30% of staff are leaving by choice; 41% of pharmacies are reducing their staff; and those in charge of the pharmacies are working almost 100 hours a week. Against this demonstrable crisis in workforce, the core workload continues to increase. Dispensing activity over the past nine years has risen by almost 40%—again, pharmacies are doing more work with fewer staff, which compounds the issue—to a level of around 55 million dispensing episodes in 2018-19 alone. That is a colossal number of prescriptions handled and dispensing episodes.
Over the same period dispensing fees have been reduced by around 30%, which is an example of marked underinvestment in an essential service, where safety and accuracy are critical to the public and the health service. I am not saying for one minute that things are going wrong, but we want to ensure that the general public’s safety is always at the forefront. For that to happen, pharmacies need to be assisted financially, and they must have the opportunity to get the staff they need.
The community pharmacy workforce survey contains a number of recommendations for turning things around in the sector. I have no doubt that the Minister’s response will help make these things happen before it is too late. I ask her to be cognisant of the recommendations, because if they are applicable to Northern Ireland, then they are applicable to the UK mainland. The thrust of the recommendations is that there must be better communication. How often do we say that there should be better communication? There must be better communication between Government Departments, elected representatives and their constituents on new legislation coming through. It is critical that we have better communication between the Department and pharmacies, because they need to know what is happening. The Government and the Department need to be responsible to them too.
We have TV campaigns outlining when it is appropriate to seek a pharmacist’s attention, rather than to see a GP. That is all good stuff. People can now visit their pharmacist to ask about minor ailments, taking some of the pressure off A&E departments. That is part of what they are trying to achieve over the next period of time. Yet the information about what can be treated and how to get that help is not communicated. Better communications are a way of doing things just that wee bit better.
Over the years I have suggested to Government Departments, including the Department of Health in Northern Ireland—health is a devolved matter—and to Health Ministers here that we could perhaps do things a lot better. For example, we could let pharmacies take on responsibility for some minor things, such as checking for glaucoma or diabetes. It would be helpful if those things could be checked for in pharmacies.
In conclusion, with this body of trained professionals we have the potential to ease the burden on GPs and enable better surgery efficiency, yet that has not been tapped into. We have the potential to make people’s lives a lot simpler with an appropriately funded community pharmacy. By not doing that, we are losing highly trained professionals and adding more strain to an already overburdened GP system. If we do not help the pharmacies, we do not help the GPs or the A&E departments. This needs an overhaul, and who better to feed into that than those operating the service at present? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and, hopefully, some positive replies.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir David. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing today’s debate.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit a local community pharmacy in my constituency, and the superintendent pharmacist sat me down to tell me his tale of woe, which has been echoed across the Chamber this morning. He runs seven pharmacies across the city, serving 20% of the population, but he has seriously struggled over the past three years and is wondering whether he will be there next year. He has ploughed in tens of thousands of his own money just to keep the business afloat. That certainly highlights how many single-handed pharmacies have closed in the city.
Part of this is about the Government funding cuts, not least to the establishment payment, which covered things such as rent, regulatory registration and insurance. Part of it has also been about the loopholes for the clinical commissioning group and how it is now buying branded generics and not giving the headroom that pharmacies used to have. For instance, if people were purchasing a drug at, say, 60p and it had a value of 90p on tariff, there would be headroom of about 30p. That money was then ploughed back into the business to run other essential health services and to ensure that there could be free deliveries of pharmaceutical products to the community. Pharmacies just do not have that headroom any more.
The situation is made far worse by the multinational companies—we have heard about Boots, Lloyds and the others—which have the buying capacity and the space to be able to drive up the price at the wholesalers, which in turn means that the independents pay more when they go to purchase their pharmaceuticals. I have always called it the Walmart model, because that is how many of these companies operate. They try to push out the competition by making it impossible for the independents to participate in the market. That is certainly what we see here.
There is a toxic combination of cuts, CCGs facing tough financial lines—the CCG in York is always struggling—and, on top of that, the wider market pressures. Of course, the multinationals can spread their risk. They sell other products, and they are owned by multinational corporates, which gives them a further cushion in their operations. The impact is that, where some of those big companies have bought up independents, they are then closing them in crucial communities.
Clifton in my constituency is an area of high deprivation, with one of the lowest ages of mortality in the city and a real need for a community pharmacist, but Lloyds has pulled out of that community. That means that while people are waiting, say, three weeks to go and see their GP, they cannot just pop down the road to their community pharmacy as an alternative, because it is simply not there.
That is building more pressure on the independents, because people go to them to get the free delivery now that, as we have heard, the big companies have seen a gap in the market—surprise, surprise—and are charging their drug delivery tax to get more resource. That means that the independents, which are trying to provide that community service, are delivering further and further afield, which is costing them more, and they have less resource to do that with. We need to address the drug delivery tax to ensure that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax set out, we get these products to those people in our communities who are incredibly vulnerable.
I draw the Minister’s attention to one other scandal in the industry, which is that companies such as Boots are paying only 9% corporation tax. As a result, the Government are losing out on £1 billion a year. If we think about the scale of the cuts and the £200 million that has been removed, it does not take long to realise that, if Boots was forced to pay its corporation tax, we would not see pharmacies struggling and going to the wall, or communities suffering and losing those essential community services.
I ask the Minister to go back to the Treasury and make sure that those tax loopholes are closed. Boots moved into a multinational company, which I believe is 49% American-owned, and it is now registered in Switzerland, so it does not have to pay the same overheads. That is another inequality built into the market that must be addressed. The pressure cannot continue, or we will lose our community pharmacies. As I said, one pharmacist, who oversees seven pharmacies, does not think he will be there next year. That is seven communities across my constituency and York Outer that will not have a community pharmacy on the street corner.
It is vital, therefore, that the new Minister gets to grips with this issue. She must make sure that the right investment goes into our communities, that those loopholes are closed for the CCGs and for tax, and that the drug delivery tax is not put on pharmaceutical products.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for bringing forward this issue, which is important for the whole country. Community pharmacies play a vital role wherever they are, but that is especially so in large dispersed rural communities such as mine.
As we have heard, many of those community pharmacies are in increasingly marginal positions and are at risk of closure—indeed, many have closed. That is tragic for them, their patients and the communities that they are at the heart of. It is also a tragic wasted opportunity. The Government should make far better use of our community pharmacies to secure their futures and to benefit patients. The Government could provide sufficient funding for pharmacies so that they can provide an agreed range of patient services to prevent ill health and to keep people who are living with chronic conditions from getting worse, as hon. Members have mentioned.
I sat down with one of my local pharmacists in Kendal a few weeks ago. He told me that the Government have an opportunity to commission a national minor ailments service provided by community pharmacies. The key objective would be to use the talents and expertise of our pharmacists and, in doing so, to remove pressure from GPs and A&E departments in other parts of primary care in the NHS.
Pharmacists in my area serve communities as diverse and widespread as Sedbergh, Hawkshead, Ambleside, Staveley, Windermere, Milnthorpe, Kendal, Kirkby Lonsdale and many others. All the pharmacists I speak to fear that their numbers may be further whittled away by the Government, either by design or by attrition. The Government and people in the sector have talked about there being 3,000 fewer pharmacies. On behalf of local pharmacists and their patients, I say that that would be unacceptable. We want clarity from the Government on the number of pharmacies that they envisage, and we want a commitment to maintain the number that we have.
In the past, Health Ministers have expressed admiration for the French community pharmacy model, which pays for community pharmacies across the board to provide more patient services, such as conditions tests, smoking cessation and blood tests. Will the Minister commit to commissioning such services from community pharmacies across England comprehensively, not just case by case?
Community pharmacies would also be aided by having greater flexibility to dispense authorised medication when the pharmacist is away for a short time, perhaps visiting a local care home. The Government should also consider allowing big national pharmacy chains to share their automation platforms for prescription assembly with smaller independent community pharmacies to reduce costs across the board.
There is also the issue of fair payments. Many independent pharmacies in the south lakes are in danger of going out of business because of reductions in payments for prescriptions by NHS England. Often, the money that pharmacies receive from the national health service does not even cover the cost of the drugs being dispensed. In one shocking case, a pharmacist in my constituency in a relatively small Lake district village, who I have visited regularly, received in one single month £5,000 less in NHS payments than they had to pay out in wholesale drug payments. And that is on top of that pharmacy losing on average 10% of its NHS income each year over the last three years. That is utterly unsustainable, but it is replicated across our communities. So I ask the Minister to intervene personally to put this matter right.
We see a picture of a community pharmacy network that is full of wonderful, talented, highly skilled and dedicated professionals, who provide vital services to patients and their families, and that is part of the glue that holds communities—particularly rural communities—together, but it is being let down by an unambitious approach to community pharmacy from Government, which undervalues what these pharmacies do and, even more importantly, undervalues what they could do.
Therefore, I ask the Minister to consider the proposal in my early-day motion—which, thanks to the non-Prorogation, is still alive—for an essential community pharmacy scheme, to support community pharmacies in rural areas such as mine and to keep them open and thriving. Moreover, will she heed the calls from pharmacists across the country, who are merely calling for fairness in payments and for the ability to use their skills to serve their patients and communities, removing debilitating pressure from other parts of the NHS?
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve with you chairing today, Sir David. It is also a pleasure to speak in a debate in which the contributions so far have been full of knowledge and experience of the grassroots. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on securing it and on setting out at the start, from her own personal experience, the strength and importance of community pharmacies in their communities. They really are at the heart of communities.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) spelled out clearly the potential of community pharmacies. I think the Government recognise that potential in their NHS long-term plan, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax pointed out, they do not provide the funding to deliver on that potential.
Every day in this country, 1.6 million people visit a community pharmacy, so it is not surprising that the 2016 petition to save community pharmacies was one of the largest ever seen in this House. It demonstrated the commitment of communities across the country to their community pharmacies.
In visiting local community pharmacies across Scunthorpe, Bottesford and Kirton in Lindsey, I have seen the huge range of work that they do: dispensing medicines, dealing with minor injuries, administering flu jabs, and, as has already been said, being at the sharper end of drug shortages. Making sure that the drugs are there is a massive job and needs a lot of resource to ensure that it is done. As other colleagues have said, community pharmacies are a core part of the public health network, doing important work.
Community pharmacies are at the heart of communities and keep an eye on people, arranging their medicines in trays and delivering them free of charge to people’s doors. However, as my hon. Friends the Members for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) have said, what is now developing is a drug delivery tax, which threatens the survival of this service. That is because the very people who most need it are the very people who will not use it—that is the nature of the loneliness and other challenges in these communities, as my colleagues have said.
As the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) said, pharmacies are very important in rural areas, but they are also crucial in areas such as Westcliff, which is in the heart of the urban part of my constituency. There, the community pharmacy is the only health service that is close to the local community, which has many health needs.
A local community pharmacist contacted me recently, and I will use his words to describe what it is like at the sharp end. He points to
“Huge shortages and price hikes by suppliers of generic drugs from July 2017 onwards”,
and says that the Department of Health is
“not reimbursing us for even the cost of drugs, let alone giving us a purchase margin”—
something my hon. Friend the Member for York Central talked about in great detail and with great clarity. He says his pharmacy has been losing £10,000 a month since July 2017. He has not been able to afford to replace the two dispensers who have left in the past three months, so local people are losing their jobs as a result of the cuts, and the pressure on those remaining, although they continue to work really hard—I know because I visited them recently—is beginning to take its toll.
He says:
“The government has agreed to a five year funding package with no annual increase to the funding package. I would have at least expected an index linked funding package with index linking to NHS pay rises. The DHSC has given pay rises to all the other sectors of healthcare like GPs and Dentists but has chosen to effectively give a 9% cut over 5 years to community pharmacies.
As you know, community pharmacies are still struggling from the impact of the £250 million cut announced in December 2016. Since then, I have struggled…and…I have had to borrow hugely just to keep afloat. The net result is that my business is in danger of defaulting on the bank loans/overdrafts and might be potentially looking at bankruptcy. I have 20 employees who are mostly Scunthorpe residents and they are unlikely to find any work quickly if we were to go under.”
That pharmacist asks me to ask the new pharmacy Minister, who I congratulate on her appointment—she has shown since she came into this House her commitment to this area of work, and I can see from the way she is listening to the debate that she wants to make a difference—several questions. They are:
“why the Government chose not to give community pharmacy a pay rise given to other primary care health sectors…why the funding was not index linked…how the Government expects us to invest in our staff and premises with what is essentially a cut”
and
“how community pharmacy is expected to be part of Primary Care Networks when our sustainability is in jeopardy.”
That is from the frontline, from a man who is delivering excellent service to my local community and to patients locally and who wants to carry on doing so. The Government recognise the value of community pharmacies. If they want community pharmacists to continue to deliver, they need to give them the ability to do that, and not to speak nice words, without delivering. As well as talking the talk, the Government need to walk the walk on community pharmacies.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on securing this important and timely debate on community pharmacies. Those are critical resources at the heart of all the communities in our constituencies and the first port of call for many of us who experience common or low-level health complaints.
In the North East Lincolnshire clinical commissioning group area, there are no fewer than 30 pharmacies, ranging from branches of Boots—we have already heard some discussion about that this morning—and pharmacies operating out of supermarkets to companies such as Periville, which runs three pharmacies on Cromwell Road, Wingate Parade and Ladysmith Road, two of those out of medical centres. Day Lewis Pharmacy, in Scartho medical centre, gave me my flu jab last year—thanks very much—while Cottingham Pharmacy on Wellington Street in the East March area has been run by the family for 60 years.
We talk about the community element of pharmacies, and Tim Cottingham recently joined me and the Labour campaign for drug reform in a community event hosting about 150 people to talk about the development of drug treatment, the lack of community drug and alcohol support, and the essential role played by pharmacists. Tim knows so many of his customers and provides an incredibly intimate service, working with them to improve their health and move them further away from the trappings of addiction. The tales he told the audience, with compassion and empathy for the human being behind the addiction story, were quite remarkable. That was something I had not seen or heard before, and I was not necessarily expecting it. It was very eye-opening, and we should recognise the important role that pharmacists play in people’s day-to-day lives. Pharmacists provide vital services to residents in Grimsby, and not only do they dispense medicines to those who need them, but they provide residents with advice and guidance to ensure they make a rapid recovery.
North East Lincolnshire pharmacies also take pressure off GPs by providing a minor ailment scheme for anyone who does not pay for their prescriptions, and by providing free advice and treatment for illnesses such as colds, coughs, flus, hay fever, dry eyes, athlete’s foot, conjunctivitis and many other complaints that might end up at a GP’s door without the presence of such an amenity. Given how important our pharmacies are to our health system, it seems counterproductive for the Government to say that they want to develop sustainability and transformation plans for the long-term needs of local communities, and then to cut nearly £300 million from the community pharmacy budget, thus harming those amenities that sit at the heart of our communities.
The impact of the cuts has been severe. The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee found that in the two years since the cuts were introduced in October 2016, more than 200 pharmacies across the country closed their doors. That includes E A Broadburn of Scartho, which operated and moved into a medical centre, but ended up closing due to loss of footfall.
Lloyds Pharmacy on Dudley Street is part of a much larger corporate structure, but presumably it was not making the returns from that site and decided to close. It sits right on the edge of the West Marsh, which is one of the most deprived communities in Great Grimsby, and that closure meant the loss of another service, including out-of-hours provision.
Independent, stand-alone stores are not necessarily inside medical centres, hospitals or supermarkets, and they can provide 24-hour pharmacy services much more easily than those that are co-located in medical centres. Such closures therefore mean the loss of another service and emergency access pharmacy on which communities rely. Both those shopfronts remain empty, which means another hole in the small parades of shops in which they sat. They were not quite on the high street, but they were certainly on community high streets, and such things make people feel that their communities are not being properly invested in.
In 2017, Ian Strachan, then chair of the National Pharmacy Association, pointed to pared-back services, reduced opening hours and lower morale in the pharmacy workforce as evidence of the pressure that all pharmacies are experiencing. Will the Minister confirm that the extra investment in primary and community care that was announced by the Government last month will not only cover the costs of any extra service that pharmacies might be expected to provide, but will reverse the cuts in real terms?
Great Grimsby contains a number of good medical centres that include multiple GP centres and often contain pharmacies. However, there are also an awful lot of empty spaces, and for a number of years the intention has been for some services to be offered in those community settings. Some things that are done in hospital could be done in the heart of the community, which would be much easier—and there is space available. If that happened, and if some of those services were to operate out of those community-based centres, that would increase footfall and aid some of those pharmacies by giving them the opportunity to reach more people who would otherwise go to hospital.
Pharmacies are often on the frontline when patients encounter wider problems in the NHS. For example, when the contraceptive Microgynon 30 went out of stock earlier this year, it was the pharmacists who spent time informing patients and trying to find solutions to get around the scarcities. All that takes far more time than simply dispensing the drug and can have an impact on pharmacies’ bottom line. The Operation Yellowhammer report told us that we might face many more drug shortages in the event of a no-deal Brexit, so have the Government involved pharmacies in no-deal planning and taken into account the pressures that pharmacies might experience due to drug shortages in the event of no deal?
Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on bringing forward this important debate. I do not want to spend too much time summing up and repeating what has already been said by other Members—I have a list of them here—because I want to leave time for the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) to make her case and for the Minister to answer the many questions that have been asked—I know she will appreciate that.
As everyone here should know, the NHS operates differently in Scotland. There are many plus points to being a patient and a user of community pharmacies in Scotland, not least of which are free prescriptions for all and the way the Scottish Government value and support local pharmacies. As we are all aware, pharmacists are in a unique position to improve medication safety. They have the time and clinical expertise to make a difference to how patients manage chronic conditions, for which they might be taking multiple medications.
For many patients, it is probably much easier to consult a pharmacist than a GP. The community pharmacy often becomes the de facto community health centre, and most of us know the value of what those centres do. They can be the first point of care, and how many of us here have just popped into the chemist for a bit of advice when we did not feel well, taking some strain off our GPs?
I pay tribute to my local pharmacy, because I could not have managed the last year and a half of my husband’s life without the help and support of its staff. They provided help, advice and reassurance in equal measure and took a real interest in how I was doing. I saw them do exactly the same for other people who visited what is an invaluable point of help.
In Scotland, pharmacists already play an active role in coaching patients on the potential side effects of medication, going out of their way to say why it is important to take medicines exactly as prescribed. Unfortunately, due to this Tory Government’s disastrous handling of Brexit, there is a real possibility that community pharmacies and their customers will be left without an adequate supply of medicines. The Operation Yellowhammer documents gave us a real insight into how that will affect our communities. The threat remains significant and, with just 30 days to go until the Brexit deadline, information about medicine supplies and stockpiling is lacking. Pharmaceutical companies tried to stockpile for the 29 March deadline, but warehousing space is much reduced at this time of year, especially as warehouses fill up with Christmas goods.
Of the 12,300 medicines licensed for use in the UK, around 7,000 come to Britain either from or through the EU. According to the Government’s reasonable worst- case scenario, the flow of goods could be cut by 40% to 60% on day one following a no-deal break, taking a year to recover. As we have already heard, that would play havoc with our local community pharmacies, because they are very much on the frontline. They are where our communities turn when they need help with medication.
Jim Shannon
I declare an interest as a type 2 diabetic who is on tablet medication. Over the past few weeks, I have been contacted by type 1 diabetics who depend on insulin. The hon. Lady refers to the need to ensure that medication such as insulin is available after Brexit. I understand from my discussions with the Government that they have assured us that it will be. Does she agree that it is important for the public record that we say that in this Chamber today?
Marion Fellows
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am not standing here to cause panic; I have spent a long time not trying to cause panic, but I have been wondering what will happen if the medications that people rely on do not arrive, because that really is a critical concern for lots of people. I know that community pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies are doing their very best to make sure that it does not happen.
Because the NHS in Scotland is different, I have had my eyes opened to a number of things that I did not realise were happening. I had assumed that what happens in my own country would happen in England, but it very much does not; I have had that experience in my dealings with Vertex Pharmaceuticals with respect to cystic fibrosis drugs as well.
I have to say that the SNP Scottish Government really do recognise the importance of community pharmacies and are taking action to ensure that they remain properly resourced. In April, the Scottish Government announced that community pharmacies will receive an extra £2.6 million in funding this financial year. We must compare that with the cuts in spending that this UK Tory Government have made to community pharmacies’ funding over a number of years, with absolutely no provision being made for inflation, as we have heard.
The package announced by the Scottish Government includes confirmation that the Pharmacy First scheme has been integrated with the national Minor Ailment Service, so there is a real drive for people to consult their pharmacist first. People who can register with the Minor Ailment Service, such as those who are over 60 or in full-time education up to the age of 19, can see a pharmacist and be given medication there and then without having to see their GP. The scheme has recently been extended; it now covers not just things such as diarrhoea, but treatment for uncomplicated urinary tract infections and impetigo. All those things reduce the strain on GP services—we know that across the country, with its ageing population, they are under strain.
The increases in funding have been welcomed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in Scotland, which states:
“The RPS supports the Scottish government’s vision for more people to use their community pharmacy as a first port of call.”
The Scottish Government have reviewed pharmaceutical care of patients, and they really want to understand how community pharmacies can be better supported. They are putting their money where their mouth is.
I do not always get to stand here and tell an even better story, but in Scotland we care about how our communities can be better treated and have better health outcomes. To my knowledge—I need to verify this—a local pharmacy in Scotland does not charge for delivery to patients because, as the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) pointed out, people who qualify for a free prescription service are really hammered if they then have to pay for the delivery of their drugs. I ask the Minister to look at that. As hon. Members all know, I frequently stand here and say, “Can you look at how things are done in Scotland and see whether that can be adapted for better use here?” I plead with the Minister to look at that again.
The Scottish Government really do recognise the vital role that community pharmacies play in Scotland, in rural and in urban areas. I will sit down now and leave the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West to sum up for the Opposition.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing the debate, and for her excellent opening speech. For their contributions early on this cold Wednesday morning, I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron), the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), my hon. Friends the Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), and the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), who speaks for the Scottish National party.
It is clear that community pharmacies are valued across all our constituencies. On Friday I will be visiting Davy Pharmacy in Castletown in my constituency. I will hear once again at first hand how my constituents benefit from community pharmacies, and the impact that their services are having.
I welcome the new Minister to her role. I look forward to hearing from her today and to shadowing her in the months to come. I know that health is very important to her, and that it is one of the reasons why she stood to be a Member of Parliament. We previously worked together as officers of the all-party parliamentary group on breast cancer.
I will begin with one of the first things that springs to all our minds when we think about community pharmacies: prescriptions. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), the shadow Secretary of State for Health, announced in Brighton last week, the next Labour Government will introduce free prescriptions for all. We believe that prescription charges are a tax on sickness. When as few as 5% of patients actually pay for their prescriptions and many of them struggle to pay, surely it is time that the charge was scrapped.
The £9 per item prescription charge results in some patients on low incomes reducing their medication or going without, which is dangerous and can impact on a patient’s long-term health. It can even be fatal, as in the heartbreaking case of 19-year-old Holly Warboys, who died of an asthma attack. Holly did not have a full inhaler because she could not afford one. Nobody should have to pay to breathe.
A large proportion of the 5% of people who pay for their prescriptions budget for them by taking advantage of prepayment certificates, to reduce what they have to pay to the equivalent of about one and a half prescriptions per month. When all the costs of administering the fines and prepayment certificates, and the whole kit and caboodle around charging, are taken into account, it seems eminently sensible, fair and cost-effective to extend free prescriptions to all.
Research backs that up. A study from the University of York has shown how beneficial free prescriptions can be as a means of prevention. When patients suffering with Parkinson’s disease, for example, were given free prescriptions, hospital admissions were reduced by 11.4%, patient day care was reduced by 20.4%, and accident and emergency attendances were down by 9%. I am sure that the Minister will see that the policy will improve patient outcomes and save precious NHS resources. I know that she is new to her post, so she might want to make a bold announcement today. Will she match Labour’s commitment to ending this tax on sickness? The subject was definitely on the radar of one of her predecessors on the health team, the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), as I had conversations with him about it.
As we have heard, filling prescriptions is only the tip of the iceberg of the services that our community pharmacies provide. There is the potential for the expansion and development of a whole range of services. For example, I would like to see an expansion of pharmacists being able to prescribe, especially basic medications, in order to relieve pressure on our GPs. I understand that that service is very successful where it currently happens. Community pharmacists are the most accessible healthcare professionals, and community pharmacies are a genuine hub for the delivery of a diverse range of health and wellbeing services. The Government’s television campaign advises people to ask their pharmacist, because it really is an easy thing to do. That is especially true for traditionally hard-to-reach people who benefit from the barrier-free access to healthcare that community pharmacists provide.
In some circumstances, if there is a high turnover of GPs in an area, the community pharmacist is the only one providing continuity of care, which builds invaluable trust and the capacity for important health interventions. It is therefore a natural and sensible progression to allow basic prescribing, especially if it is coupled with a sort of triage service that is linked to an ability to make appointments for people with more serious concerns directly with their GP.
As we have heard, community pharmacies have long provided a range of services in addition to the provision of medicines, including minor ailment schemes, smoking cessation services, blood pressure testing, support for asthmatics and diabetics, emergency hormonal contraception and monitored dosage systems. Despite that, community pharmacies are in many ways the NHS’s best kept secret. They are invaluable in a health service that is overwhelmed by increased demand.
There is so much untapped potential in community pharmacies, as well as some excellent examples of best practice across the country that could be rolled out nationwide. For example, when patients phone the Central Gateshead Medical Group with a minor illness such as earache or a sore throat, they may be offered a referral to one of 13 community pharmacists in the Gateshead area for a same-day booked consultation, which creates capacity for GP appointments for patients who need to be seen by a GP. The patient’s referral details are sent to the pharmacy using a secure NHS mail account. Patients are then sent a text message to confirm the details of the appointment with the community pharmacist. Community pharmacists are already doing some great work and they have a huge role to play at the heart of every primary care network. The Government are failing to recognise that if they do not try to roll that out.
I welcome the Government’s commitment to prevention, but they must put their words into action, for example by reversing the terrible cuts to local authority public health budgets and by recognising the importance of community pharmacists in particular and the role that they can play in prevention. As we have heard, thousands of people—millions, actually—visit their community pharmacy every day. Every one of those presents an opportunity for a positive health or wellbeing intervention. In the words of Simon Stevens, “Make every contact count”.
The profession and its representatives, the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee and the National Pharmacy Association, have offered to deliver more services. The recently negotiated new pharmacy contract begins to recognise what the NHS has been missing for so long. There are many welcome features, including the new community pharmacist consultation service, which will take patient referrals from NHS 111 and will be extended for referrals from other parts of the NHS, such as GPs and A&E. Similarly, the new Medicines reconciliation service will ensure that medicine prescribed in secondary care is appropriately implemented on discharge to the community, which will reduce the number of unnecessary hospital readmissions. Those changes will be not only convenient for patients, but enormously important in relieving pressure on GP surgeries and A&E departments, which is what we all want to do.
That is why we need a shift to service-based remuneration in the context of a five-year agreement. If community pharmacies, with their huge potential, are to remain viable, the remuneration must be adequate. Can the Minister tell us today what the new funding settlement will look like? I hope that, in her response, she will celebrate the work of community pharmacies—I am sure she will—and set out what the Government will do to utilise their potential.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Jo Churchill)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank each and every right hon. and hon. Member who has contributed. Most importantly, I thank the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing this debate and allowing us to discuss the challenges and celebrate the opportunities that lie ahead in community pharmacies, as well as how we best deliver to patients. The right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) and the hon. Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) and for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) all made excellent speeches that gave food for thought, as did the contributions from the hon. Members for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) and for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). They celebrated exactly what community pharmacies can do if they are embedded in the heart of their communities and what untapped potential there is for moving forward.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to set out the vision for community pharmacy at a pivotal time for the pharmacy sector. As we have discussed, the past three years have been challenging, but there is a new pharmacy sector agreement. I am continually inspired, as everybody has been—we heard about the experience of the hon. Member for Halifax of working in a pharmacy—by the compassion, dedication and commitment of those who work in the NHS family. I saw that myself last week when I met pharmacists and the chief exec of the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee at the local pharmaceutical committee conference. That underlined to me again what an essential part of the NHS the pharmacy is, working day in and day out on improving outcomes for patients and for the community, which lies at the heart of what they do.
We have heard about the challenges of different communities. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale made his point very well, as did other Members who represent rural constituencies. The hon. Members for Strangford and for Motherwell and Wishaw mentioned that the challenges are slightly different in rural, dispersed communities. We hope that the new contract will not be one size fits all but will give additional help to rural pharmacies to help them deliver, because we know that they are an important and integral part of their local community. Ensuring that we maintain a good level of access in England and support pharmacy where there are fewer pharmacies is important and built in.
Community pharmacy always has been an integral part of our communities. We have 11,500 community pharmacies delivering. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Rother Valley for his work in chairing the all-party group on pharmacy. He explained clearly how pharmacies are close to 96% of people, who can get to one by foot or on public transport in 20 minutes. The key thing for me was when he said that the majority were in areas of high deprivation. That is hugely important as the contract moves forward, because we are determined to double down on health inequalities, and we know that the pharmacist is a key frontline expert who can help deliver in those communities. Pharmacy can play a greater part in helping people to stay well in their communities.
Today’s debate is timely because the new landmark arrangements for pharmacy—a five-year deal for pharmacies—came into force yesterday. I have heard the deal criticised as flat, but the PSNC said that it wanted certainty; it wants to be able to use its skills better and further, and we have determined the deal in collaboration with it. The deal is the beginning of a programme to transform the sector and to see community pharmacies play a much expanded role in the delivery of health and care across prevention, urgent care and medicine safety. Those new arrangements will support the pharmacy team to utilise all its extensive clinical expertise, further developing new roles and providing the community with the knowledge, skills and support to prevent ill health, manage minor conditions and stay happy and healthy for longer. We have heard from virtually every Member who has spoken about how much that goes on. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby told a moving story of how intimate the relationship is between the community pharmacist and the community that he serves.
The deal sets a programme of work that the Department, NHS England, NHS Improvement and the PSNC have collaboratively developed and agreed—we have worked together to get there. Our direction of travel is clear, and we will continue to work together on the detail, strengthening the role of community pharmacy and the delivery of health and care year on year for the next five years and beyond.
Jo Churchill
On the matter of reimbursement, which was also raised by the hon. Members for York Central and for Westmorland and Lonsdale, we seek to ensure a fairer system of reimbursement for pharmacy contractors and value for money for the NHS. I am sure we would all agree that that is the challenge that we face the whole time. That is why, in July, we launched a consultation on community pharmacy drug reimbursement. We have engaged widely with pharmacy stakeholders and have had an excellent response. We will consider all those responses fully and set out plans for the fairer system in due course. I appreciate that the response will be, “But it’s needed now,” but a pharmacy is a private business, and reimbursement is not pharmacies’ only form of income. What I am talking about will take a shift. There is an acknowledgment that that shift—that transition—will need to be assisted. There is also an independent funding stream from the flu vaccine, for example. I would like to see—and have been discussing with officials—whether a broader vaccine programme could be rolled out through pharmacies as well, and reimbursed. We know we need to do better.
Jim Shannon
The Minister has so far given a comprehensive response to our concerns. I suggested in the debate that, when it comes to medical attention, pharmacies could do more to oversee small things such as the flu vaccination that she referred to and diabetes and glaucoma. As other hon. Members have mentioned, there are small things that pharmacists could do to take the pressure off GPs. Is that something the Government would consider—giving more responsibility to the pharmacist and taking pressure off GPs and accident and emergency?
Jo Churchill
If the hon. Gentleman will just bear with me for a second, he will hear me largely repeating what the right hon. Member for Rother Valley said when he so beautifully laid out the skills and expertise that lie in the pharmacy sector, and how they can be utilised better.
As I said, the deal sets out a programme of work we shall be working on. Our aim is that collaborative working across the system will deliver an integrated and accessible community health service for all. I want to name-check the hon. Member for Strangford here because, as he articulated, communication lies at the centre of this issue. One instance might be the digital expertise that the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West said exists in Gateshead, where people’s greater readiness to get services from pharmacists, and the fact that pharmacists can do more, is having a positive effect for patients.
First, pharmacists told us that we must utilise and unlock the potential of the highly skilled pharmacy teams that are embedded in communities throughout the country, including in the constituency of the hon. Member for Halifax, with everyone celebrating what pharmacists can deliver. That is why the settlement aims to deliver more fulfilling, patient-facing careers for community pharmacists and technicians, as highly valued members of the NHS team. Additionally, populations will be helped by much better services.
Secondly, pharmacists told us that they wanted continuity. The settlement funding over five years gives certainty, and gives community pharmacists the confidence to invest in their business. However, there is no one size fits all. Being in the centre of a town is not the same as being in a rural village. Looking at these things in the round is why we want this to be collaborative.
Rachael Maskell
How will the Minister measure the impact of the settlement, particularly on independent pharmacists? If more of them close or are struggling financially, what other interventions does she plan to make?
Jo Churchill
As I said, there is no one size that fits all. As the hon. Lady articulated in her speech, the difficulty is that we are not looking at a system where businesses are run on the same scale model. At any one point, there are single pharmacists. She stated that the pharmacy she visited was part of a seven-strong business. Then there are the multiples. We need to look at what is the best scheme. However, I would argue that independents have a much higher footfall from their local population, because they are more trusted than many of the multiple pharmacies due to the continuity that comes from their having been in their communities for longer. There are opportunities there for independents.
We know we will need to design new ways of working to make a success of this, and we will need patients to be confident in how they use the services. The enhanced role for community pharmacy will support patients in getting access to help where required and in using the NHS in the best possible way. When people are suffering from minor conditions such as earaches or sore throats and need health advice, we want them to think “Pharmacy First”.
We want to build on that, with other parts of the NHS proactively signposting to local pharmacists. We want everyone to recognise the high-level skills held by pharmacists and to get people to understand that we need them as a first-line service to go to. That will grow trust in the system and spread the load. We will, of course, need to reform the way we work to free up pharmacists’ time so that they are able to deliver these new services.
Liz McInnes
I am sorry to interrupt, but the Minister has not referred to delivery times yet, and we have only two and a half minutes to go. Will she mention what she is going to do about those?
Jo Churchill
I thank the hon. Lady, but I would like to push through and to come on to the supply of medicines, which the hon. Member for Halifax spent much of her speech discussing.
We must recognise that we need to work in partnership and that this is not only about treating ill health. One of the first services to come online under the new arrangements will be the community pharmacist consultation service, which will start on 29 October. It will establish the first ever national triage system, which will look at community pharmacies referring patients into pharmacy directly from NHS 111 for minor illnesses, wellbeing support and self-care advice, as well as urgent problems. It is important that everybody involved makes this work a success, because we want this to be a two-way process. Over the next five years, we want to include referrals from GPs, urgent treatment centres and NHS Online, but we want to do that based on evidence, sensibly and in collaboration with those in the sector. Registration opened only last month, and more than 2,000 pharmacies have been signed up.
Additionally, by 2020, being a level 1 healthy living pharmacy is expected to be an essential requirement, so that pharmacies can give advice. Integration across primary care is hugely important; the new contractual framework is about not moving minor illness, but about using the whole system better. Community pharmacies are a vital part of the picture if we want to think “Pharmacy First”.
Coming on to the question of medicine supply and shortages, I appreciate the issues that the hon. Member for Halifax mentioned, but, as recognised in last week’s National Audit Office report, we have done an enormous amount in collaboration with pharmaceutical and medical device companies. There are always ongoing shortages, but the Department works all the time to ensure that they are mitigated and that a proper supply of medicine can be got to people. With the issues of Brexit, we know that that is doubly important, and that is what the Department has been doubling down on.
Sir David Crausby (in the Chair)
I do not think there is really time for Holly Lynch to wind up.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the role of community pharmacies.
Free Movement of EU Nationals
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered proposed changes to free movement of EU nationals.
I am delighted to raise the issue of freedom of movement in the EU, and I thank you, Sir David, for your chairmanship. “End freedom of movement” is a Brexiteer slogan that we have all become so accustomed to that it is easy to forget what it is really saying, and what it would really mean to this country, people living here and British citizens living abroad. We all know the basic numbers: freedom of movement allows 1.3 million British citizens to live, work, study, fall in love, marry, or retire across the European Union while more than 50,000 non-UK EU citizens work in our national health service, including support staff, nurses and doctors, all of whom play a vital role in our nation’s health.
More than 80,000 EU citizens work in social care, and even more in the UK construction industry. As the Government love to tell us, unemployment is at its lowest rate for 40 years, but where are the British workers who are queuing up and clamouring to take those jobs? If we end freedom of movement, who will care for our sick and elderly? Who will build the 300,000 homes a year that Britain needs? The Government’s own figures show that non-UK EU citizens bring far more to our economy and public services than they use. If free movement ends, services will suffer because we will not have the people to continue to provide them at the same level.
Those are the numbers, but what about the human cost and the sheer inhumanity of ending freedom of movement? Edinburgh West has constituents from France, Spain, Poland and many other EU countries who have made their lives in the city. Their children were born there, but now they are being told that they are not welcome. They feel they have no option but to leave.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service (Kit Malthouse)
That is not correct.
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
I must take exception to the language used by the hon. Lady. We have given a very clear message that all EU citizens currently residing in this country are welcome to stay. At the end of August, 1.5 million people had been granted settled status or pre-settled status, and there had been only one rejection.
Christine Jardine
With respect, that contrasts completely with what non-UK EU citizens tell me every week on the doorstep.
Christine Jardine
Although there is a settled status scheme, that does not make anyone feel welcome, and that is the issue. People no longer feel that they are wanted. They have to go through paperwork to stay in a country that has often been their home for decades.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Members across the House should understand that simple messaging is often far more powerful to people than complex explanations and systems. If we vote to leave the European Union and declare the end of freedom of movement as a great triumph—to great cheers, “I will remove your liberty.” Amazing!—we should not be surprised if the response of people already in this country and elsewhere is to think, “The United Kingdom is not for me.” The simplest message received by many EU citizens through us voting to leave the European Union is that they are not wanted. That might be inaccurate, but it is the perception, and it is human and understandable.
Christine Jardine
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I have in my constituency a family who came here from France more than 20 years ago. They have worked here, and both their sons were born here and are in schools in Edinburgh. While one son is automatically entitled to a British passport under the new system, the other is not. They have been asked to provide proof of residence and employment. They have only ever worked here, they pay tax here and they have national insurance cards, but they are being asked to prove their entitlement to stay here under the settled status scheme. They have also been asked to prove how long and how often they have visited France. I do not know whether any other Members here keep plane and train tickets for 20 years, but I certainly do not. However, that is probably the only way to prove where and when we were in the European Union at any time in the past 20 or 30 years under freedom of movement.
What about the many thousands of students who have travelled to or from the EU as part of the Erasmus scheme? Last year at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Edinburgh University, an honorary doctorate was given to the man who established that scheme. As I looked out on that hall, I saw students, graduates and academics from all across Europe who have come here to make a contribution.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
I represent a university constituency and have students, academics and researchers coming to see me every week. Does the hon. Lady agree that the international standing of our universities—a global brand that has been so successful—is at risk from this isolationist, inward-looking policy of ending free movement?
Christine Jardine
I completely agree with the hon. Lady. There are many projects in this country that have been initiated by academics from elsewhere in Europe and that we would not have had without freedom of movement. Our reputation stands to be damaged by the ending of freedom of movement.
Amid all that concern, and despite what the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) has said, we still have no clear picture of what the Government intend. For example, the Home Office changed its position in August, saying that free movement would end on 31 October. In September, the Government rowed back, admitting that primary legislation is needed to end free movement and saying that free movement will continue until the end of 2020.
The Government now say they will just make some changes to free movement as of 31 October. Are we surprised that everyone, including hon. Members, is waiting for some clarity from the Government and perhaps thinks that the Government themselves do not know the implications of ending free movement or how to end it?
There is confusion and lack of clarity about what the Government will do on immigration and what will replace the current immigration system. Then there is the impact on different sectors. Only 2% of employers in this country sponsor visas from non-EU nationals, but thousands more have EU nationals working for them and will now need to grapple with an immigration system of which they have no knowledge. What will they do? Will they have to employ lawyers? What about landlords who will have to have visas for immigrants? What about schools, many of which are now informing parents about the settled status system on which, as we have heard, there is no clarity whatever?
There is one other issue that particularly bothers me: the Good Friday agreement, which protects, in its words,
“the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland.”
The Government simply have not got to grips with what that will mean when we lose free movement. What about the rights of the people in Northern Ireland? How will they be affected by the loss of free movement?
One other thing comes to mind. When I was a young woman starting out on a career, I heard a British Prime Minister talking about how wonderful the single market would be, and how it would allow businesses in this country to prosper by putting no limitation on them and allowing the workforce to move freely across Europe. About a week ago, I was talking to a young girl who is slightly older than I was when my parents took part in the original EU referendum, in which we decided to stay in what was then, I believe, the European Economic Community. I thought about all the opportunities that I have had and that my generation have all enjoyed, including my generation of students, academics, business people and entrepreneurs, or those who simply wanted to travel. I thought about the benefits that we have enjoyed for 40 years, and I thought about what the end of that single market and that collaboration with Europe, which that Prime Minister promised us, will mean to this generation.
I also thought about what that Prime Minister might think, and I wonder what this Conservative Government would tell her, about their bringing an end to what in many ways was her vision of Europe, which they are now betraying, and the generation that they are betraying, who will not have the opportunities that every person in this Chamber has had for 40 years. How will we explain that? How will we look members of this generation in the eye and tell them that, while it was good enough for us and we benefited from it, they cannot? I say that because, while people can dress this up however they want, with red buses with numbers on the side, and while the Prime Minister can say whatever he likes about leaving, deal or no deal, it boils down to the simple fact that without freedom of movement we will all be poorer.
Tim Farron
My hon. Friend makes a massively important point about the great mass of us in this country; this issue is about our freedom of movement, and that of generations to come, as much as it is about anybody else’s.
I wonder whether my hon. Friend will say something about those people in the most marginal position. There is a real need to ensure that the provisions of the Dublin system for refugee family reunion are maintained post-Brexit. However, does she share my concern that unaccompanied minors in Europe who have family in the UK might find themselves in a much more marginalised position?
Christine Jardine
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point, because unaccompanied minors will find themselves much more marginalised. They will find it much more difficult to come to this country, as everyone will, which is another illustration of why I think this Government have not thought through what leaving the European Union will actually mean, and what the end of freedom of movement will actually mean, to immigration, employment and the economy. We have seen that the Government have papers that tell them what it will mean, but are they paying attention?
On Radio 4 yesterday morning, the Prime Minister said that this Government are working to mitigate the impact of a no-deal Brexit, and of Brexit. Even the Prime Minister knows that there is an impact—a detrimental impact—to be mitigated.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I am really appreciative of the hon. Lady’s speech, which is excellent, particularly around the research community. Brexit has a massive impact on my constituency, not least because of the university in it. One of the issues that constituents have raised with me regularly is that they now cannot plan for their future, or that of their family unit. That is because they do not know what will happen if, say, their mum or dad becomes ill and that parent is French or Spanish, or lives elsewhere in the EU. They do not know whether they will still be able, as they are now, to bring family members into their home to care for them, because they do not know whether those family members will still be eligible, if they continue to live in the EU country they are in currently, to come here to be with them. This issue is really penetrating the family unit, too.
Christine Jardine
The hon. Lady again makes an excellent point about what we in this country will lose: the ability to be sure that family members who live elsewhere in the European Union can come here and be looked after in our homes, and the ability to go and look after them easily. I am sure that, like me, every MP has constituents who come to them regularly because they have issues with family members who have travelled to other parts of the world outwith the European Union, and they know how difficult it is to go at a moment’s notice if, perhaps, a family member is ill. We should cherish the fact that we have that ability in the European Union.
Returning to the Prime Minister, if he is saying publicly that he is trying to mitigate the effects of a no-deal Brexit, surely that is an acknowledgment that that is not going to be good for this country. A Prime Minister and a Government who acknowledge that they are doing something that has to be mitigated have serious questions to ask themselves.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service (Kit Malthouse)
Thank you for presiding over this morning’s debate, Sir David. I apologise for the fact that you have a Minister responding who is not directly responsible for this area of policy but, as you may know, things are going on in Manchester that mean we are ducking and diving slightly.
It would perhaps be easy to dismiss some of the issues that the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) raised, not least because much of the emotion and assertion is incorrect, but I recognise that she, like many people, is grieving—mourning the outcome of a referendum three years ago with which she profoundly disagreed. Much of her speech this morning was a rerun of the debates held during that referendum and since, accompanied by great emotion and controversy across the nation. I urge her and other hon. Members to try to be as measured as possible about the coming changes in the immigration system, not least because, as she says, they will affect a great number of people. This morning I aim to provide clarity on some of the points that she has perhaps not yet grasped, unlike the 1.7 million people who have applied for EU settled status.
The Government have been clear that on 31 October the UK will leave the European Union. Our intention is to leave with a deal and, as you will have seen in the newspapers, Sir David, work is ongoing to get that deal. But we must also prepare for a no-deal exit, not least because the EU may choose that outcome itself. At that point, free movement as it stands will end. On 4 September the Home Secretary set out the immigration arrangements for European economic area and Swiss citizens moving to the UK after a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. To be clear, those new immigration arrangements will not affect EEA citizens who are already living in the UK before we exit. The Government value the enormous contribution that they make to our economy, public services and national life. They are our friends, our families and our neighbours. That is why we have given an unequivocal guarantee to the more than 3 million EEA citizens resident in the UK that their rights will be protected, and we urge them to stay.
The Government have delivered that protection through the EU settlement scheme, which will give them a UK immigration status and rights in UK law. They will have at least until 31 December 2020 to make an application to the scheme. The EUSS makes it easy for EU citizens to get the status they need to remain here permanently after we leave the EU, with the same rights to work and to access benefits and services as they have now. Applicants need only complete three key steps: prove their identity, show that they live in the UK, and declare any criminal convictions. It is free to make an application. There is less hassle than when applying for a bank account or renting a flat.
Jo Stevens
I seek the Minister’s help. A couple of weeks ago I met a constituent whose wife has applied for settled status and has received a letter from the Home Office confirming that her application has been successful, but it also says that the letter is not proof that she has settled status. How does somebody prove that they have settled status?
Kit Malthouse
My team will provide me with the answer shortly, and I will come back to the hon. Lady on that question.
Thus far, 1.7 million people have applied to the scheme and more than 1.5 million have already been granted settled status. In a no-deal scenario, law-abiding individuals will also be able to live, study, work and access benefits and services in the UK until the remainder of the free movement framework is repealed by Parliament at the end of 2020. If they wish to stay beyond that point, EEA and Swiss citizens and their close families will be able to apply for European temporary leave to remain through a new scheme that we will launch after exit to provide them with a bridge into the new immigration system.
The ETLR scheme will be opened by the Home Office after exit. Applications will be free and involve a simple online process and identity, security and criminality checks; successful applicants will receive permission to stay for three years. This will give individuals and their employers confidence and certainty that they can remain in the UK after the end of 2020. Anyone who wishes to stay in the UK after their temporary status expires will need to make a further application under the new points-based immigration system.
On that future immigration system, our vision is for a truly global country where we welcome the brightest and best, where we are more outward-facing, and where we decide who comes here based on what they have to offer and their circumstances, not where they come from. That is why the Home Secretary has commissioned the independent Migration Advisory Committee to review the benefits of a points-based system and what best practice can be learned from other international comparators, including the Australian immigration system. The MAC is also undertaking an existing commission on salary thresholds.
We will announce the details of the UK’s future immigration system early next year, after considering the MAC’s advice on these issues. That will provide time for businesses to adapt ahead of the implementation of the new system from January 2021.
Rachael Maskell
Will the circumstances that the Minister describes include the scenario that I raised about family members being able to come to the UK—or vice versa, where EU citizens go to their home state?
Kit Malthouse
If hon. Members do not mind, I will finish trying to give broad clarity and then, at the end, give answers to specific questions, which are being provided by my officials behind me.
Post exit, if we leave the EU without a deal, free movement as it currently stands under EU law will end on 31 October, as I said. The Government will make tangible changes at the border to reflect our status outside the European Union. We will introduce visual changes, such as removing the blue EU customs channels and introducing blue UK passports, later this year. We will also supply a tougher UK criminality threshold to conduct at the border and in the UK, to keep out and deport those who commit crime. The Government have also signalled our intention to phase out the use of EEA national identity cards to travel to the UK during 2020. Where we need to legislate to make those changes, we will do so with secondary legislation.
Immediately after exit, EEA and Swiss citizens can continue to enter the UK with a valid passport or identity card. They will be able to use e-gates if they have a biometric passport, and they will not require visas.
Christine Jardine
On the point that I was perhaps too emotional, may I make the counterpoint that what we are hearing at the moment is a list of facts—a list of procedures? When will the Government accept that this endless, meaningless list of facts has an impact on people, on the economy, on lives and on this country’s future? When will they acknowledge its impact on people’s lives?
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Lady is quite right that there will be an impact. The intention of leaving the European Union is that it should be impactful. During the referendum campaign, in which I know she participated, no doubt she outlined what she felt that impact would be. The question is how the impact is felt by individuals. What we are trying to do in creating the EUSS, the EUTLR scheme and the future immigration arrangements in this country is ensure that that impact is as beneficial and smooth as possible, both for us as a country and for the people who participate in it.
I happen to be married to an immigrant myself. She is not from the EU; she is from Canada. I had to go through the existing immigration system to be able to marry her and for her to be able to stay in the country, so I have some experience of what it is like for people coming from outside the EU. We also travel regularly to and from Canada, a country that operates a perfectly humane and compassionate immigration system but is not part of a free movement bloc. Its universities flourish, its communities are as varied and lively as we would expect—in fact, it is a nation built on immigration, yet it operates a perfectly sane and reasonable immigration system. That is what we intend to do.
As for Members’ specific questions, these obviously relate to relatively complex situations, so if Members do not mind I will take the inquiries about repatriation, families being brought into the country and proof of settled status letters and provide some clarity in writing. However, my understanding is that EUSS is meant to be and should be a smooth and simple system—the over 1.5 million people who have applied for it thus far have seemingly found it so—that allows people to continue, if you like, unmolested in their status in this country. That is what we are trying to achieve.
Turning to a couple of other specific matters, the hon. Member for Edinburgh West referred to the impact on Northern Ireland. Of course, the island of Ireland has benefited from a common travel area for many decades—since well before our membership of the EU—and the UK Government, the EU and the Irish Government have committed to the preservation of the common travel area in perpetuity, so I would not have any concerns there.
Finally, the hon. Lady also raised an issue about academics and their ability to travel to and from the EU. It is the case—the Government have already announced this—that we will favour academics in the immigration system, making it easier for scientists and others to come and do academic research in this country, not least because we recognise the benefits to this country and, indeed, to international effort towards solving humanity’s problems with science and technology. However, please be aware that there are scientists outside the EU. There are many scientists in China, India, Pakistan and the United States who also want to come to this country to do their research. In fact, there are a lot more of them than there are in the European Union. For example, there are more top 10 science-based universities outside the EU than there are inside it, and I speak as a former chair of the all-party parliamentary group for life sciences. We want an immigration system that opens our academic endeavour in this country to the world, not just to the European Union.
Christine Jardine
The Minister says that he wants to open the system, but are we not just making it as difficult for everybody from the EU to come here as it currently is for academics from the rest of the world? Should we not be looking at making it as easy for everyone to come here as it currently is for academics from the EU?
Kit Malthouse
As the hon. Lady will be aware, we will be developing our plans for our future immigration system over the next few months but, as I said in my speech, we want to operate on the basis of a person’s circumstances and what they can offer, not on where they come from. We should not discriminate in our immigration system based on geography, but we should discriminate based on circumstances and what someone can offer this country. That is what I think people felt was encapsulated when they voted to take back control of the immigration system, and that, I think, is what we are going to try and achieve over the next few months and years.
However, I recognise that the changes to immigration are providing some uncertainty for many people, and I hope that I have been able to provide an element of clarity and that the remaining 1.5 million—or whatever it is—EU citizens who are eligible for settled status and who can apply for it up until the end of next year will do so with speed and alacrity.
Question put and agreed to.
Trophy Hunting Imports
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered trophy hunting imports.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and I am delighted that the relatively new Minister from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who has championed many different environmental issues, will respond to this important debate. I am particularly delighted to have secured this debate on banning trophy hunting imports to this country: although the Government have already announced that that is their plan, I wish to check exactly what their policy will cover. It makes a change to take part in a debate in Westminster at the moment that, I suspect, has cross-party support.
Oren Lyons, the chief of the Onondaga, was invited to address the United Nations in 1977. He made a long speech about our responsibilities. When talking about who had been invited to speak at the UN, he said:
“I do not see a delegation for the four footed. I see no seat for the eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of the Creation. We must continue to understand where we are. We stand between the mountain and the ant, somewhere and there only, as part and parcel of the Creation. It is our responsibility, since we have been given the minds to take care of these things. The elements and the animals and the birds, they live in a state of grace. They are absolute, they can do no wrong. It is only we, the two leggeds, that can do this. And when we do this to our brothers, to our own brothers, we do the worst in the eyes of the Creator.”
We, the human race, have done wrong. Over the last few years, often through the greed of humans, we have brought to near-extinction many animals that used to exist in large numbers.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware that it is a widespread view on both sides of the House that there is something nauseating and revolting about someone who would slaughter an endangered animal to use part of its body as a trinket or trophy?
Mrs Latham
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will touch on such things later, but they are absolutely abhorrent. As I said, this is a debate that we can all agree on.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Further to the intervention of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight), is she aware that a recent opinion poll suggests that 86% of people across the UK support a trophy hunting ban? It is not just this House that is united on the issue, but the vast majority of this country’s population.
Mrs Latham
That is an interesting statistic, because I think that would not have been the case 20, 30 or 40 years ago. The extinction of many animals and the talk about that—for example, David Attenborough talking about it—have raised awareness among the general population, which can be only a good thing. I am sure the Minister is listening intently.
Local people in different countries do not benefit financially from this appalling trade, just the big greedy bosses of the operations. Elephants, tigers, rhinos, gorillas, lions and many more species are endangered—even giraffes are affected. British big game hunters have travelled to every corner of the globe, from Africa to Asia, North America to South America, and across Europe, in pursuit of often-rare hunting trophies. The most popular destination for UK hunters is South Africa.
Thanks to the determination of the Government and the previous Secretary of State, the ivory trade will be reduced, which will hopefully have an impact on the poaching of elephants for their tusks. Although other countries did that before us, we have at last caught up. With respect to trophy hunting, we might get to the forefront, although other countries have in fact banned trophy hunting imports.
During this debate, I wish to concentrate primarily on lions. Once they roamed free across many countries in Africa, but now there are far fewer truly wild lions. Although killing a lion for sport is bad enough, I can almost understand why that was done when they were plentiful, but I find the new, popular canned hunting of lions especially offensive.
Imagine being born into captivity, stolen from your mother at the age of about two weeks to three weeks and sold by merciless breeders to face death at the hands of bloodthirsty tourists. Laughing, smiling tourists pose for photos with dead lions, and I have even seen a photo of tourists kissing next to that fabulous being. That is the face of the animal that was once hailed as king of the jungle.
For 11,000 lions in South Africa, there will not have been one day of freedom. At a young age, they will be shot by a hunter who cannot miss. Lions are bred in cages for the canned hunting industry at more than 300 farms in South Africa. There will be no chase, no escape, no mercy. It beggars belief that British hunters are among those propping up this desperately cruel industry. The lions are reared in cages and forced to breed too young, and their cubs are taken away from them soon after birth so that the mothers can breed again, but too quickly.
The cubs might then be taken to petting zoos where tourists—possibly unaware of the past or future of those cubs—are able to bottle-feed them. Some tourists are even able to walk with the young lions until they are about nine months old, when they become much harder to control. From then on, these immature lions are kept in small pens until they are about two years old.
These animals have trusted humans because they know no different. They have been bred in captivity. This trust is tragically misplaced. The lions are either let out of the cages and shot at almost point-blank range by the trophy hunter or are taken by truck into the bush to make it more like the kill of a wild animal. In this instance, the lions are allowed out of the truck and shot—again at almost point-blank range—although some are never let out of the cages and are actually shot while in captivity, through the bars, by these so-called trophy hunters.
These magnificent animals have had no freedom to roam and live as nature intended, thanks to an industry that is, believe it or not, legal in South Africa. This kind of hunting is often given a licence thanks to the sometimes-corrupt authorities turning a blind eye, or because the owners of these “farms” persuade them that it is being done in the name of conservation. That is simply a lie. It is a heinous activity that lines the pockets of greedy owners. Every time a trophy hunter shoots a lion, they have paid many thousands of dollars for the privilege. These lions are farmed in great secrecy to produce cheap, quick trophies for hunters. In some cases, the breeders themselves shoot the lions so as to sell lion bones in the far east for ritual medicines. It is easy to see that it is only a matter of but a short time before the only lions we will see will be those in zoos.
Shamefully, Britain still allows so-called hunter trophies to be brought into the country. Yes, lions’ heads may be flown into our airports by hunters who glory in adorning their walls with them. We need to make it clear that the UK condemns the killing of lions, as well as other threatened species. This should start with legislation preventing hunters from bringing back the heads, tails, feet, skins and other body parts of these animals to the UK. We need a clear moral response.
The Government should impose an immediate moratorium on the importation of trophies until legislation is made. There is no reason this cannot be done immediately. People’s lives are in danger when they speak out about this terrible practice, so we need to protect those who whistleblow about it. People might not be aware that there are three times more canned lions than wild lions in South Africa today. There are fewer than 15,000 lions left in the wild across the world. Indeed, our own Prime Minister mentioned this recently at Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Over the past decade, 10,000 lion trophies have been taken. Despite the very small number of lions, trophy hunting of adult males is still allowed in Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Tanzania. There is an absolute dearth of information that such activities are in any way sustainable or contribute to the conservation of the species in any way. In fact, it has been shown in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania that trophy-hunting concessions are now so devoid of wildlife, largely due to overhunting, that they cannot garner any further interest in tenders from trophy-hunting operations. There has never been a population count of lions in any trophy-hunting concession in any African nation that permits lion trophy hunting. It is no wonder that trophy-hunting operators are increasingly reliant on illegal hunts inside national parks, luring lions such as Cecil out of national parks, along with many other such transgressions on lion populations that should be strictly protected. The UK has put in place much funding to combat the illegal wildlife trade, but hunting transgressions on protected areas should be considered as one of the important illegal activities.
It is now abundantly clear that the future of wild lion survival in Africa is dependent on not more than four populations, which still have more than 1,000 individuals. Those populations are located in Northern Botswana; perhaps in the Kruger National Park in South Africa; in the Serengeti in Tanzania; and in the Selous in Tanzania. The estimate of 15,000 lions in total depends on an accumulation of small, scattered and isolated groups of lions across this very large continent. For example, there are 16 lions left in Senegal, 34 in Nigeria, 32 in Malawi, 34 in Angola and maybe 60 in Ethiopia.
This practice should stop and should stop now. Britain should not be allowing trophy-hunted imports of any species from any country. How can we allow zebra, rhino, lions or, indeed, any single animal from an endangered species to be brought in to go on someone’s wall at home or in the office when we are supposed to be a nation of animal lovers? Other countries have banned imports, but, so far, we have not banned them all. I am told we still allow some to come into this country. Why? That does not help conservation.
Shockingly, the infamous killing of Cecil the lion has encouraged British hunters to go to South Africa and shoot dead more big cats than ever. Experts had believed that worldwide revulsion at the shooting would mark a turning point for the endangered species and the start of a decline in trophy hunting. Instead, the number of British hunters targeting farmed lions and bringing home their body parts more than doubled in the three years after Cecil’s death, compared with the three years before, according to statistics from the global wildlife trade regulator.
This is not about telling African countries how to manage their wildlife. It is not even about laying down the law on trophy hunting to them. It is simply saying that the UK does not agree with killing lions, elephants and other threatened species for sport, nor with allowing hunters to bring back the heads, tails, feet, skins and other body parts of these animals to the UK.
Sir Greg Knight
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again; she is being very generous. Does she agree that a ban on import should also include the body parts being traded through Britain?
Mrs Latham
Yes, I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. We must put a ban on everything that makes more species endangered, and we should be regulating and being very careful about what we do or do not allow into this country. As I said earlier, we are supposed to be a nation of animal lovers.
The times we are living in and the threat facing all wildlife demand a clear moral response. Things need to change so that live animals are better for the economy than dead ones. I understand that the US had a total or near-total ban when Obama was President, but the current President has decided to release the pressure and to allow some trophy hunting. I understand that that is because two of his sons like trophy hunting. That is something that should not happen in America. It should not happen here. It should not happen in Europe. It should happen nowhere.
I am fortunate to have seen many lions and other endangered species in various African countries, but I want my grandchildren and their children to have that privilege too when they are old enough to travel. We can visit a zoo, but that is such a poor relation, compared with seeing a lion, or any animal, living in freedom in its own natural environment. David Attenborough has spoken about the animals in Africa and other places, and indeed in the oceans, and his programmes whet the appetite, but unless we stop all trophy hunting, those beautiful animals will disappear from our reach, as many very nearly have.
I have a series of questions for the Minister, following the Government’s welcome announcement at the weekend, and I know he will listen hard to them. Which animals will be covered by the trophy hunting imports ban? When will it come into effect? Every month we take to pass legislation means more endangered species getting closer to eradication and extinction. Which countries will be banned from importing trophies into Britain? If it is not all of them, greedy businesspeople will find a way around the ban by moving the dead animal to a country from which we do allow the import of trophies. Which countries do we still allow trophies to be imported from? Will animal parts, such as bones, hands, tails and so on, be covered?
What about trading through a country, which my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) mentioned? Obviously, countries such as China value the body parts of these endangered species. I ask the Government to impose an immediate moratorium on the importation of trophies until legislation is made. Is there any reason why that cannot or should not be done immediately?
Can I be assured that the welcome announcement by the Government a few days ago will not result in just more consultation? There have been multiple consultations over a number of years, and the longer that that continues, the fewer lions there will be truly in the wild. I understand that the previous Secretary of State was holding a consultation—another one—and said that we had to listen carefully to both sides, but while we do that, more and more lions die. I thank the Minister for his passion on this and many other environmental issues, and I look forward to his positive response later.
Bill Grant (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. With your permission, I may leave a wee bit early so that I can synchronise with the Virgin Trains timetabling. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) on securing this important debate.
Trophy hunting is a particularly emotive topic but, as usual with such an issue, the situation is not entirely clear-cut. While most of us are instinctively opposed to such a practice, as I certainly am, we must surely endeavour to set that emotion aside, albeit briefly, if we are to properly consider how best to respond. While a number of animal welfare and environmental groups are firmly opposed to the practice, other institutions, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the European Parliament and the convention on international trade in endangered species maintain that trophy hunting has beneficial side-effects. Those include generating revenue for landowners to conserve or restore wildlife on their land and for wildlife management, including anti-poaching activities.
However, we must ask ourselves whether there is a better means to support those ends than revenue raised from hunting and associated tourist activities. What, after all, is the value of an anti-poaching effort for an endangered species if it is funded by the hunting of other species under the guise of big game hunting, often carried out in a merciless way, simply to secure a trophy or a photograph?
The natural assumption in this debate is that we are considering those who travel abroad from the UK for a trophy hunt, but of course the problem is broader than that. This is not just about British nationals bringing trophies back from other continents; the practice also operates the other way. Many hon. Members will recall the furore caused this time last year by an American television presenter, Miss Larysa Switlyk. She came to the beautiful island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland—I know it well—to shoot wild goats, which she then, in my opinion, glorified on social media. Those animals have no natural predator, and are classed as an invasive non-native species in the United Kingdom. They have been the subject of several official culls over the years, and they are thought to have roamed parts of Scotland and the north of England for 5,000 years. Although hunting them on private land is not illegal, we as a society were appalled at the sight of Miss Switlyk posing with one of her kills. Perhaps it was the glorification of the process and the trophy hunting element that most offended sensitivities throughout the United Kingdom.
Given our increasing concern as a nation for animal welfare, I was surprised to note that, between 2013 and 2017, trophy imports rose by 23%—a rise of almost a quarter over such a short period. That must surely be of concern worldwide, and is perhaps an indication that current regulation is ineffective. Additional red tape is seldom the solution to any problem, but do the Government—with their recent announcement of a call for evidence, they appear to be moving towards improving regulations—feel the time is now right for action? I know they have been keeping the situation under review, and although I cannot predict the outcome of that review, I hope it will be acted on and not simply placed on a shelf.
I understand the basic human need to hunt an animal to feed a family, and we must all consider rural life, in whatever country, and accept that it is perhaps unfair to apply urban values to an already fragile rural economy. Thankfully, however, hunting for food is hardly commonplace in the UK these days, and to kill purely for the purposes of hanging a memento on the wall seems, in this day and age, rather barbaric and unnecessary. Surely the days of such trophy hunting should now be behind us.
Let me close with a verse from Robert Burns, which was penned as far back as 1789. He was a farmer, and he saw the fate of a hare that was shot and not killed, but simply wounded. Strangely enough, the title of the poem is “On Seeing a Wounded Hare”. I will read the first verse:
“Inhuman man! curse on thy barb’rous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye;
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!”
It concludes:
“And curse the ruffian’s aim, and mourn thy hapless fate.”
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) on securing this debate. I believe we have debated this issue previously in Westminster Hall, and she and other hon. Members—including me and the Minister, in his previous role—were much involved. I assure her of my support in its entirety for what she has said today.
I wish to say, humbly and genuinely, that I am a country sports enthusiast. The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) referred to those who hunt for the pot, and on the farm that our family holds back home we have a small pheasant shoot and a small duck shoot. It is not particularly big, but it sustains our country sports enthusiasm, and it is important that we manage the habitat for which we have responsibility and the animals on that farm. For the record, hares are not likely to be shot, because legislation in Northern Ireland means they are protected. We are fortunate to have a large quantity of hares on our land, and I love to see them, especially in March when they start to box and spar with each other in the fields.
Bill Grant
To clarify, the verse was penned in 1789, when the rules might have been a tad different.
Jim Shannon
I realised when the hon. Gentleman mentioned Robert Burns that it had to be back in that time, but I thank him for his intervention.
By way of introduction, I absolutely support the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire, but I want to explain how I can be a harvester of pheasants, ducks and pigeons so that they are of use, in contrast to what the hon. Lady put forward, which is totally different. I support her 100%. Everything that is shot by me and my sons—and ultimately my granddaughter, when the time comes—we eat, and I make sure that my neighbours who enjoy fowl also have that opportunity. Indeed, in her room in Stormont, where she was First Minister, my party leader, Arlene Foster, would find on her desk pheasants or ducks to take home and prepare for her family to eat.
As for conservation, we believe the land has to be looked after, and the animals on the land have to be conserved and protected. If we are truly embedded in conservation programmes, as we probably all should be, and we have the opportunity to look after the land, farms, habitats, countryside and trees, it is important for us to control the predators. For instance, this last season, we used the Larsen trap. I, along with my son, got 45 magpies and 10 great black crows. The result of controlling those predators is clear: we now have an abundance of small bird life that we have not had on the farm for many years. Yellowhammers—the word “Yellowhammer” is used very often nowadays, although for a different reason—are back in numbers on our farm again. They were a threatened species, but we took action to make sure they came back.
I have a true story from my childhood. Back in the ’60s—I suspect you and I are of the same vintage, Mr Hosie, so you can probably relate to this—we did not have very much. My cousin, who lived in Strabane in the west of the Province, used to shoot pigeons, put them in a shoebox and send them—it was truly carrier pigeon—by post to us in the east of the Province. One of my favourite birds, which I enjoyed from a very early age in Ballywalter, was pigeon. If used correctly, these things can control vermin, and that can be encouraged.
As for the canned hunting the hon. Lady referred to, it is obscene, immoral and incorrect. I say, as the person I am, and with the pursuits that I have, that I find what happened to Cecil the lion very difficult. Perhaps I am a bit naive, but I can almost picture the scene of a lion being enticed from a safe place. It perhaps had daily interaction with people. What happened was totally wrong.
We cannot ignore the fact that Australia introduced a ban in March 2015. In the face of canned hunting, it proposed a total ban on all African lion trophy imports. Nor can we ignore what other countries have done. Four months after Cecil the lion was killed, France’s Environment Minister Ségolène Royal—it is a fantastic name—said that she had instructed officials to stop issuing permits for lion trophies. The Netherlands took an even bigger step and introduced the strictest ban on the importing of hunting trophies into the EU. Those are the three countries that have taken action As the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire said, it is time this country took the same strong attitude.
I am grateful for the background information on the debate, which contains things I was not aware of, including about rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and zebras. My goodness, who on earth would want to shoot a zebra? Is there not something wrong there? I think there is. It is a species of horse, probably—to us in the United Kingdom horses are horses and the zebra is a smaller version.
The other instance that really got to me was the polar bear. Many of us cannot relate to the polar bear sitting on the ice floe, surrounded by the coldness of the water. We wonder how it survives in the inhospitable habitat where it lives. Yet someone wants to shoot a polar bear. I just cannot understand it, and that is coming from where I am, although it is pheasants and ducks that we use, and it is about protection of wildlife.
The hon. Lady referred to the wildlife of today, and a magazine I get every week said something important about that—that the wildlife of today is
“not for us to dispose of”
as we please. It said:
“We hold it in trust for those who come after.”
That is our responsibility, as she mentioned, and it is why this debate is so important. We have a responsibility to ensure that lions, polar bears, zebras, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses and all the others on the list are protected from extinction. Large numbers of my constituents have contacted me to oppose trophy hunting imports. I oppose them too, and feel that they are totally wrong. Those constituents want me to oppose trophy hunting, put their views on record and look to the Minister for a response.
As the hon. Lady said, things may have been different 40 years ago—and even more so in 1780. However, society has moved on, and things that were acceptable in the past are certainly not today. We must make a positive response as a society.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point about how we need to move with the times. Does he agree that we should allocate our international aid budget in a way that reflects modern sensibilities? My constituents would like our aid budget to be used to preserve biodiversity, whether that means the sorts of animals he has referred to or other types of diversity. That is what we should use our financial firepower for. Does he agree?
Jim Shannon
I wholeheartedly agree. The hon. Gentleman has introduced a point I was going to make, so well done. I think we should do that, because there are ways to do things in conservation. I think that the Department for International Development or some other Departments are helping rangers in some countries, at least partially. I am not sure where all the money is coming from, but they can train people in Africa to be the protectors of animals. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I know that we are doing something, but perhaps the Minister can tell us a wee bit to clarify things and add some meat to the bones.
Where there is any chance of making money, we can be pretty sure that a criminal gang is involved somewhere, and there are criminal gangs that clearly do not give—I should keep my language under control—any concern whatever in terms of what happens, as long as they can make money. So the criminal gangs, who kill indiscriminately and murder animals for their own personal gain, have to be addressed as well.
Let me make a comment about conservation. I said what I said earlier about conservation to set the scene, in a very small way, for how conservation works. In his intervention, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) referred to conservation that we can help with, in Africa and in other parts of the world. The Minister, and indeed everyone else, will understand the importance of habitat. When it comes to addressing trophy hunting and imports, which is what this debate is about, we also have to—perhaps directly, as the hon. Gentleman suggested in his intervention—do other things, which are about habitat retention. They are about addressing the conflict in parts of Africa, where the population is exploding and where there is confrontation between the farmers, landowners and animals. Those wonderful TV programmes that Sir David Attenborough presents tell us about Africa and elsewhere, but they also tell us about the savagery of wildlife and life on the plains, where animal eats animal; that is how things are.
However, we also need to ensure that, in addressing habitat loss and conservation in Africa, we help countries to do what they do. Landowners and farmers are growing crops to feed their families, so we need to have some methodology to address that. There is enormous demand on resources—water, trees, woodland, scrubland and the land itself. Where can the land sustain farming? We need the large savannahs as a large place for the animals to roam as well. There is no doubt that lots of the problems on savannahs are very complicated. Let me ask the Minister a question, which follows on from an earlier intervention: what are we doing to help countries to retain habitat and reduce the confrontation between people and animals?
I will finish with this point. Trophy hunting imports need to be not just controlled, but stopped. The Government have said they will keep the issue constantly under review. I respectfully suggest to them, and in total support of the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire, that it is time not just to keep trophy hunting under review but to stop it.
Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) on securing this debate. I agreed with everything she said, which is hardly a surprise, because I agree with most of her views on life generally.
I hope this is the last time we need to have a debate on this issue, because, by a happy coincidence, my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) led a debate on it earlier this year—I think it was on 15 May—and he is now the Minister. I am absolutely delighted about that, and I suspect that we are pushing at an open door.
Of course, this subject is not party political, and all Members hopefully agree on it. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) is no longer in his place, but when he and I entered Parliament the issue of animal welfare was treated very differently from the way it is today. When a show of support was organised in July for a ban on trophy hunting, I was delighted that many colleagues lined up—quite rightly—to have their photograph taken with Sir Ranulph Fiennes. That was very good to witness.
Trophy hunting is a wicked, evil practice, and anyone who indulges in it or encourages it should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. We should not mince words or be intimidated on this issue: trophy hunting is an absolutely disgusting practice. I recognise, especially from the point of view of my hon. Friend the Minister, that these words come easily. The question is: how do we stop trophy hunting? Our excellent Library briefing tells us that Australia has acted, France has acted and the Netherlands has acted. I do not know whether the Minister can tell us how successful they have been so far, but I believe that the Government want to do everything they can to stop this practice.
I was delighted to host a meeting of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation in Manchester on Monday. The Foreign Secretary, who stood in for the Prime Minister today, made an excellent speech on this very issue, as did Dr Nick Palmer, a former Labour Member of Parliament, who is now head of Compassion in World Farming UK. We had speeches from Peter Hall, who is a director of the CAWF, and from Kike Yuen of the World Dog Alliance, and an excellent contribution from Duncan McNair of Save the Asian Elephants. It was particularly good that we had speeches from the Prime Minister’s father, Mr Stanley Johnson, and from Ms Carrie Symonds. There was wide unanimity on the subject.
Conservatives’ perception of the issue has been changed by one person in particular: Mrs Lorraine Platt. She set up the CAWF and, through charm, has persuaded any number of my colleagues that we need to be on the right side of the argument. She has been supported in her endeavours by Mrs Elise Dunwebber, and I congratulate them both. There is still much work to be done on the issue, but I know they are keen to work with the Government on banning trophy hunting.
In the 10 years to 2017, 290,000 trophy items were exported across the world. That is absolutely disgusting. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire spoke about lions, but as the Library briefing tells us, this is also about polar bears, giraffes, antelopes, alligators and all sorts of beautiful animals. We realise that they could kill us—they are wild animals—but, for goodness’ sake, think of David Attenborough’s wonderful work, not only in our country but throughout the world, to highlight the fact that these animals are facing extinction. We do not want elephants and lions to be just a story for future generations, like the dinosaurs.
In these difficult times, this is a subject that Parliament can unite on. We should help and encourage the Government to do something about it—I know that the Minister is thinking about how to reply to my hon. Friend’s questions. I recognise that there is no easy solution; 200,000 endangered animals are put at risk each year, which is an awful lot to deal with. It is so depressing that as soon as someone comes up with an idea to stop trophy hunters, these evil, wicked people get ahead of the game and find some way round the legislation.
I do not minimise the difficulty the Government face, but I simply cannot comprehend why anyone would pay up to $72,000 to travel across the world and shoot a beautiful animal. As I have said at business questions, I have seen numerous adverts for trophy hunting, with some companies even advertising price lists by trip length—as my hon. Friend said—by animal on offer and by trophy fee. Such adverts should be completely banned from all platforms in the United Kingdom.
The Government have a responsibility to use their global influence, along with the views of our royal family, to stop this trade. We have an important role to play in bringing the world together on the issue, but it will be a real challenge because 0.76% of tourism jobs in some countries are directly linked to the trade. I was pleased by what my hon. Friends the Members for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) had to say on that point, and I hope the Government will take it on board.
In conclusion, before we are able to stop trophy hunting completely, we must recognise the need to act swiftly to ban all imports of trophies, which we must be able to do. Some 86% of British people apparently support this action, and the Government need to be alive to the fact that some of these beautiful animals will find their way into the UK because some of the customers are British citizens. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire said, we are a nation of animal lovers, so let us prove it. Let us do something about banning trophy imports. It looks as though we are going to have the Gracious Speech on 14 October, which may or may not be controversial, but would it not be good if a big chunk of legislation to deal with animal welfare were at the heart of that speech? What could be better than to pay a tribute to the debate my hon. Friend has led this afternoon and to have a proposal to ban trophy hunting imports?
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Hosie. I start by thanking the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham). We often do not agree on many policies in relation to Brexit and so on, but when we worked together on the Select Committee on International Development we agreed on fundamental issues, including helping the poorest countries in the world and animal welfare. I pay tribute to all her work in Parliament on those issues, and she will no doubt continue that work in the future.
This crucial debate is important to many of my constituents and to the public across the United Kingdom. The hon. Lady provided a detailed, passionate overview of the issue, and I agree with her words and with her asks of the Minister. We do not necessarily have to unite on a cross-party basis around some of the issues that the public and MPs currently find so difficult, but animal welfare is a unifying issue for MPs and for people in each of the nations of the United Kingdom. I am therefore pleased that we are having this important debate today, and I hope that the Government will address the issue in the Queen’s Speech.
I thank the other Members who have contributed today. The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) described trophy hunting as barbaric and unnecessary and went on to advance the alternatives that exist in this day and age. Indeed, he referenced the wild goat that was shot in Scotland, about which I received a full mailbag from my constituents, with many asking, “How brave is it to shoot a goat? How can that give pleasure? What exactly is the point?” It is not so much about conservation but, I dare to say, more about the ego of the person involved. My constituents were appalled by that individual and want to see movement on the issue.
The hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) is a real champion of animal welfare. We are usually lining up to have our photograph taken with pledges to support animal welfare, and I am pleased that he hosted a meeting of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation at the Conservative conference this week. The foundation is kind enough to send me a Christmas card every year, so Lorraine Platt is doing well by boosting not only animal welfare issues in the Conservative party but cross-party efforts to bring everybody on board, so I pay tribute to her.
Westminster Hall would not be the same if the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) were not sitting in his place right behind me. He outlined eloquently the difference between hunting for food and trophy hunting, and stated plainly that trophy hunting is not acceptable today; we need to move with the times. In my constituency and others across the UK, young people are so enthused by doing all they can for the planet, through addressing environmental issues and conservation. They are saying to MPs in this House, “Get on with it; do this work.” In this day and age, it is those issues that are top of their priority list.
Alex Chalk
The hon. Lady is absolutely right that young people are interested in the planet. When DFID was set up in 1997, it was principally focused on people, rather than the planet. Does she agree that the time has come to recalibrate our approach on deploying our international aid so that it truly focuses on and prioritises preserving the planet?
Dr Cameron
As the hon. Gentleman may be aware, DFID has a presence in my constituency, and I am so very proud of the work that it does to eradicate poverty the world over. I believe that conservation is commensurate with the sustainable development goals, because it is not only about animal welfare; it is about helping the communities located where those endangered species are. It is about making sure that those communities have another source of income; that people and animals can cohabit. We must do everything possible on both issues, and I will be interested to hear from the Minister how the two can be married together. We must ensure that aid goes to the poorest and that no one is left behind. I have a particular passion for helping disabled children into school in developing countries, but I do not see a contradiction in helping the poorest communities and working on conservation and, in the main, I do not believe that colleagues across the House would either.
In November 2018 the Minister lodged early-day motion 1829, which was signed by 166 MPs cross-party, including myself. It asked the Government to commit to halting imports of hunting trophies as a matter of urgency. I am very pleased that the Minister is in his place today, and not just because of that issue. He also did a lot of cross-party work with the all-party parliamentary dog advisory welfare group on Lucy’s law, which will now become law not just in England, but in Wales and Scotland. We are extremely pleased about that.
As has been said, 86% of the public support a ban on trophy hunting. I pay tribute to the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, Born Free and Stop Ivory for placing these issues at the forefront of our minds, so that we can see what is happening. I had a look at the statistics. Although progress is being made on elephant populations and larger cat populations—not enough, but some progress—people are now reverting to hunting bears, cranes, antelopes, rhinoceroses and, would you believe it, crocodiles. Perhaps they have watched too many “Crocodile Dundee” films. Other species are up 29.2% as well; I am not sure what species those are, and it would be interesting to find out more, particularly whether any of those species are at risk.
Many trophy hunters use the rationale that they kill the old, the weak or the sick, and that they are therefore helping conservation. That is rarely proven by the egotistical photographs that are put up online, with the hunter standing next to the biggest, the rarest and the largest animals with the biggest horns. It is much more about ego than any effort towards conservation.
A current loophole allows hunters from the UK to import trophies of animals, many so rare that they have been declared extinct in the wild. For example, puffins are often hunted and the trophies brought to the UK, despite the UK Government’s efforts to save the species. Online websites are easily found offering these grisly puffin hunters trips costing around £3,000 to Iceland, where they have the chance to kill a bag of puffins and can boast of shooting up to 100 at a time. The species is classified as endangered in the 2018 “State of the World’s Birds” report, but is not listed for protection by CITES, the body that regulates the international animal trade. British people are bringing home puffin carcases in their hundreds and the puffin is at risk of becoming extinct, with uncontrolled hunting a leading cause.
I was proud to lead for the Scottish National party on the Bill that became the Ivory Act 2018. As a party, we welcome that historic legislation and the UK Government’s progress on tackling the illegal ivory trade and trophy hunting. Organised crime is often behind the individuals involved in that trade, as it offers big money, so we need to tackle it at the root. I was pleased—actually, emotionally quite overcome—to visit Sheldrick Wildlife Trust the day before the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire, I believe, with the International Development Committee. We were able to spend time with orphaned elephants there. Now, I have quite short legs, but the little elephants only came up to my waist, which shows how small they were. Some, only a few days or a few weeks old, were being bottle-fed, because the hunters were after their parents and left the little baby elephants behind, unable to survive on their own. This fantastic project goes out and saves them from otherwise certain death in the wild, but still, they will not have had the life they should have had. They should live with their herd, not be raised in those circumstances.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
I missed the beginning of the hon. Lady’s account. Could she clarify whether the victims—the parents of those elephants—were poached or hunted for trophies? There is a huge difference.
Dr Cameron
I did not get the details of what had happened to all the parents. I imagine it was a mixture of the two, but mainly poaching, because organised crime is behind a lot of that activity. However, trophy hunting does not help when saving the species.
I believe that the Department for International Development could support this work, and there is no contradiction in that. It would help some of the most rural and impoverished communities. I would like some money to go toward training local people as wardens, giving them the opportunity of jobs and livelihoods. Finally, will the Minister reinforce and re-endorse his own early-day motion calling for a ban on trophy hunting imports as a matter of urgency?
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) on initiating this very good debate, in which good points have been made by a number of speakers. It is a shame that it clashes with Second Reading of the Domestic Abuse Bill, because I know many of my hon. Friends wanted to speak in this debate. I imagine that, had they been here, they would have said much the same as has been said by others in the debate, but the Minister would have heard it from a few more voices.
I welcome the Minister to his place. It may not be fashionable—or productive for my future career—to say this, but I am excited about the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) becoming a Minister. His championing from the Back Benches of causes and views that I believe many Members share has been really powerful. At the risk of injecting a partisan flavour into the debate, I have to say that sometimes we have heard the soundbite from Ministers but not seen the action that goes with it. I am certain that the hon. Gentleman will not fall for any press release camouflage on inaction. This is an area where there is a real opportunity to stop the long-grassing of policies where there is clear cross-party support, and to get on with it. I hope that when he gets to his feet in a moment, he will say exactly the same things.
We have heard some good contributions. The hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) mentioned a few but I will add a few more. The phrase of the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight), that trophy hunting is “nauseating and revolting”, cut through and adequately described what is going on. The hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) rightly said that a ban on trophy hunting is backed by 86% of the British public. The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) spoke passionately about the fact that it is not something that only happens abroad. We should recognise that and ensure that any ban takes adequate notice of that, so that it covers not just imports but exports of trophies from UK wildlife.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) used “yellowhammer” correctly—it is good to hear the yellowhammer bird getting due attention after its name has been borrowed for so many things. We all share the complete puzzlement implied by his question, “Who on earth would want to shoot a zebra?” I agree with the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess), who was clear when he said it was a wicked, evil practice. We should not mince our words about people who go and shoot.
I am glad that it is not just parliamentarians who have encouraged this debate; people have used their fame and celebrity to endorse it too. Ricky Gervais does not mince his words on social media when it comes to this subject. I especially like his tweet from a few years ago, which says:
“The trophies I’m proudest of are the memories of all those times I didn’t kill a beautiful, majestic, endangered species for no reason.”
Although he may choose more powerful language to describe some of the people who are engaged in trophy hunting, his leadership on social media has highlighted a cruel and inhumane practice to many people who might not otherwise have appreciated its barbarity.
Ricky Gervais and the Minister are not alone, however, and have been in good company in championing the cause. Joanna Lumley correctly said that trophy hunting is “cruel, immoral…and unjustifiable”. Bill Bailey said:
“I can’t get my head round why anyone would want to kill a beautiful creature for fun. With the dwindling numbers of species, it’s time to halt this cruel and unnecessary practice.”
He is right, as are the speeches that we have heard today.
I will ask the Minister a few questions to try to understand the detail of the proposed ban. He has been clear that we should ban trophy hunting, but Ministers in the past have not been clear about what that ban comprises in detail, as the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire hinted in her opening speech. The thread of Ministers to date was that the Government’s proposed ban would affect just threatened species, by taking that international classification and banning the imports of trophies in relation to them. I would like us to go much further. Labour’s position is that the ban should be for every species above least concern. That would effectively capture many more species, not just the most endangered.
Looking around the room, I see that many hon. Members served on the Committee for the Ivory Act 2018 to support the introduction of a ban on elephant ivory. Since that ban has come into place, as expected, and as mentioned in Committee, we have seen the trade move from elephant ivory to other ivory-bearing species, such as the rhino, which has experienced additional hunting since the ban on elephant ivory came in. We knew that at the time and we must not make the same mistake with the trophy hunting ban by banning it for the most endangered and allowing it to slip down to those that are just below the most endangered. The Minister will be well aware of that and, hopefully, with his power, he can make sure that it does not happen.
We need to recognise that trophy hunting, as well as being cruel and unjustifiable, can act as a cover for illegal poaching, which was the sentiment of the intervention of the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin). The proposed ban that we would like the Government to adopt would cover all species above least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources red list, which would include species classed as vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered and extinct in the wild.
Sustainable alternatives to trophy hunting, such as eco-tourism and photographic safaris, are generating revenues that cover the real costs of conservation and effective anti-poaching work, as well as providing well-paying permanent jobs for local people. Shooting a lion such as Cecil can generate a one-off trophy fee of around $15,000. There is no evidence that that goes toward conservation, no evidence that it goes toward the local community, and no evidence that it goes toward the protection of other animals. Nature tourism, on the other hand, can generate money from the protection and valuing of those wild animals.
There is an opportunity, which has been mentioned a few times, through Brexit to come together. What Brexit has done for DEFRA debates is to open space in the Government’s legislative agenda for issues that might not otherwise have got the airtime they deserved. If we think about what has been passed by this House in recent months, on a cross-party basis, with the Brexit malaise and chaos going on around us, we will realise that many of the same faces in this Chamber have been working together on banning wild animals in circuses, banning the trade in elephant ivory and tightening up regulations across the board.
That work might not have attracted the attention of many people outside Parliament, and certainly it has not troubled some of our friends in the media, but it has been worthwhile. We should continue that spirit, whatever is happening with Brexit or outside, because there is something here that could make a real difference to the species involved.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
The hon. Gentleman is speaking very eloquently about the issue and the potential opportunities of eco-tourism. He will know that last year in Scotland, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) has mentioned, the shooting of a wild goat on Islay caused a huge upset among people in Scotland and much further afield. What is most upsetting is that tourism companies are promoting Scotland as a place to come and trophy-shoot. Surely we should be clamping down on that. Companies are not just offering places in Africa as destinations; that is also happening here in the UK.
Luke Pollard
The hon. Lady makes a very sound point, on a common theme with the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess), who voiced a concern about what powers the Government have over the advertising of those tourism products. I spent five years working for the Association of British Travel Agents, and in that role I supported the animal welfare guidelines that encouraged ABTA members to ensure that animals are used sustainably and without endangering them, their habitats or their handlers. There are opportunities to ensure that those principles, which are good and strong, are spread across not only ABTA members, but the entire tourism industry. I am sure that the Minister is familiar with those guidelines; if he is not, I encourage him to look at them next time he needs some bedtime reading, because there is some real strength there and some real opportunities to do the right thing. The market does not correct all ills, and in this case there is a role for real moral leadership from the Government.
I hope that the Minister will be as strong and forthright in his new role as he has been in campaigning to date. I was pleased to see a letter that he co-signed in The Guardian in April with a series of high-profile supporters, which said:
“Banning the import of hunting trophies will send a clear message to the international community that there is no place for trophy hunting in this day and age.”
We must be clear that the continuation of that colonial and neo-colonial practice of rich people descending on communities, for whom that extra money can have a positive impact on their lives, to do something that is abhorrent, is something that we should not accept any more.
The Minister was in good company in signing that letter. It was signed not only by the Prime Minister’s father and his partner, but by Michael Palin, Captain Kirk—William Shatner, that is—Matt Lucas, Will Travers of Born Free, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad), for Stroud (Dr Drew) and for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue), and many others besides.
As my final remark, I encourage the Minister not to allow his passion for these topics to be diluted by the sense, which there sometimes is within Government, that animal welfare legislation can be cut up and parcelled in different parts, as happened with the Ivory Act. The Ivory Act should have been a comprehensive ban on ivory—I believe that is something the Minister himself supported from the Back Benches—but it was allowed to be parcelled up into smaller bits. I hope that the new Administration will move away from that parcelling up of animal welfare opportunities.
There is a real opportunity here for people who may be bitterly divided on Brexit and other matters to come together, on a cross-party basis, around animal welfare. I encourage the Minister to be as bold as he can be, because in these times animals do not have a voice, and every animal matters. We must ensure that we are their voice. The Minister has the opportunity to be a bull in a china shop on the previous behaviour of the right soundbite but the wrong action, and to ensure that we have the comprehensive trophy hunting ban that we deserve, which animals both in the wild and in the canned lion industry that the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire spoke about can really benefit from.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Zac Goldsmith)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) on securing this debate. Over the past years we have stood side by side in so many debates on issues relevant to this one that I have lost track of how many we have shared. She has been a nature champion for all the time I have known her—indeed, this room is full of nature champions, and I wish there were a few more. It has been a joy to hear the contributions, including interventions, from all Members present.
My hon. Friend will know that this subject is close to my heart. Indeed, the last time I took part in a debate on this issue in Parliament—I believe she also took part—was on a motion tabled in my name, some time earlier this year. Last Saturday I was pleased to announce that the Government are launching a consultation on restricting, or banning, the import and export of hunting trophies.
Many questions have been raised, some of which I will struggle to answer because they relate to the details of the consultation. Hon. Members will understand that I must be slightly guarded and cannot go into too many details about a Government consultation, because I could end up jeopardising or compromising the process. Broadly speaking, however, we are not looking for any long grass. This is a serious consultation, and we intend to resolve the issue once and for all and not to waste any time. I will drive it through as fast as I possibly can, but in a proper manner.
I cannot answer the question about the threshold, were we to end up with the ban that we are talking about. My early-day motion broadly reflects the position laid out by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), which relates to not just CITES I and II, but the list from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. However, those details will have to come out in the consultation, and it would be wrong for me to pre-empt it.
I am grateful for and flattered by the remarks made about my appointment. I am an animal welfare and conservation advocate, and I was worried, before being asked to be a Minister, that I might have to go through a lobotomy and cast aside all my passions for such issues. That does not seem to have been the case—yet—so I am able to pursue issues that matter to me and to Members across the House. Over the next few weeks, I look forward to reading the feedback on this debate from people across the spectrum, but I know from correspondence I have already seen that some people will push back heavily against the proposal for a possible ban.
On a personal level, hon. Members know I believe that shooting a beautiful and endangered animal for fun is, to quote the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), obscene, and it is something I could never understand. Most people with whom I have discussed the issue are similarly sickened when they see images of so-called celebrity hunters smirking over the corpse of a lion, giraffe, rhino or elephant. It is something that most people regard as grotesque, and poll after poll shows that to be the view of the British people. There have been a range of polls, but they have consistently shown that between 75% and 90% of people are in favour of a ban on imports of hunting trophies.
To demonstrate quite how non-partisan this issue is, I was shocked and amazed last Saturday to read an editorial in the Daily Mirror—I have appeared in it a few times as a politician, and I have always put on my tin hat and hidden away for a few hours afterwards. This recent editorial, however, praised both me and the Conservative Government for initiating this process, because the issue goes way beyond the left or right of politics today. I thank the Daily Mirror for having pushed the issue up the agenda. It has run an incredibly impressive campaign, as have The Daily Telegraph and a number of key campaigners, such as Eduardo Gonçalves, who runs the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting.
Trophy hunting is not just a niche issue or a symbolic part of the conservation story. A 2016 report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare estimates that around 1.7 million hunting trophies crossed borders globally between 2004 and 2014, and at least 200,000 of those came from species that are threatened. Some of those species face a horribly uncertain future, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire in relation to lion numbers. There could be only 15,000 lions, 415,000 African elephants—there were 3 million elephants a century ago—and 5,000 black rhinos left in the wild.
As I said from the Back Benches a few months ago, we must nevertheless separate the moral arguments from the scientific ones. The moral arguments do matter, and for many people the idea of shooting a giraffe for fun or with the idea that it might help protect the giraffe seems utterly perverse, but the issue is subject to a live debate between experts and even some conservation organisations.
Bill Wiggin
Many people who live in the Forest of Dean wake up in the morning to find that wild boar have completely destroyed their garden, and they then ring the Forestry Commission—in the Minister’s Department—which culls those animals. Is that right?
Zac Goldsmith
It is certainly right that wild boar are culled. There is a live discussion about whether there should be a protected season for wild boar, given that they are now prevalent throughout the country. I am not sure that my hon. Friend’s point is directly relevant to the issue of the positive contribution of trophy hunting to either the conservation or the denudation of wild species.
Bill Wiggin
It is very easy to attach a huge amount of emotion to animals that are attractive and beautiful, as the Minister described, but they are still managed, and the ability to manage populations is the difficult part. The Government have to take responsibility. I felt he was perhaps straying into pretending that it does not happen.
Zac Goldsmith
My hon. Friend pre-empts the point I was about to make. We have to separate the ethical arguments from the scientific ones. If the scientific evidence can show that trophy hunting contributes to conservation, we will be having a different debate. Although I cannot pre-empt the consultation, we will be flooded with evidence that will tell us one way or the other. I acknowledge that some conservation groups make the case for trophy hunting. I have seen the documents and been bombarded with letters, as we will no doubt be throughout the consultation. Some of the arguments that I have heard are—I think this term entered the English dictionary only recently—whataboutery. A number of different organisations tell us that trophy hunting is an issue but that it is not as bad as habitat loss or illegal poaching. Obviously, habitat loss is the big problem facing species across the world, and we have heard about the illegal wildlife trade decimating communities and bringing species to the brink of extinction, but whether or not that is true, it is not an argument for or against trophy hunting. It is an entirely separate issue.
The central argument that has been put forward in favour of trophy hunting is that these magnificent animals, through being hunted, generate money that is then ploughed into conservation. I have not seen much evidence of the funds being used to support local communities or to invest in conservation. It is not much use if the main argument of the conservation groups is based on generalising the best of the best practice—no doubt there are some best practice examples—throughout the world; if so, their argument is flimsy at best. We will see during the consultation whether there are more examples of best practice than perhaps I have implied.
There are other issues to examine. Unlike wildlife tourism, trophy hunting contributes a tiny proportion of revenue for African countries. There is a question whether we should instead focus our efforts on promoting the former. I will come to that point in answer to another question, which was raised by the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron). There is also the issue of cruelty, with reports that half the animals killed in the course of trophy hunting are not killed instantaneously but are wounded. Cecil the lion lived for another 19 hours, I believe—no doubt in hideous pain—after first being shot.
We must find out the impact of trophy hunting on the gene pool. If hunters prize the biggest and the best of the rarest, the most endangered and the most valuable species, does that not logically mean that the gene pool is inevitably going to be weakened over time? These are issues that, again, we are going to have to address.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire mentioned the issue of canned hunting. I forget which hon. Member described it as an obscenity, but it is. As far as I can see, these lions are bred for one purpose only and they are shot in such a manner that anyone would be able to finish them off, no matter how talented they are with a gun. It is no different from putting goldfish in a bowl and just shooting them. It is an extraordinarily grim practice. In answer to my hon. Friend’s question about whether the consultation will include measures to tackle canned hunting, I would say that it is one and the same. That will be explored in the consultation, and I hope the outcome will fully take into account the points she made.
The UK cannot ban trophy hunting overseas. We are not at liberty to do so, but we can ban the import of hunting trophies. Over the five years from 2013 to 2017, we estimate that up to 1,500 trophies were imported into the UK, with up to one third of those from the most endangered species. Perversely, elephant parts are the favourite import for British trophy hunters. I say that is perverse because we are the world leader now in stepping up our efforts to protect elephants around the world, not least through the ivory legislation that has already been commended today and much more besides. This consultation is critical, and it is going to have to provide answers to those very difficult questions.
I want to talk briefly about animal welfare and conservation more broadly. People in this country do care—very much—about the issue. As the animal welfare Minister, I clearly do too. I am proud of the progress this Government have already made. We introduced the ivory legislation I just mentioned. We introduced legislation to ban the use of wild animals in travelling circuses. We have legislated to ensure that CCTV is required in every slaughterhouse. Along with this consultation on the importance of hunting trophies, we are also consulting on mandatory cat microchipping, we are issuing a call for evidence on banning the keeping of pet primates and we are bringing forward proposals for consideration on ending the live export of animals.
I was proud that the UK played a defining role at the recent CITES COP, working under the radar, barely noticed by the rest of the country, to bring an end to the appalling practice of capturing wild elephants to be sold for captivity around the world. Without our negotiating team from DEFRA taking part in that debate, the motion would not have passed and it would still be possible for countries to capture wild elephants and pack them off to grim zoos in China and elsewhere. If they were here, I would pay tribute to them. In their absence, I will do so, all the same.
I am delighted that the Prime Minister announced at the United Nations that we are going to radically step up our contribution to tackling the wider environmental and climate crisis—and it is a crisis, no matter how you choose to interpret it. We know from scientists that a 1.5°˚ C rise in temperatures is going to be utterly devastating to humanity and nature. We heard just a few months ago, in what is the most comprehensive ever assessment of the state of the natural world, the report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, that 1 million species face extinction, many of them within decades. We have heard that, since 1970, the populations of the world’s wild animals have declined by 60%—a staggering figure. We learned from the World Resources Institute that, last year, we lost the equivalent of 27 football pitches’ worth of forest every single minute. Incidentally, we also learned from the World Economic Forum that, by 2050, our oceans will have more plastic in them than fish, if measured by weight.
We recognise the scale of the challenge. We are determined as a Government to provide the leadership that is needed globally and to do our bit at home. I was at the General Assembly of the United Nations when the Prime Minister made his announcement that we are going to double our climate funding. I was there when he made the important point about the crucial role of biodiversity in nature in tackling climate change. That directly addresses the point raised by a number of hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Strangford, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) and no doubt others as well. The Prime Minister emphasised that much of that uplift in climate funding will be spent on nature-based solutions to climate change. We know that if we invest in protecting, saving and restoring forests, we protect the livelihoods of those hundreds of millions of people who depend on them for their livelihoods. We protect the harbour for 80% of the world’s biodiversity, and we also tackle climate change, given that deforestation is the second-biggest cause of emissions.
The same is true of our oceans. About 1 billion people depend on oceans for their main source of protein. Some 200 million depend on oceans for their livelihoods and on there being fish for them to catch. However, oceans are also a gigantic carbon sink, so the case for investing in nature-based solutions as a means of tackling climate change and helping to stop the extinction crisis, and also as a means of alleviating and preventing base poverty, is absolute and unarguable. I am thrilled that we are moving in that direction, and I do not sense any opposition from any party in this place to that shift. So that is where we need to go, and that is where I am thrilled to say we are going.
As a start to that package—these are just the things that have been announced in the past few weeks in relation to biodiversity—the Prime Minister announced a new £220 million fund. That includes a dramatic uplift to the Darwin initiative, which I am sure Members are aware of. That world-renowned programme has brought individual species back from the brink of extinction. We will see a major uplift in the illegal wildlife trade challenge fund, which is relatively new, but is already yielding incredible results, particularly on the continent of Africa, but elsewhere as well. It helps train local people to tackle poaching and create alternative livelihoods in areas most at risk, and it is having a significant and measurable impact.
We are creating a new fund. It does not have a proper name yet, but we are calling it the biodiverse landscape fund. It is a £100 million fund—a world first. It will tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss in large biodiversity hotspots around the world, focusing particularly on trans-frontier initiatives such as KAZA in southern Africa, which is a programme that five countries have signed up to to create wildlife corridors connecting their countries, their national parks and more. It is all based on helping local communities to create alternative livelihoods so that the viability of local economies is based and dependent on the health of the local environment and on flourishing biodiversity.
That is just a start. We are doing a lot, and I am thrilled that the UK has been given an opportunity to host the COP in 2020. We keep hearing about 2020 as a superyear for nature. It is absolutely the Government’s ambition to play a part so that 2020 will be the superyear for nature. We will host COP, and by the end of the year, in December, we aim to have aligned as many big countries in the world as possible with our ambition to step up our contribution to tackling climate change, to focus much more on nature-based solutions and to help turn the tide on this catastrophic extinction crisis, which is now beyond any doubt at all—it is happening right now on our watch.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire for bringing attention to this hugely important issue and for all the work she does as a parliamentary nature champion. I thank other hon. Members for their contributions too. We will crack on. We will get this done. We are not looking for the long grass. We will nail this issue as quickly as we possibly can.
Mrs Latham
I thank the Minister and all hon. and right hon. Members for contributing to this debate. It must be terribly hard for the Minister to be the poacher turned gamekeeper. He has a difficult decision, having now to stick with what he is told and what he has to do, but I hope that his passion will cut through some of the civil service speak and that he will get on and do it, because we are only temporary custodians of the wildlife and the environment of this planet. We really need to act if we want our grandchildren, their children and their children after that to be able to see these magnificent animals. We can play only a small part, but we can do a lot to persuade other countries to cease their activities. A ban on wildlife trophy imports into this country sends a hugely significant message that we care and want to change things. I commend this motion to the Minister and everyone else.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered trophy hunting imports.
Leasehold and Commonhold Reform
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered progress on leasehold and commonhold reform.
This debate is an opportunity for the Government to explain what progress has been made on this issue, describe what is in their mind at the moment, and give us some hope that there will be even more improvements in future.
Before I start in detail, I want to thank colleagues who have worked really hard on the issue. I welcome the fact that the Labour party has developed proposals of its own, and I know that the Liberal Democrats have done the same. In particular, I thank and praise the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), who I think has done more on this issue than any other Member of Parliament. I also thank the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), who has joined in and helped to make the scandal of leasehold homes in the north-west so relevant.
I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), who was deeply involved in the early stages of the campaign by the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership. That charity’s campaign, both for the ordinary leaseholders of flats and houses and in the retirement field, has done so much to make it possible for the work of MPs to be well directed and well supported. With Louise O’Riordan, it acts as the secretariat for the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform, and I think we can all say that we have made progress together.
I say to those in the Government field and in the Government’s Leasehold Advisory Service, or LEASE, that we often agree that problems exist. We agree more often now than we did five years ago, when a succession of temporary Housing Ministers could not see that there is a problem, which partly was because the Department did not have many officials working on the issue of leaseholds and commonholds. The attempt by Parliament and the Government to bring in commonhold failed because the responsibility for it was split with the Ministry of Justice, which had no resources whatsoever. As a result, nothing happened. When we put forward the case for uniting commonhold with leasehold, I understand that the predecessor Department to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that it would take responsibility if it received the resources, but there were no resources.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
I and other Labour Members are grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his generous comments, and I congratulate him on securing the debate. He does not have any support from other Government Members at the moment, whereas Labour Members are mob-handed in Westminster Hall today. However, I can assure him that we are here as his fan club and support structure, because it is the prominent role that he has played—leading the all-party parliamentary group, as co-chair—that has ensured that we have been able to press the Government on the issue. To the Government’s credit, they have made a number of commitments on leasehold during the past five years, and we are very keen to hear the Minister’s response to this debate.
Sir Peter Bottomley
That is the sort of remark I can survive, and I am grateful for it.
I will say, as I try to in each of the debates on the issue, that I am a leaseholder of a small flat in my constituency, and with the other five leaseholders we bought the freehold. We had a good freeholder, good managing agents and we have had no problem whatsoever, and we know how the system can work. In effect, we are commonhold now, but we were originally freehold. Ground rents were low and we did not have the problem of ground rents doubling every 10 years.
We also did not have the kind of crooks, such as Martin Paine, who came in and gave informal leases, which really made a mess of people’s lives. We did not suffer from the Tchenguiz interests, which were responsible—both in the retirement field and in other fields—for some of the worst excesses. Frankly, the public authorities, such as the fraud people, the economic crimes people, the police and the Competition and Markets Authority people failed, and the Tchenguiz-controlled business got away scot free, when the people in that business should have been sent to jail and fined millions of pounds. The millions of pounds would have made up for the losses of the ordinary leaseholders who were failed by them.
I also pay tribute to Martin Boyd and Sebastian O’Kelly, chief executive and trustee of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, who have done so much, and they have now joined members of the National Leasehold Campaign and Bob Bessell, the former director of social services in Warwickshire, who in his retirement built 1,600 retirement homes without a single ground rent.
I thank my right hon. Friend the Minister for coming down on a fast train from Manchester, where she has given distinguished service over the past two days. I ask her to review whether it is sensible, necessary or right to allow ground rents in retirement properties. I look on the Churchill Group as the son of McCarthy and Stone, which was, with Peveril, at the foundation of some of the problems that hit previous generations. To any Treasury civil servant who reads the report of this debate, I would say that if we get leasehold and commonhold right, the value of homes will go up, not down, and the income to the Treasury will go up.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
My area has quite a few new leasehold housing estates, some of which have now been there for a number of years. The residents are being hit with a double whammy. They have all the costs associated with leasehold and they also have service management fees, which are absolutely enormous and growing. More and more people are reporting to me that they cannot sell their properties because they get partway through the process and the buyer looks at the cost and says, “No way.”
Sir Peter Bottomley
We are not able to cover everything in a half-hour debate, but that is one of the issues to which I think the House of Commons needs to return. We ought to have a full-day debate, preferably in Government time and on the Floor of the House, so that many other Members can speak and be a voice for their constituents.
As an example for those who do not read Private Eye on the day it comes out, there is a story about Rothesay Life, which apparently has £1.5 billion of loans. It can revalue the interest over 30 years and take it almost as instant profit. That is the kind of thing that leads people to say, “I am going to be greedy and get away with things as long as I can.”
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick). We are very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for all the work that he has put into the campaign, which is growing stronger by the day. Some of the voluntary schemes that developers have entered into with leaseholders have a sting in the tail, with additional clauses carrying on afterwards. Does he agree that that example shows that it is important to get something on a statutory footing as soon as possible?
Sir Peter Bottomley
The whole House will agree with the hon. Gentleman. Incidentally, we got the Competition and Markets Authority to hold an investigation into leasehold and—this is one of my tributes to the Government—I want to say how grateful we all are for the matters that have been sent across to the Law Commission, with the aim of getting practical and fair proposals that can be enacted.
One such important issue is lease extensions. There are more than 1 million leases, mainly of flats, that are coming to the 80-year limit where they cannot be mortgaged and where the marriage value starts coming in. At the moment, it is very difficult to find a cheap, easy and fair way of getting an extension on a lease. As and when we come to the elimination of new ground rents, we should find a way of putting a sunset clause on old ground rents, and give an incentive to freeholders to come forward with ways of getting some capital value now, rather than none later on. They have had the dawn of their money, and there needs to be some kind of sharing of the dusk that stops the money rolling in. We need to find a way of saying to them, “Let’s agree a simple chart; if you take 10 years of existing ground rent, don’t start saying you will take a doubling, and a doubling again after that.”
I interrupt myself to say that there is one announcement from the last couple of days that is potentially very dangerous to leaseholders, which is the proposal that people can put two more storeys on top of a block without planning permission. If the block is owned by an outside freeholder, that will ruin the chance of enfranchisement. If it is going to happen, all the value should go to the leaseholders, not the freeholder. In fact, it might provide an incentive for the leaseholders to buy the freehold and then agree among themselves how to deal with building on, and having a bigger community. As I said, I own a lease and part of a freehold of a block in Worthing. I am also contracted to buy a leasehold flat that is being built at the moment, which might be built in three years’ time. If anyone thinks that I have an interest in this issue, I do—if I get any benefit from it, I will give it to a good cause.
To go back to LEASE, MPs have had difficulty with its two previous chairs. The first, Deep Sagar, showed no understanding at all that LEASE should not be helping rapacious freeholders or clever managing agents to screw money out of leaseholders. He moved on, but I must say incidentally to the civil service appointments people that they should count how many public appointments he has had—I think he has had more than the number of years I have had in the House of Commons, which is 45. The second chair was Roger Southam, whom I took on trust when he was appointed. Others said that he was not trustworthy. It turned out that I was wrong and they were right.
I hope that when a permanent chair is chosen for LEASE—it now has an interim chair—the stakeholders will be consulted on the process and, if possible, given a chance to comment on who might be on the shortlist. If they do not want to trust me, perhaps they could ask the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse or someone else to bring an impartial view. LEASE has been led for many years by Anthony Essien. I have no complaint about him; I have treated him with respect on every occasion, and vice versa.
LEASE has been changing: it is now unequivocally on the side of leaseholders, thanks to the intervention of Gavin Barwell, who was the first Housing Minister to get a grip on what was needed—he provided leadership in the Department, and I am glad that the Department has responded. LEASE’s website now has more than 100 categories under which people can interact and get some advice. The problem is that LEASE could not give all the advice on practical things.
For example, on the Grenfell Tower cladding issue, when the Government rightly said that no social tenant should have to carry the cost of re-cladding, the private tenants were left stuck, either in public or private blocks. The advice that the campaigning charity Leasehold Knowledge Partnership gave was right, while the advice that LEASE gave—to go to court—was wrong, because the tribunals had to reach the unfair conclusion that the leaseholder was stuck with the cost.
I pay great tribute to the then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who got the Government to agree—perhaps against the advice of some civil servants—to carry the cost. He solved a problem that would otherwise have hit many small people.
There are other issues that I could cover at some length. I pay tribute to the National Leasehold Campaign, and to Katie Kendrick and Jo Darbyshire; to Victoria Derbyshire’s programme on BBC 2, which gave the issue prominence at a time when it mattered; to Patrick Collinson of The Guardian; to whoever advises Strobes at Private Eye on leasehold issues; and to others.
I declare this in public: if any of these big property interests threaten defamation proceedings against any of the leasehold campaigners, I will say on the Floor of the House of Commons exactly what can be said about them, in spades—I won’t hold back. Up to now I have been pretty restrained, but I want people to know this: do not bully those who campaign for justice. We are all on the side of the small voice. By all means have discussion, and by all means have disagreement, but do not think that you can get away with lawyers’ letters of the kind that get prominence every now and again in Strobes’s legal pages.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for all the work that he has put in over many years; many of us have come in on the back of it. Does he welcome the decision in the Persimmon case in north Wales last month and recognise that other leaseholders are in a similar position of not having had enough information when they bought out their lease? I have a situation with Barratt Homes in my constituency, where leaseholders are now looking to get the county council to take on a similar case under trading standards. Would it not be far more efficient for the Government to send out a clear message to property companies in this case that they really need to do the right thing by leaseholders who have been dishonestly sold to? That would save them from all those actions and relieve the pressure on county councils and leaseholders.
Sir Peter Bottomley
The whole House will agree. Perhaps it would help if the Ministry considered having a roundtable to go through some of these issues—it would not have to be secret, but it could be informally private. We were fortunate, in part, with Pete Redfern of Taylor Wimpey, when we discovered that the then chair of LEASE had written totally defective documents that put it as though Roger Southam could control blocks that should never have been anywhere near his control. That got resolved. Taylor Wimpey said it would set aside £130 million to put right some of the things it now recognises it should not have done—it has not done enough, but at least it recognises the issue and has made a start.
I think the trading standards case in Wales is a way forward. Responsible shareholders in each of the building firms should be saying, “With social responsibility in corporate governance, what are you going to do about it?” That applies to Barratt as to the other firms. As for Persimmon, I hope that it will say that this is not just a judgment relevant to Wales, where in fact it kept away from judgment by making a voluntary payment, but applies to England as well.
Put simply, we need to abolish new leaseholds in any but the most extreme circumstances; we need to find a way to convert to commonhold; and we need to make commonhold so well known that when people try to register, it is recognised by Help to Buy and by the Land Registry—it is now recognised by both, but it was not previously. Advice should be taken from the all-party group and our secretariat, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership. When there is friction, let us try to resolve it in a normal way. I end with this offer: I hope that the chief executive of LEASE will accept an invitation to bring all his staff to a drinks party here in the House of Commons, where the all-party group and those who give day-to-day advice to leaseholders can come together and get past any problems that may be apparent at the moment.
The Minister for Housing (Ms Esther McVey)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) on securing today’s debate on the progress of leasehold and commonhold reform. He is a determined and formidable campaigner. I am also grateful to the Opposition Members who, with my hon. Friend, have been making solid progress on this important matter. With more than 4 million leasehold properties in the UK, we need to ensure that the system is working correctly, and that where it is not—where we see unfairness and exploitation—the market is held to account and changed.
Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
During a recent Backbench Business Committee debate on the Floor of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and others raised the problem of people who had bought new properties in the north-west with leasehold arrangements that, to be frank, are a rip-off. At that point, the body language of the Minister—great champion of free enterprise that she is—conveyed her recognition that we had a case. Will she agree to meet a small delegation to discuss what can be done? The developers involved, in particular Redrow in my constituency, are completely unwilling to discuss the rights and decencies due to our residents.
Ms McVey
I will indeed meet the right hon. Gentleman and a delegation of fellow MPs. I did not realise he was such a good reader of body language, but he is quite right. The cases raised are not right, the system is not working right and those who agree with the market can see that it is not working right for the market either. Such cases should not be happening.
Let me be clear: the Government are committed to improving consumer fairness for leaseholders, and we have a programme of work under way to make sure that changes are made. Some of that work has already happened, including setting out how the ban on leasehold for new homes will work and stating our intention to reduce to zero ground rents on new leases, if we have them at all.
Mark Tami
The Minister talks about going forward, which is great, but we must go back too. We cannot leave behind the people who have been sold a pup. People tell us how they were advised to use Taylor Wimpey’s own lawyers and how it was never pointed out to them that the properties were leasehold. Even now, some people do not realise that they have a leasehold property.
Ms McVey
The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point; I will come to it later in my speech. No doubt, he realises that with leaseholds dating back a long time, there are legalities to unpick, but we are working on understanding how to do that.
I am pleased to see that the leasehold house ban has had an immediate effect on the market. In 2017, when we first made the announcement, 10% of new-build houses in England were sold as leasehold; today, that figure is down to 2%, which is significant progress, but we obviously want to make more. We will still legislate to ensure that, in future, apart from in exceptional circumstances, all new houses will be sold on a freehold basis.
Developers will no longer be able to use leases on houses for financial gain—a practice that has become the norm in some parts of the country, as we have heard again today. That will make certain that the right tenure is used on the right properties, which will make it fairer for all. The reforms will remove the incentives for developers and freeholders to use leaseholds to make unjustified profits at the expense of leaseholders.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
To echo the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) about going back, do the Government see that as a responsibility and could they find a way to intervene? We have identical houses on the same estate: they were sold in the first phase as leasehold but are being sold in the second phase as freehold at the same price, yet the owners of the first-phase houses have been told that they must pay £3,750 to Persimmon, Redrow or whoever to convert to freehold. There is no market and there is no choice in that—is it not wrong?
Ms McVey
Everybody here can agree that is wrong, but it is about the steps that we will have to take to get the situation under control. We are looking at help for existing leaseholders, many of whom face, as the hon. Gentleman says, onerous fees and charges, including the doubling of ground rent in some cases. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee and many existing leaseholders want the Government to legislate to amend those. We are deeply concerned about the difficulties that people are having with those charges, but we clearly have to look at how to unpick those contracts, which are set in law.
Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to the Minister for her generosity in giving way and to the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) for securing the debate.
One thing I would beg the Minister for is a simple right-to-buy formula, perhaps based on the number of years remaining—a multiple of the ground rent, in some way—that could be applied nationwide. I know there will be a lot of complexities in that, but is it something she is looking at in those plans? It would be great to hear if she were.
Ms McVey
We are indeed looking at a much simpler model that people can understand and make sense of, and at how to make it easier, smoother and quicker to do.
We have also made sure that there is a voluntary way for the sector to come together to solve the problems of its own creation. The industry pledge is an important first step. It has been signed by more than 60 leading developers, freeholders and managing agents. We will work with them and keep a vigilant eye on how it is working. Through that pledge, freeholders have committed to identifying any lease that doubles more frequently than every 20 years and contacting the relevant leaseholders to offer to amend their lease where necessary. I acknowledge those developers that have signed the pledge not to insert such clauses into future leases and welcome that. The pledge is an important first step, but we need to keep our eye on it. We will continue to monitor how effective it is in supporting leaseholders and we will take further action where necessary.
Matt Western
The Minister is being generous in giving way. It is interesting to hear that there is a voluntary assembly of the various housebuilders and developers. Surely, however, there is an opportunity for a paid-for body, funded by all those builders, to come together and arbitrate on behalf of the leaseholders and come to a sensible cost for them to pay for the conversion to freehold. Would not an independent body funded by the builders be a better solution?
Ms McVey
All the ideas that have come forward are being looked at to figure out what the way forward will be. That may well be something that ends up happening. At the moment, I cannot say, but we will look at every idea that comes forward.
The Government are looking to standardise the enfranchisement process and have asked the Law Commission to review the current arrangements. That is to support existing leaseholders and, as mentioned, it includes making buying a freehold or extending a lease easier, quicker and as cost-effective as possible. The Law Commission is analysing responses to its consultation paper on leasehold enfranchisement reform, “Leasehold home ownership: buying your freehold or extending your lease”. This autumn, it will report back to Government on the options for reducing the price of that, and on all other aspects of the enfranchisement regime early next year. I look forward to receiving its recommendations.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
If there is evidence of mis-selling and collusion between solicitors and developers, what action can the Government take?
Ms McVey
I shall come to that later, but the hon. Gentleman will know as well as I do, I hope, that that is looked at and where it can be proved that something wrong and unlawful has been done, it will be taken up and checked.
Obviously still more needs to be done. Our recent publications show the other plans we have for leasehold reform. They include our responses to the technical consultation on implementing reforms to the leasehold market, and to the Select Committee, most of whose recommendations we were able to accept in full or in part. We have also committed to regulating managing agents, and to improving the transparency and fairness of service charges. Too often, people feel ripped off by fees and charges, sometimes not even being told what they are paying for. We have committed to introducing a single mandatory and legally enforceable code of practice to set standards across the sector. We will also require agents to be qualified to practice.
Last October, we established an independent working group, chaired by Lord Best, to look at how standards can be raised across the property sector, and to consider how fees such as service charges should be presented to consumers. The working group published its final reports to the Government in July. We are considering its recommendations and will announce the next steps in due course.
Sir Peter Bottomley
The whole House is grateful to my right hon. Friend. There may not be time to get through all the things that the Government are doing and looking forward to doing, so would she consider making a written statement to lay things out and make them available to all, not just those who are here for the debate?
One thing that may not be dealt with straightaway is looking at the regulations on recognised tenants’ associations—in effect, recognising leaseholders, which I know is a tricky issue. The Government wrote to me saying that they would consult the property tribunal about how this was working. I do not ask for an instant response, but that is one of the issues that should go forward.
The Minister’s response to the Select Committee report is very good. The report was one of the best I have seen in all my time in the House, and the Government are responding to it well.
Ms McVey
My hon. Friend makes a good point. We should and will lay the matter down as a written statement. Everyone, across the House, appreciates that there is bad practice. Where bad practice happens, in whatever form, it should be taken to task.
It is unacceptable that some freehold homeowners are unable to challenge excessive fees for the maintenance of their estates. We are going to legislate so that residential freeholders will be given the right to challenge the reasonableness of such fees. They will also be able to apply to the tribunal to appoint a new manager. That will help to increase the transparency, accountability and reasonableness of the fees.
Many leaseholders have raised concerns because they believe they were mis-sold their properties—the leasehold tenure was not properly explained to them, and the onerous terms were not made clear. Some were told that they could buy the freehold for a certain price after a couple of years, only to find out that it had been sold on to an investor in that time and that either the price had gone up considerably or they could not buy it. I welcome the Competition and Markets Authority’s current investigation of the issue.
I appreciate that I am running out of time, but I will indeed meet with my colleagues. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West for bringing this important matter to Westminster Hall. It is something that all colleagues want to get right. Abuses will not be accepted by any of us.
Question put and agreed to.
Child Maintenance Service: Payment Recovery from Absent Parents
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the performance of the Child Maintenance Service in recovering payments from absent parents.
I would hope that everyone agrees that parents should continue to take financial responsibility for their children after the break-up of a relationship. We must understand that relationship break-up can often be a disturbing and distressing time for everybody, often leaving behind a great deal of bad feeling. It is not easy in such circumstances to come to an arrangement that is fair on both partners and, most of all, fair on the children. The criticisms that I will be directing today at the Child Maintenance Service, and its predecessor the Child Support Agency, should not be taken as an indication that I do not appreciate the difficult circumstances in which it has to operate.
Many absent parents do their best to care for their children, and I do not want to give the impression that everybody whose relationship has broken up is trying to avoid their responsibilities. Sadly, however, some people see the break-up of a relationship as an opportunity to abandon all responsibilities for their children. The Child Maintenance Service owes it to those children and to the resident parent to ensure that the absent parent complies with their legal and moral responsibilities. We are not talking about forcing somebody to pay to give their children a life of luxury. Indeed, we are often talking about forcing somebody to pay money that they can well afford in order to keep their own children out of poverty. The Child Maintenance Service is sometimes not good enough at getting money from people who can afford it, and we sometimes see it pursuing people for payments that they quite clearly cannot afford.
I am grateful to several organisations that have provided me with background information not only for this debate, but to support my caseworkers in dealing with a significant number of requests for help from constituents. Fife Gingerbread does an enormous amount of good work in my constituency and elsewhere in Fife. My caseworkers also find the Child Poverty Action Group’s child support handbook indispensable, and that will be the same in every constituency across these islands.
Several individuals have also shared their experiences with me. I do not have time to go into any of them in great detail, and some of cannot be aired in public for reasons of confidentiality. In addition, some of the issues that have been raised—serious though they are—do not really fall within the remit of this debate because they relate, for example, to the regulations around exactly how somebody’s income is determined, which causes a great deal of anger, sometimes among the paying parents and sometimes for the receiving parents. I make that point because it will not be possible to go into most of these cases in any kind of detail in the time available. I have also been approached by several colleagues who want to speak in the debate or to intervene, so I want to give time for that as well.
I see too many cases in which it is obvious that a parent is determined to avoid their responsibilities and that they can get away with it—sometimes for years at a time—which is just not good enough. It is far too easy, for example, to hide income from the Child Maintenance Service, which too often leaves it to the resident parent to produce the evidence that their ex-partner is effectively committing fraud. That is bad enough at the best of times, but if the resident parent has been the victim of domestic abuse or financially coercive and controlling behaviour, it is wholly unacceptable to make them responsible for ensuring that the other parent of their children complies with their legal responsibilities.
Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech on an issue that I have raised in the past. Several constituents who are the resident parent have not received any money for years, and a common theme or trend seems to be that the paying parent claims to have given up paid work or become self-employed in order to hide their income. That totally thwarts the whole purpose of the Child Maintenance Service. Does my hon. Friend agree that the CMS must pull out all the stops to find a way to prevent that from happening, maintain its charter commitment and ensure that the child is at the heart of everything?
Peter Grant
Absolutely. I do not think we will ever have a set of regulations that everyone agrees with. If a relationship between two people has completely broken down, the one who is paying will think they are paying too much, and the one who is receiving payment will think they are not getting enough. Surely, if the rules are based on someone’s income, however, it should be no easier for them to hide their income from their children than it is to hide it from the Inland Revenue.
I have assisted constituents affected by HMRC loan charge, as well as a constituent who was pursued to a ridiculous degree for a relatively small debt that they turned out not to owe to HMRC. Many resident parents in my constituency would like a fraction of that diligence to be used by the CMS when it chases down money that is owed not to the Government but to children who often desperately need it.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Does he agree that more must be done to reconcile reported earnings with the lifestyle of the absent father or mother? I have seen parents in my constituency who give their child £10.50 a week, yet they drive a brand-new BMW, have the newest of gear and have that kind of lifestyle. An absent father must be allowed to live, but it should be difficult for them to disregard their financial obligations. We must make that more difficult.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I have a constituent who is owed a substantial sum by an absent father, who lives very comfortably and flies in and out of the UK with no apparent difficulty. The only answer my constituent gets is that the service cannot touch him because it cannot establish a UK address for him. Does my hon. Friend agree that such cases need more than just ministerial hand-wringing, and that concrete action to seize passports or assets could be in order?
Peter Grant
Absolutely, and I will come on to some of the new powers that have recently been given to the Child Maintenance Service. Although those powers are draconian, there will be instances when they have to be used. Deliberately concealing income from people who you know want only to provide for your children should be a criminal offence. It is not a matter for the civil courts or for civil adjudication. If someone falsifies their tax returns, they go to jail, so if they falsify returns provided to assess their financial liability for their own kids, they should also go to jail.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I have a constituent who has not received payment for years. Their former partner has moved home and jobs, and keeps changing bank account. They also disposed of two properties, yet that money is untraceable. Surely people should not be able to open new bank accounts if they owe all that money.
Peter Grant
Again, I entirely agree. I have had female constituents who use one name in their family and one in their professional work. They have difficulty opening two bank accounts, so it seems strange that others are able to get away with opening bank accounts all over the place.
Last year the powers available to the Child Maintenance Service were extended. I found it concerning to read the evidence submitted to the Work and Pensions Committee in 2016, because it seemed that the Department for Work and Pensions did not understood the difference between collection powers and enforcement powers. The DWP can implement collection powers immediately through the Child Maintenance Service—it does not need anybody’s permission—but enforcement powers are more severe and need the consent of the courts. If those who write the evidence for a parliamentary Select Committee are vague about the distinction between those two powers, it is no wonder that parents and children who are waiting for their money sometimes get confused about what the powers are.
Some powers that the Child Maintenance Service has should not be allowed as a form of debt enforcement, and even in certain cases I do not think that imprisoning someone for not paying their dues is acceptable. It should be an imprisonable offence if somebody falsifies information, but not if they refuse to pay money that has been established as owed. I certainly would not want any seizing of property, warrant sale or auction to happen in Scotland. One of the first private Members’ Bills put through the Scottish Parliament was to outlaw what I believe to be a barbaric practice. In a civilised country, there are other ways to carry out debt collection, without such draconian and barbaric actions. For example, we could restrict someone’s ability to open new bank accounts.
Peter Grant
I need to make a bit of progress. If I have time later, I will give way to the hon. Lady. I am grateful for her interest in the debate.
Something that has been a major concern for many of my constituents recently is the Child Maintenance Service’s decision to write off debts that somebody has been owed for a significant time. Sometimes that is a relatively small amount of money, but it can open up all the old wounds again if the parent who is owed that money suddenly gets a letter from the CMS after 10 years, having heard nothing from it, as happened to one of my constituents recently.
Another constituent has been asked to agree to writing off a debt of £18,000 that she is owed for the children she has raised on her own. Her children are now grown up, and people could argue that they do not need the money, but the person who owes the money certainly does not need it. I do not think that is acceptable, any more than it would be acceptable for the HMRC to decide not to bother chasing somebody who owed £18,000 of tax. In the case I have referred to, the Child Maintenance Service knows where the absent parent is. It knows where he lives, it knows where he works and it knows his bank account details, so there is no excuse whatsoever not to require him to enter into some kind of arrangement to pay his children the money he owes.
The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)
On that specific point, they will have been contacted. If that information is available and they would like that £18,000 debt to be pursued, it would be, and it would be a priority.
Peter Grant
Interestingly enough, when I contacted the Child Maintenance Service about that specific case, it promised to give us a fuller response by 3 October, so it has about 20 minutes left. If we finish a wee bit early, the Minister might be able to get on to his colleagues and ensure that they honour that. Of course, it may be that they have responded during the time that I have been on my feet.
Far too often, the parent who has the main responsibility for looking after the children physically is left to fight battle after battle with the CMS to get the money that is theirs and their children’s by right. Often, they feel as if the CMS is not working with them, but is almost acting as an obstacle to them. Far too often, when I look through the cases that have come in to my office since I was elected, the final point is that the parent has just given up and feels it is not worth chasing things up. Very often, they can no longer stand the stress of being forced to continue to contact somebody who, quite frankly, they never want to hear from again because of the way that person treated them while they were together. It is not only a tragedy, but a scandal, if somebody is forced to give up the fight for what they are legally entitled to simply because a Government agency has not supported them enough in the process.
Ruth George
I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this important debate. Like him, my caseworkers and I have found it incredibly frustrating to try to get through to the CMS, both in cases where there is a claimant making a claim and where the CMS holds wrong information on a defendant. Just trying to get the CMS to look at that is very difficult. Does he agree that the fact that universal credit now takes account of maintenance income, whether or not it is received, will make recipients who are due that money even poorer if they do not receive it, and that that is a double whammy for them and often for their children as well? It just adds to the injustice of the situation.
Peter Grant
The hon. Lady makes a valid point. Those of us who are old enough to remember it would do well to recall that the original version of the Child Support Agency was set up not to help the children, but as a way of getting somebody else to pay the children’s maintenance costs to save the DWP or its predecessor a wee bit of money. That legacy can be seen sometimes in the fact that the CMS, through the DWP, is simply not as enthusiastic about pursuing money that is owed to other people as it would be if it were pursuing money owed to itself.
Peter Grant
I think I can give way once more, and then I will have to move on.
Stephen Timms
I was looking through my records this afternoon, and I saw that I wrote to the Child Support Agency on behalf of one of my constituents on 30 September 1999. She finally received a first, partial payment on 1 August 2018. It took 19 years. Is the hon. Gentleman as unsurprised as I am that people, as he says, just give up?
Peter Grant
I just wish that I could wait 19 years before paying the bills that come into my constituency office with more regularity. I would love to think that the example the right hon. Gentleman raises was unique, but I do not think it is. What is the point of a child maintenance system that does not pay anything to the child until they are 18 or 19 and have left school, and possibly left home and gone to university? The children need the money when they are two, three and four years old, not when they are in their 20s. In a case I mentioned earlier, the children were literally grown up and had left home. Some were married, some were at university. As a point of principle, the parent was determined to carry on fighting, but he knows perfectly well that the money will not make any difference to his children. They have had the experience of being brought up when money was desperately tight.
A completely incomprehensible aspect to the write-off scheme is that the process the Child Maintenance Service has to go through before it can write off historical arrears depends, reasonably enough, on the level and value of the arrears, but that, by its own admission,
“significant policy, operational and IT issues beset the 1993 and 2003 schemes which contributed to the build-up of considerable arrears of unpaid maintenance”.
In another document, it admitted that it cannot always be sure how much the arrears are. How can it be fair for the CMS to say that it can write off an amount of arrears because it is small enough within the scheme that it does not need the receiving parent’s permission, and at the same time to say, “We don’t really know how much the arrears are, because our record-keeping system was so appalling in the past”?
A great deal more could be said, but I know that colleagues want to speak as well, so I will bring my comments to a close. First, however, I want to add something that was not in my original speech. I decided to do that when I realised that, while we are having this debate, our colleagues in the main Chamber will, hopefully, be agreeing to the Second Reading of the Domestic Abuse Bill.
I cannot go into much detail about some of the cases I have had, because people are still under threat from ex-partners, but I hope the Minister can explain how someone whose partner has been convicted repeatedly of assault can hide their income from the Child Maintenance Service for more than three years after the CMS has been alerted to where the money was, where it was going and how it was being hidden. It was hidden in such a way that, if I had the same authorisation to visit premises and to make inquiries as the CMS and HMRC, I could have found it, as any of us could, within 20 minutes. It was not an elaborate offshore scheme; it was a very simple accounting practice that HMRC and the Child Maintenance Service know about.
How can it be that someone who has been and still is a victim of coercive financial control is told that it is entirely up to her to find evidence that her ex-partner is committing fraud against her and probably against HMRC as well? How can that be acceptable? Why is the Child Maintenance Service not working more closely with HMRC, so that when they get information that points clearly to a large-scale criminal evasion of tax by somebody whose address and place of work is a matter of public record, they can take action? How can it take three years for them even to begin an investigation? When the Minister sums up, I hope he can answer that question, as well as responding to the other comments I have made.
Several hon. Members rose—
Albert Owen (in the Chair)
Before I call Mr Kerr, I remind Members that I will call the Front-Bench spokespersons at 10 past 5. Three Members have indicated in writing that they wish to speak, and I will call Mr Madders and Mr Pollard after Mr Kerr. If you divvy the time up among yourselves, we might be able to get more Members in.
Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on bringing this subject back to Westminster Hall. I shall be brief.
It is important to remind ourselves that even though we live in a world of three-letter acronyms—we talk about the CMS and the CSA—at the centre of all our thoughts and considerations in this debate is the welfare of the child and of children. Nothing ought to be more precious to us than the welfare of our children. I have no doubt that the staff at the CMS are sensitive, conscientious and aware of the impact of what they do. I pay tribute to them, because they deal day in and day out with adults, many of whom are in distress or are emotional and sometimes very angry. Behind each case is a child or children, often bewildered and dealing with complexities they are often too young to process.
I have some questions for the Minister, for whom I have immense regard—I think he knows that. I have asked these questions before because they are the issues that surface in my constituency casework and they have to do with the powers of the CMS. By the way, contrary to what the hon. Member for Glenrothes says, I wholly support the powers granted to the CMS last December to track down these reluctant, absent parents, but I ask the Minister, why is it so reluctant to use them? That is how it appears to my caseworkers and me. Why does the CMS seem not to be prepared to exercise to their full extent its powers to investigate cases, especially when it is clear-cut that something is seriously amiss?
I am thinking of a case, which I will anonymise, where a non-resident parent is a clever accountant and is clearly hiding his income: you can tell that by the lifestyle he is able to maintain. It is clear what is happening. Earnings are being hidden away, squirreled away, disguised, but nothing happens. In another case, the MP contact agreed that an investigation was urgently needed, but, subsequently, someone somewhere else in the CMS flatly turned that down. Those are just two examples, but there are so many others.
Why the reluctance to press ahead? Is that reluctance to use powers based on how resource-intensive this is? The CMS has the powers, but does it have the resources it needs to enforce them? Based on my constituents’ experience, I raise a question about how the CMS works internally. Does it have the right internal systems to support the work it does and to manage its casework? I have no doubt it is a heavy case load for every single one of the people managing their clients. However, looking from the outside in, it is hard not to conclude that the systems are not functional, or that the system users are not working to a standard.
Why does there appear to be so little in the way of cohesive or comprehensive notes or records in my constituents’ cases? They will phone up and they might speak to the same person—that is an improvement. Sometimes they speak to different people, and when that happens, they have to rehearse their situation over and over again. That is deeply upsetting and distressing. It seems a very basic question to ask a Minister, but is there a standard for making notes? Is there a standard for creating follow-up items and action points? Is the system quality-checked? Are the users of the system being assisted to maintain a high standard?
Then there are the letters my constituents receive when they are in the complaints process. They will often receive generic letters with phrases in them where sometimes the meaning is just not clear. That can create confusion and upset. My senior caseworker Rachel Nunn, to whom I pay tribute, and I have tried to help our constituents decipher these letters. However, they are so general—not specific enough, not personalised enough—and are confusing because they are not sufficiently personalised. Consequently, they create anxiety and stress for parents, and the last thing those parents need is more stress.
Thank you for affording me the time to make these brief comments, Mr Owen. I end with a simple home truth: there is a human cost to the breakdown of relationships. Yes, adults pay a price: an emotional price, a mental price, a wellbeing price. However, those who often—sadly and invariably—suffer the most are children. Frankly, I am aghast at how mean-spirited some adults can be when it comes to the welfare of their own children. That is why I support the new powers granted by the Government to the CMS and why I implore the Minister and the CMS to use those powers. When the Minister rises to his feet, I hope he will address at least some of the issues raised in my remarks.
Several hon. Members rose—
Albert Owen (in the Chair)
Order. If Members take about three minutes each, we will get everybody in.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
Thank you for calling me, Mr Owen. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair.
All Members here will recognise that this issue is an important matter that comes up in surgeries week after week. We know that the maintenance service is vital to ensure children do not enter poverty. One lone parent in four is vulnerable to poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, so it is critical that those payments are delivered on time. Simply, when the system fails, it fails the children we are trying to protect.
It saddens me that progress in improving the payments seems to be slow. I met the Minister earlier this year and I was impressed by his commitment and dedication to improving things, but we still come across issues all too frequently. Cases of non-payment are commonplace. Non-payment problems seem to arise particularly when parents switch from the collect-and-pay service to direct pay. There needs to be greater recognition of the long history of the parent’s paying record, rather than the small period when they are on direct pay. Too often, matters deteriorate again when they switch back to direct payments, which can make things worse for everyone, because arrears—sometimes of several thousand pounds—begin to accrue, which makes it even harder for commitments to be honoured.
I understand that a third of paying parents were non-compliant in the first quarter of this year, which demonstrates that my constituents’ experiences are not isolated. The level of arrears appears to be creeping up; more than £275 million of arrears was recorded in the first quarter. That suggests that some of the measures that the Government have introduced need further refinement.
In particular, there seems to be a lack of effective enforcement. My constituents tell me that the CMS appears more concerned with meeting the priorities of the paying parent than those of the receiving parent. That is probably an incorrect perception, but it is how they feel. There is also sometimes a feeling that some payment is better than no payment at all and that a hands-off approach with the parent seems to arise, which leads to greater arrears accruing.
All too often, my constituents experience unreasonably long delays in dealing with complaints, which not only cause emotional and financial stress, but leave parents without the support they are entitled to. Those payments matter. It is vital that, whatever challenges the CMS faces, it is effective in supporting children. Every organisation makes mistakes and I am not here to harangue it for those mistakes, but too often it seems that, even when an error has been identified, the culture of the organisation is too defensive, there is little candour and it takes too long to put things right.
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing the debate, because it is time that we set out the concerns of our constituents—far too many of them. I have a real concern that the CMS is not fit for purpose. I say that because there are too few staff chasing too much demand, too many mistakes being made, and too many parents and too many children—as the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) said—not getting the support they deserve because of failings in the way the organisation works.
I wish to raise an issue that has not been discussed in detail, which is the Government’s changes to the way that historical debts are chased. I recognise that last year, the Child Support (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2018 were passed to enable the CMS to write off debts accrued when it was the CSA. There is a logic behind that in the adequate use of resources, but it means that there are far too many families in Plymouth and across the country who are legitimately owed money but who are having those debts written off. That is being done in a way that creates genuine heartbreak for the parents because of the lack of support for the children involved.
The Government have stated:
“If there is a reasonable chance of collection we will make reasonable attempts to collect the outstanding debt”,
but they are yet to articulate what “reasonable” means. I would be grateful if the Minister set out what the Department means by “reasonable attempts”, because far too many parents feel that there is no attempt to reclaim and go after those historical debts.
Consequently, it seems that if people avoid paying historical debts for long enough, they can simply get away with not paying at all. That is a deeply concerning sentiment that I have heard time and again in my surgeries. One constituent who visited me was owed £9,378.08 by her ex-husband. She was told that approximately £4,500 of that would be written off because it was accrued under the old CSA rules. After she got in touch with my office, we intervened so that did not happen. When the CMS actually investigated, it discovered that her ex-husband had more than enough money in his account to pay for the arrears, so the decision to write them off should not have been made in the first place, yet it was.
Another person who lives in my patch came to me with a similar issue: £13,359 was written off. In this case, it seemed that the absent parent was deliberately changing bank accounts and hiding income. The CMS said that the debt was a direct result of his determination to avoid meeting his responsibilities, yet my constituent was told that there was no right of appeal against the debt being written off. She is never going to see the £13,000 she is owed.
I have spoken to children involved. The money is not just cash; it represents a connection with a parent and a value for an individual. Children who are affected in these cases have a value and a worth; the historical debts hanging over them from parents who do not pay have no consequence on their value. Those children deserve to be loved, cared for and supported responsibly.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing this important debate. It is important that the adults on both sides recognise that the money that is reclaimed through the CMS is not for the parents; it is for the child or the children. The breakdown of a relationship can be incredibly difficult; it can be rather tempestuous and emotions can run high. However, it should always be remembered that the money is not going to the other parent who is taking principal responsibility for the care of the child; it is for the child’s benefit.
There have been long-standing problems with the transfer from the CSA to the CMS. People have been chased for debt that does not exist. My office has had to contact the CMS about money that has already been paid. The CMS is wasting its time and energies chasing debts that it should not be, and it should undertake its responsibilities to investigate seriously what individuals say to them.
On non-payments, constituents raise the issue of having no communication at all from the CMS and, again, it takes the involvement of my office to get any kind of resolution. It is striking that we do get a resolution, which makes me very aware that there is something going wrong in the system.
I also want to touch on reductions in salary. It seems from the examples we have heard that if someone has the financial flexibility, clout and wherewithal, they are able to hide their money. They are able to hide their funds, and it becomes incredibly difficult. If they are self-employed, they can put all the money into a company—the company can be in the name of a new spouse, for example—in order to pay for household bills and to live a more comfortable lifestyle and not necessarily pay what is owed.
The situation is different for those who are on lower salaries, who are taking their responsibilities seriously and who want to pay for their children, in the event that they are ill and they lose money. Because they are paid on a weekly basis, their salary has to go down by 25% for them to get any kind of reduction in the amount of child maintenance they are paying.
I have had people come to see me in tears because their illness has meant that they have been unable to work or they have had a serious reduction in their salary, and they have a new life and a new family who they have to pay rent for, and then they are unable to pay the money to the CMS. They are put into debt and financial hardship and then, when they are earning again, 40% of their salary is taken off them. It leaves them in a dire situation, wondering why they are bothering to work when they could be in the benefits system. I do not think that we should have a Government-sponsored system that encourages people to look to the benefits system as a way out.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing the debate. I would like to say a little more about the case I referred to in an earlier intervention.
By the time of the letter I wrote on behalf of my constituent, Mrs A, on 30 September 1999, the father, Mr A, had been assessed as being due to pay just over £100 per week towards child maintenance. He never paid. He claimed to be on a very low income. He claimed that he had absurdly high housing costs. At one stage, confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he was working, he claimed to be doing so free of charge. He is actually a prosperous and busy builder, who owns his own large home.
I was more or less continuously in touch with the Child Support Agency, its successors and Ministers for 19 years on my constituent’s behalf. There was a short period when she was distracted because of the ill health and later the death of her mother. However, she showed extraordinary ingenuity and determination in compiling evidence of Mr A’s true circumstances. Without that evidence, I do not think that he would ever have been forced to pay at all. He was absolutely determined not to pay. He spent a fortune in legal costs. If only that money had gone to his child, things would have been very different. He made three small contributions in 2003, amounting to just over £1,000, and that was after he had lost three tribunals in succession and appealed against the decision each time. But other than those three small payments, he refused to pay any money.
By December 2013 it had been established that Mr A owed £54,000: £15,000 was due to Mrs A; and £39,000 was due to the Government, to reimburse benefits that should not have been paid. It then took another five years for that demand to be enforced. My constituent finally received the £15,000 on 1 August 2018, 19 years after she had first approached me. The system completely failed to deliver the support that she and her son were entitled to throughout his entire childhood. As a result, he grew up in much more straitened circumstances than he should have.
The point that I put to the Minister is that surely the Government must act to ensure that an absent parent can no longer use legal chicanery to avoid their responsibilities for 20 years.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Owen, for allowing me to take part in this debate. I will discuss both sides of the arguments that go on in this area. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), on occasion I am on the side of people who have to defend a claim to pay child maintenance. The Child Maintenance Service is the worst organisation that my office and I have to deal with, in that we see bills for payment that come from it that pay no regard to reality or income. It can put people who were previously healthy into situations where they are so stressed and so upset with the whole situation that it literally makes them ill.
Getting any sort of response from the Child Maintenance Service is almost impossible. It seems that people actually need their Member of Parliament to intervene on their behalf in order to get a response from the CMS. That is not good for MPs and our staff, and it is not good for people out there who need the child maintenance.
Having spoken to a friend in the Chamber who represents a very poor area of east London, I know that she has no child maintenance cases. We believe that is because the system is so complicated and so unresponsive that people simply do not come forward to claim the child maintenance that they are due. That is not good for them and it is certainly not good for their children.
I know that the Minister will be well aware of the situation concerning universal credit and the fact that parents with care are now deemed to be in receipt of child maintenance even if they are not actually receiving it.
Justin Tomlinson
To be absolutely clear, child maintenance does not impact on the amount of benefits the receiving parent will get, whether it is paid or not paid. It did under the old system of the Child Support Agency, but it does not under the new system.
Ruth George
That is very good to hear, although it is certainly very different from how the regulations for universal credit were set out at the time. If those regulations are changing, that is good.
However, it remains the case that women who are due to receive child maintenance are not getting the support from the CMS that they need, and it is all too easy for men in general to evade their responsibilities by hiding their money and income, and it then takes years for people to be able to claim that, and for children to receive the support they need, as has been highlighted here today.
The Minister’s team have listened to many cases from my constituency surgeries. We have yet to see decisive action taken against those defendants; I hope that it will be, but we really should not have to meet senior civil servants in the Department in order to get any action taken.
Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
As always, Mr Owen, it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair. I just wish that we had more time to debate this hugely important topic. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing the debate and on his powerful and thoughtful opening speech; he spoke for many of us, and for many of those who have been badly let down by the Child Maintenance Service. All MPs deal day in, day out with a steady stream of child maintenance cases in which a parent can and does avoid paying, simply because the current system is not robust enough.
Earlier this year a constituent from Argyll and Bute contacted me about a case that had begun in the days of the Child Support Agency, which highlights the failure of the system. Back in 2015 the father of Fiona’s children declared through Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs that his gross annual income was just over £7,500, on which basis he was ordered to pay £20 a week to support his children. Knowing full well that that was not the case, Fiona appealed. Sure enough, the investigation that followed discovered that his true earnings were £200,000. The amount that he had to pay was increased accordingly, yet four years down the line, in a letter to my office dated May 2019, the CMS admitted that Fiona’s former partner was still in arrears to the tune of £68,000. That is unacceptable.
Fiona’s case is just one example—albeit perhaps an extreme one—of the cases that we deal with daily in which a former partner simply refuses to pay out. We have been contacted by a constituent who believes that the CMS is working on former calculated earnings; by a dad whose former partner refuses to pay out despite a CMS ruling; and by a young mother who feels that she has been sent from pillar to post, between the CMS and the Ministry of Defence, while trying to get regular payments for her eight-year-old daughter from her ex-partner in the Royal Navy. I could go on—there are numerous examples—but the fact of the matter is that the system simply is not robust enough; it is too open to abuse if one partner or the other is determined enough to avoid their parental responsibilities.
Children living in single-parent families are twice as likely to fall into poverty as children living with two parents, which makes regular maintenance payments even more important for securing their future and protecting them from falling into poverty. Charging single parents to access their right to support for their children is therefore completely wrong and unacceptable. It is grossly unfair that a receiving parent is charged £20 per application fee and a 4% deduction of maintenance when the CMS collects the payment, given that the CMS’s involvement is almost exclusively down to the fact that the payee is non-compliant with the rules. Why should children suffer at the end of that system?
There is ample evidence from stakeholder groups to show that the CMS’s charges have deterred many people from using the system. Indeed, a recent survey by the Department for Work and Pensions found that 40% of receiving parents on direct pay said that they found the application fee difficult to afford. That figure rises above 50% among those on very low incomes.
Will the Minister explain why we have a system wherein the people who need the money most—those parents whose children are recognised as most at risk of falling into poverty—are being made to pay to get something to which they are fully entitled? Is it not high time the Government heeded the call of so many people in and outside this House to remove all the hurdles that stand between single parents and the money to which they are entitled, to protect their children from poverty regardless of their situation? The primary role of the Child Maintenance Service should be to ensure that those children whose parents, for whatever reason, are no longer together, are not in any way disadvantaged because of it.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on bringing the debate to Westminster Hall today, as well as the 13 Members who have contributed. When I spoke in this place a few months ago, I made the point that child maintenance does not exist in isolation. It provides essential help with the costs of raising a child—food, clothing and travel expenses. It can make a huge difference, as hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber have pointed out, to the welfare of the child and their start in life, which is crucial. Whatever the administrative challenges, and whatever the technicalities of the child maintenance system, it is important to remember that children are centre stage, as the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) eloquently argued.
It is crucial that children—it is often the most vulnerable—should have access to the financial support that every one of them deserves. It is equally crucial that the system should function in their favour when that support is withheld without good reason. Research shows that child maintenance alone lifts a fifth of low-income one-parent families out of poverty. We must remember that lone-parent families are particularly vulnerable to poverty. One in four lone parents is in persistent poverty—twice as many as in any other group, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The inadequacy of social security arguably makes child maintenance even more vital as a source of income for struggling single parents. However, as we have heard from across the Chamber, it is fair to say that there is a considerable distance to go to ensure that the current system of child maintenance achieves its aim.
A recent report from the charity Gingerbread has shown major problems with the payment of child maintenance through the direct pay system, for example. The Government could and should take action to assess the accuracy of the concerns. The current situation, whereby the DWP does not even track whether payments have been made, means that it cannot report on compliance in two thirds of cases. On collect and pay, Gingerbread has consistently argued that there is no evidence that charges encourage collaboration between parents. In the second quarter of 2019, 33% of paying parents in the collect-and-pay service built up arrears owing to non-compliance. The DWP’s own figures reveal that that is nearly £19 million. Furthermore, there remain continuing problems such as those highlighted today with inconsistent casework handing and follow-up—no follow-up at all in many cases—as well as poor and non-existent communication.
In my own constituency case load, as with other hon. Members, concerns have been raised time and again, and constituents believe that they will never get any money because it is tucked away through creative accounting. Like many in the Chamber, I firmly believe that collecting unpaid child maintenance should be a priority for any Government, and that the considerable toolbox of enforcement measures—many, in all fairness, the result of the 2018 review—should be applied more consistently. There has been a significant fall in enforcement activity by the DWP to recover payments that are, by definition, owed to children. According to Gingerbread:
“The hands-off approach, compounded by poor administration, places the burden of responsibility for pushing for Direct Pay enforcement onto receiving parents”.
Where direct pay arrangements break down and arrears accumulate, the CMS can assist by moving the arrangement on to collect and pay, but to use the service paying parents are charged 20% of the child maintenance plus a £20 registration fee, and receiving parents pay 4%. That introduces additional costs for already financially stretched households. Even on collect and pay, only 67% are paying something—I stress that word “something”—towards what they owe. Indeed, some of the testimonials that have been heard in the Chamber today make it abundantly clear that the current system needs to be more robust, and that the leadership of the DWP should listen and take more robust action. This is not simply a question of processes and systems; relationships and emotions are at the heart of how this approach affects those who use it.
Having listened to the debate, I have a number of questions to ask the Minister. Will he introduce monitoring of direct pay compliance, so we can have a clear picture of its effectiveness? Will he commit to introducing improved and more transparent service standards around enforcement and late payments? Will he review the effectiveness of collect-and-pay charges for receiving parents and look at the provisions that relate to the Domestic Abuse Bill around coercive relationships?
The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) for calling this debate. On the basis of all the contributions, it is clear that this is one issue that unites those in all parts of the House, and that we want to do the very best for those receiving parents who have taken on the primary responsibility of the childcare and are having to battle to get the support that they rightly should be getting.
Let us remember that the CMS is a service of last resort. We would all hope that, wherever possible, parents can make amicable arrangements that do not necessarily need our involvement and have no impact on the children. Where that cannot be the case, however, because either one parent is or both parents are in dispute about what their responsibilities should be, it is absolutely the case that the CMS is there to provide support.
I want to make it very clear that all the cases raised show why this is such an important area, where we have brought forward significant new regulations and powers. I will go through some of those processes, but I repeat: a lot of the cases raised are legacy cases that would initially have been dealt with under the old rules and show why we have brought forward the rules I am going to talk about. There is still much more to do, and we are working very closely with stakeholders, including organisations such as Gingerbread, and on the other side those such as Families Need Fathers, which can provide constructive and helpful feedback. It is about getting balance between both sides.
There are around 700,000 cases a year. We record 2,500 complaints a year, which is less than 0.5%, but we still want to go further. We are absolutely focused on improving the customer experience. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr), who I know has been proactive in this area. I must stress that I am not actually the Minister responsible for child maintenance, although I used to be; I have a great deal of interest in this area both as a constituency MP who raises cases and having served in a different role in DWP. Everything will be passed on to the relevant Minister. I would like my hon. Friend to meet the operations team, because some concerning operational issues were raised.
Customer experiences are shared with the senior management team. We work with stakeholders, and we also work with key organisations such as Womens Aid, which have done a huge amount to improve our ability to identify either victims or potential victims of domestic abuse, so we can tailor the service accordingly.
The initial contact with the service is with child maintenance options. That is not automatic; people must have a conversation, which will explain all the options available to them. Many people do not wish to use the process; they just want to have an amicable arrangement but would like some guidance on a starting point for those discussions. We can provide that information and signpost to other organisations, and that can open the gateway to looking at options such as direct payment or click and collect.
Deidre Brock
I note the Minister’s offer to the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) to meet the operations team. Is that offer open to all of us who have participated in this debate?
Justin Tomlinson
That is a fair point. I am sure the team would be very happy to meet those who are particularly interested in the operations side.
On direct payment, there are cases where we have advised what the financial contribution should be, and the parents set out to try and do that without using us. A number of people have highlighted how that can break down. The problem is then that the debts mount up, and the bigger the debts, the bigger the problem it is to get that fixed. So, we have rightly tried to be more proactive. Not only is there the annual review, but we now text the receiving parents proactively to ask whether there are any issues, and if there are issues, we ask that they should contact us immediately so we can either escalate ultimately to enforcement or move them on to the click-and-pay service. In the last quarter of last year, 9,000 people moved from direct pay to collect and pay. We are nudging that proactive level of support as quickly as possible.
The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), talked of 33% not being collected on collect and pay. The 67% was the last published figure, in June 2019, which is up from 62% in the previous year, and the improvement has been long-standing. The amount unpaid in June 2019 was £18.5 million, down from £22 million. That is £18.5 million too much, but we are heading in the right direction, through a combination of better training of our frontline staff, so that they can explain the options and potential punishments to both the receiving parent and the paying parent; better enforcement, which I am coming to; and the regulations that we passed to strengthen our ability to investigate and enforce.
Hon. Members have rightly raised areas where enforcement has not been quick enough. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) set out the exact reasons that we needed the two separate sets of regulations that were brought in over the last 12 months, which we did after listening to the cases, learning the lessons and seeing what was missing and what stopped us taking the action we all support. That is underlined by the fact that action must be taken much more quickly. The sooner we act, the easier it is to remedy.
We are also now benefiting from the ability to access more real-time information from HMRC and the strengthening of our ability with deduction orders, where we take money directly from people’s salaries. We are also reminding employers. Quite often, employees will say to an employer who is their friend, “My other half is being unreasonable. It would be really helpful if you helped me fudge this.” We are now using legal powers to remind employers that they will be liable and, unsurprisingly, those collections have gone up to 48,000 in the last quarter, collecting about £26 million, compared with the same quarter last year when there were 31,300 collections, collecting £19 million. We are also proactively highlighting success stories in the media, which doesn’t half focus people’s minds.
The most significant change is the introduction of the financial investigations unit. In the past, when lifestyle queries were raised, we relied on HMRC to investigate. HMRC had finite resources; if a premier league footballer was clearly defrauding it of a huge amount of tax, it was very quick to go and look at that, but, for many of the cases highlighted, while it was a significant amount of money to those children, it might not have been enough for HMRC to prioritise it.
The financial investigations unit, which is solely ours, does not look at the value of the money, because the money is as important to every single parent regardless, and it will chase each case. These are highly-trained ex-police officers and tax inspectors with fiscal investigation experience and they focus on doing a deep dive, using evidence, in these sorts of case. We initially recruited 30 in 2017 and it went up to 50 in 2018 and 80 in 2019. They are making a significant difference; about 4,000 cases are being investigated at the moment, and those numbers will increase as we gain evidence. That is a double win, because we will share that evidence with HMRC, which can chase any tax avoidance that has gone through.
The new regulations that we passed to help here include the ability to seize people’s passports. In the past, we went after drivers’ licences, but when people went to court, they would say, not unreasonably, “Well, you can take my driving licence, but I then won’t be able to earn, and I won’t be able to pay any more money.” But the possibility of losing their summer holiday doesn’t half focus the mind. Having sent out more than 1,000 warning letters, there is high engagement at that point.
We now have powers to access joint and business accounts, because that is a clever trick of solely employed people for hiding money. We can also look at assets, so when self-employed people are transferring what would be wages into assets, we can now take a nominal 8% of those assets. It is now easier to access information from pension providers, and we will be doing more joint work with HMRC. I gently remind some colleagues who have been calling for those extra powers to vote for them next time, because some hon. Members voted against. We must put the receiving parents first.
Albert Owen (in the Chair)
I am grateful to the Minister, who has been a great deputy here today on behalf of his Department. Before I call Mr Peter Grant to wind up, I thank all hon. Members for their self-discipline and restraint about time, which has allowed us to get in all speakers, as well as a number of interventions.
Peter Grant
I realise that I must be very brief, so I thank everybody who has contributed to today’s debate. A couple of points: first, people do not need a clever accountant to hide their money; they only need an accountant who knows how to set up a private limited company, and it then takes years to find it. Secondly, we do not need to be Sherlock Holmes to find these scams; we only need a Facebook account, and then we can see the luxury yachts, the holidays, the umpteen fancy houses and so on. If somebody on benefits was boasting about their wealth to that extent, the DWP would have them very quickly. That is the speed at which we should be chasing down money from other people as well—
Written Statements
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Leaving the EU: Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Stephen Barclay)
The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union on 31 October 2019. We want to leave with a deal. One of the most important elements of this deal will be the agreement of a new Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland in place of the previous protocol (known as the backstop) which this Government are committed to replacing.
The Prime Minister wrote to Donald Tusk on 19 August 2019 setting out the UK’s views on the backstop, as well as this Government’s desired final destination for a long-term relationship with the EU.
Since then, the Government have pursued discussions with the European Union on alternatives to the backstop enthusiastically and constructively, and we have made good progress.
The Government are now putting forward a formal proposal to the European Commission, setting out the changes we are seeking to the withdrawal agreement. This represents a clear offer from the UK which we will ask the EU to engage with, enabling us to move towards a deal.
First, this proposal is based above all on our commitment to find solutions which are compatible with the Belfast/ Good Friday agreement, the fundamental basis for governance in Northern Ireland.
Second, this proposal confirms our commitment to long-standing areas of UK-Ireland collaboration, including those provided for in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, but also others, in some cases predating the European Union: the common travel area; the rights of all those living in Northern Ireland; and north-south co-operation.
Third, this proposal provides for the potential creation of an all-island regulatory zone on the island of Ireland, covering all goods including agrifood and eliminating all regulatory checks for trade in goods between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Fourth, and unlike the backstop, this regulatory zone must depend on the consent of those affected by it. This is essential to the acceptability of arrangements under which part of the UK accepts the rules of a different political entity: it is fundamental to democracy. The Government therefore propose that the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly should have the opportunity to endorse these arrangements before they enter into force, that is, during the transition period, and every four years afterwards. If consent is not secured, the arrangements will lapse. The same should apply to the single electricity market, which raises the same principles.
Fifth, this proposal ensures that Northern Ireland will be fully part of the UK customs territory, not the EU customs territory, after the end of the transition period. It has always been a fundamental point for this Government that the UK will leave the EU customs union at the end of the transition period, since control of trade policy is fundamental to this country’s future prosperity.
This is entirely compatible with maintaining an open border in Northern Ireland. Goods trade between Northern Ireland and Ireland makes up a little over 1% of UK-EU total trade in goods. Any risks arising will be manageable in both the EU single market and the UK market, particularly as all third country imports will continue to be controlled by the EU and UK customs authorities. We are proposing that all customs processes needed to ensure compliance with the UK and EU customs regimes should take place on a decentralised basis, with paperwork conducted electronically as goods move between the two countries, and with the very small number of physical checks needed conducted at traders’ premises or other points on the supply chain. All this must be coupled with a firm commitment, by both parties, never to conduct checks at the border in future.
Finally, in order to support Northern Ireland through this transition, and in collaboration with others with an interest, this Government proposes a new deal for Northern Ireland, with appropriate commitments to help boost economic growth and Northern Ireland’s competitiveness, and to support infrastructure projects, particularly with a cross-border focus.
Taken together, these proposals respect the decision taken by the people of the UK to leave the EU, while dealing pragmatically with that decision’s consequences in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. In particular:
They provide for continued regulatory alignment across the whole island of Ireland after the end of the transition period, for as long as the people of Northern Ireland agree to that.
They mean that EU rules cannot be maintained indefinitely if they are not wanted, correcting a key defect of the backstop arrangements.
They provide for a meaningful Brexit in which UK trade policy is fully under UK control from the start.
They ensure that the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland will remain open, enabling the huge gains of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement to be protected.
The Government believe that these proposals can provide the basis for rapid negotiations towards a final withdrawal agreement. In parallel, we will be negotiating a revised political declaration which reflects this Government’s ultimate goal of a future relationship with the EU that has a comprehensive free trade agreement at its heart. Together, these will allow us to reach agreement with the EU under article 50, and leave the EU with a deal that both respects the referendum result and provides a strong platform for our future relationship.
I will be depositing a copy of the following papers in the Libraries of both Houses:
Letter from the Prime Minister to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission and;
Explanatory note on UK proposals for an amended Protocol on Ireland-Northern Ireland.
These will also be made available on gov.uk.
[HCWS1845]
Crime and Policing
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Priti Patel)
One of my key priorities as Home Secretary is ensuring that the police have the resources, tools and powers they need to keep themselves and the public safe.
The Prime Minister and I have launched a national campaign to recruit 20,000 additional officers and police funding has increased by over £1 billion this year, including money from council tax and to tackle serious violence. The following packages will further progress these efforts.
Safer Streets
Today I am notifying the House of a new £25 million safer streets fund to tackle burglary, theft and other offences in areas of the country disproportionately affected by these crimes.
Police and crime commissioners across England and Wales will be able to bid to the safer streets fund for investment in evidence-based crime prevention measures such as improved home security, street lighting and alley gating. Alley gating is associated with a 43% reduction in burglary, improved street lighting is found to reduce property crime by 17% and CCTV can reduce vehicle crime by 26%. Funding will be available to areas in 2020-21. These interventions can either remove opportunities to commit crime or act as a deterrent by increasing the chances an offender is caught.
County Lines
I am also announcing a package of measures to deliver a significant uplift in activity to tackle county lines. County lines has a devastating impact and involves a form of drug dealing associated with serious violence and exploitation of vulnerable young people and adults. It involves gangs and organised criminal networks exporting illegal drugs to and from different locations in the country, using dedicated mobile phone lines, accommodation and exploitation of vulnerable people to conduct criminal activity.
It is important that we go further in tackling the criminals involved. The significant new action will help disrupt and dismantle the county lines model. The new measures are as follows:
Expanding the National County Lines Co-ordination Centre: there will be targeted investment in the National County Lines Co-ordination Centre to increase its activity, capability and capacity at a regional and national level to disrupt county lines. This will include placing more officers and staff into the centre and providing additional strategic resource to regional organised crime units. The National County Lines Co-ordination Centre brings together a multi-agency team of experts from the National Crime Agency (NCA), police officers and regional organised crime units to tackle the issue of county lines through sharing intelligence, working with partners across Government and taking concerted action.
Increased disruption on rail networks: rail networks remain a key method of transportation for county lines gangs. There will be a British Transport police team that works exclusively on county lines and will be based at a number of railway stations across England to disrupt and intercept county lines drug trafficking.
Investment in technology to disrupt county lines operations: the road network is used to transport offenders, victims, drugs, cash and weapons. Enhanced data analysis using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) will enable police to proactively target vehicles suspected of being used in county lines activity.
Increasing support services for county lines victims: county lines gangs operate their business through exploiting young people and vulnerable adults. The Government will develop an expanded national specialist support service to help young people and their families exit their involvement in county lines.
Working with money service bureaux to tackle illicit finance: county lines is a cash-driven activity. The Government will intensify operations to identify opportunities to take action against money service bureaux, enabling increased cash seizures and arrests for money laundering.
Taken as a whole, this package represents additional investment of up to £5 million in 2019-20 and up to £15 million in 2020-21.
Tasers
The Government will provide £10 million funding to deliver a significant increase in the number of officers carrying Tasers. Recent high-profile attacks and increasing levels of violence have led to growing concerns around officer protection and prompted growing calls to equip more officers with conducted energy devices (CEDs). CEDs provide officers with a critical tactic in the face of the most violent and challenging circumstances.
This funding shows a real commitment by Government to ensuring police officers have the resources, powers and tools they need to keep themselves and the public safe. Ring-fenced funding could mean over 10,000 more police officers in England and Wales will be able to carry the device. This fund will help support chief officers to buy the necessary number of CEDs they require, and ensure frontline officers are better protected.
The number of CED-trained officers in each police force remains an operational matter and is determined by chief officers in line with their assessment of the threats and risks in their force. The decision on whether to apply for this additional funding to uplift their CED capability will therefore ultimately be for chief officers and carrying CEDs will remain a voluntary decision for individual officers. All officers who are selected to use CEDs will need to complete the comprehensive training process.
[HCWS1846]
Aid Update
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for International Development (Alok Sharma)
Today I announced a new focus on ending preventable deaths of mothers, new-born babies and children, working with the international community.
Every 11 seconds, somewhere in the world, a pregnant woman or new-born baby dies. Last year 5.3 million children under 5 died. More than 9 in 10 of all maternal deaths occur in the world’s poorest countries. The true tragedy of these stark figures is that in most cases, with the right care, these deaths are preventable.
The reality for many women in the developing world, is they do not have access to the vital rights, medicines and services that make such a difference to expecting mothers in the UK. Of course, these tragedies are not limited to the developing world. Families in the UK also suffer the heartbreak of losing a child or a mother, but while their pain is of course no less bearable it is, thankfully, far less common. Since 2010 in the UK there has been a 19% reduction in stillbirths and an 8% reduction in maternal mortality.
Internationally, UK aid has supported developing countries to reduce maternal deaths. Nepal has seen the maternal mortality ratio decrease by over 50% since 1996. In Bangladesh that figure has fallen by 68% since 1990. Sustained improvements in the health system as well as innovations have driven this success. This includes using expertise from the UK Royal College of Midwives to develop a professional cadre of midwives who can provide services in hard to reach rural areas of Bangladesh.
However, while we have made progress, that progress is not felt all round the world. Two-thirds of deaths still occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent figures published by the UN show that we are off track to meet global targets of a world where every pregnancy is wanted, where every childbirth is safe and where every child lives a healthy life. This is clearly not acceptable. Where women and children are dying from preventable causes in the developing world, we must act.
As International Development Secretary, I will ramp up the UK’s efforts to end preventable deaths of mothers, new-born babies and children in the developing world by 2030. Through UK aid, we will work with international partners to boost our support for developing countries to make progress towards universal health coverage, with everyone able to affordably access the quality health services that they need, and with a health system they can be proud of, as proud as we are of our lifesaving NHS.
We will focus on the most vulnerable women, including FGM survivors who are significantly more at risk of complications during childbirth, as everyone in the world deserves access to the healthcare they need to live a healthy life.
We will also make sure women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are at the heart of that. On 23 September, at the United Nations general assembly, I announced a £600 million reproductive health supplies programme, as part of the UK’s commitment to universal health coverage, and as a champion of sexual and reproductive health and rights. This will give 20 million women and girls access to family planning and prevent 5 million unintended pregnancies each year up to 2025. Women and girls must have control over their bodies, and access to services they need. This Government are committed to defending and promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights and will continue to fight against the attempted global rollback on women’s rights.
An estimated 19.9 million children did not receive the vaccines needed during their first year of life, putting them at serious risk of potentially fatal diseases such as measles and meningitis, which is why we are hosting the replenishment of Gavi, the vaccines alliance, next year. Since 2000, UK aid to Gavi has helped vaccinate over 760 million children, saving 13 million lives and protecting a generation against some of the world’s deadliest diseases. As hosts of its replenishment next year, we are committed to working with our global partners to deliver Gavi’s new strategy that will vaccine a further 300 million children in the world’s poorest countries by 2025. We will invest more in vaccines and research so that developing countries benefit from the very best of British and international scientific expertise.
The senseless injustice of preventable deaths must end.
[HCWS1844]
House of Lords
Development Aid: Pakistan
Lord Harries of Pentregarth
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will take steps to ensure that the United Kingdom’s development aid supports the most vulnerable minorities, particularly in Pakistan.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, UK aid prioritises the most vulnerable, excluded and disadvantaged, including those caught in crises and those most at risk of violence and discrimination. Promoting tolerance and inclusion is a core principle across our Pakistan programme and we also have programmes specifically supporting minorities. We regularly raise the needs of minority communities with the Government of Pakistan.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
I thank the Minister for his reply, particularly for saying that DfID focuses on the most vulnerable, but in Pakistan this is simply not happening. There are communities there which are twice distinguished by their poverty; first, on religious grounds, as either Hindus or Christians; secondly, because they are Dalits. Of course, if they are women, they are discriminated against on a third ground. Is it not possible for DfID to disaggregate its aid in order to identify, focus on and target such minorities?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, the noble and right reverend Lord makes a very good point about ensuring that we target aid to the people who need it. DfID Pakistan continues to review its support to poor and marginalised people in Pakistan and we aim to better disaggregate our results data in future. We recently had some success in collecting more and better-quality data on people with disabilities in Pakistan, and this also picked up other minorities. We have learned from that and will build on it to focus our energy on collecting data from these other groups.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister will be aware that a key part of our support for Pakistan is the CSSF’s rule of law programme, which aims to increase Pakistan’s civilian capacity to investigate, detain, prosecute and try terrorists. He will also be aware that Pakistan routinely uses the death penalty, including against those who are alleged to have committed terrorism offences as juveniles. He talks about targeting how aid is used, so can he guarantee to this House today that not a single penny of the CSSF has been used to indirectly support the death penalty in Pakistan in any way?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, as the noble Baroness is perfectly aware, we condemn the death penalty wherever and by whoever it is used anywhere in the world. We cannot support this barbaric penalty. I cannot give individual details on that programme, but I will ensure that that information gets to the noble Baroness. I should also point out that the rule of law is paramount. For example, in the Asia Bibi case we are very pleased to see Pakistan’s commitment to the rule of law following the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s decision in January this year to uphold Asia Bibi’s acquittal on blasphemy charges.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development—CREID—was recently set up, tasked with looking at how poverty reduction efforts can actively support inclusive and religiously diverse communities, which I am sure we all welcome. I understand that CREID is funded by UK aid. Can the Minister say where oversight of it lies within government and how its effectiveness is being monitored? I am happy to receive a response in writing.
The Earl of Courtown
I thank the noble Baroness for that question and will confirm in writing the exact details she asks for. I should add that DfID’s Pakistan education programme is our largest bilateral education programme, having supported nearly 10 million children in primary education and 5.8 million in secondary education since 2011. It is also important to note that other practical support for education includes improving the teacher training curriculum, including modules on equity and inclusion.
Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, if the answer to my question is not in his answer to the previous questioner, will my noble friend undertake to let us know through the Library or whatever other means what proportion of the money that this country gives to Pakistan every year is devoted to focused targets on the most needy, and what proportion of it is not predicated on any requirement for any standard treatment of justice and the rule of law?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, our DfID programme this year has amounted to £300 million. The important point to remember on this is that DfID is active in making the case that the most stable societies are those which uphold the right to freedom of religion and belief. The stability of the whole country is reflected in that. We also regularly challenge our partners to demonstrate that they are doing all they can to meet the needs of the most vulnerable people, including religious minorities. The point of this aid is to target those minority groups, and that is what we are doing.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister not agree that part of the problem—I came across this with two big schemes I was involved with in Pakistan—is corruption? The amount of money that trickles down to where you want it to have effect has by then gone through layer after layer of provincial governors and others who, I fear, have sticky fingers, and is very small. How can we ensure that DfID money actually hits the people who really need it, rather than feeding corruption?
The Earl of Courtown
The noble Lord makes a very good point: targeting aid to those minority groups is useless if it will not reach them in the first place. One of the primary aims of the department is to ensure that the aid targeted at those minority groups actually reaches them. That is kept continually under review.
Special Adviser Appointments
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the correct procedures were followed in the dismissal of Sonia Khan as a special adviser.
Earl Howe (Con)
My Lords, the Government do not comment on personnel matters regarding individuals. Special advisers are temporary civil servants appointed in accordance with Part 1 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. They are bound by the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers and the terms of the Model Contract for Special Advisers, which sets out how special advisers are appointed and leave their role.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
Noble Lords will recall that on 29 August Sonia Khan was summarily dismissed by Mr Cummings and shown to the front door of No. 10 by an armed officer. Paragraph 3.3 of the Ministerial Code, which was updated on 23 August this year, says:
“The responsibility for the management and conduct of special advisers, including discipline, rests with the Minister who made the appointment”.
The Chancellor knew nothing of this, so under what authority did Mr Cummings—a man who was summoned to give evidence to a Select Committee in another place, told the chairman to “get lost” and was then found to be in contempt of Parliament—dismiss Sonia Khan? Finally, on treatment of special advisers, was it appropriate for Mr Cummings to say to his fellow special advisers:
“If you don’t like how I run things, there’s the door”?
If he continues to act in this arrogant manner, should that invitation not be extended to Mr Cummings?
Earl Howe
My Lords, as I just said, my noble friend will understand that I cannot comment on personnel matters relating to individuals. I can say in general terms that, in line with the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, special advisers operate under the authority of their appointing Minister. Therefore, special advisers in No. 10 act under the authority of the Prime Minister. Section 8 of the 2010 Act also allows special advisers to exercise any power in relation to the management of another special adviser if permitted by the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers. The code of conduct does so permit.
Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)
My Lords, it is the right of civil servants, if dismissal is contemplated, to have access to a disciplinary board before a conclusion is reached. Is that available to special advisers, and was it available in this case?
Earl Howe
I cannot comment on this case, but the status of special advisers is set out in legislation in the 2010 Act to which I referred. Because of the Crown’s power to dismiss at will, special advisers are not entitled to a period of statutory notice when their appointment is terminated. However, the terms of their employment are set out in their model contract.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, I will ask the Minister two questions. Given the report in the Daily Telegraph that Sonia Khan was later offered a pay-off of around £40,000 following her treatment, does he consider that an appropriate use of public money? I also refer him to the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers, this time paragraph 14, which says:
“Special advisers must not take public part in political controversy… They must observe discretion and express comment with moderation”.
Does he consider that the Prime Minister’s special adviser is abiding by that or, as journalists have been told, is this just “classic Dom” and supposed to be tolerated?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I cannot comment on the reported offer of a payout, as I hope the noble Baroness will understand. Having said that, the model special adviser contract sets out severance arrangements for when special advisers’ contracts end, as I intimated to the noble Lord, Lord Butler. As I mentioned, all special advisers must adhere to the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers, which applies across the board to every special adviser in government. They are also bound by the standards of integrity and honesty required of all civil servants, as set out in the Civil Service Code.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I will keep this simple. Does the Minister accept that the behaviour in the Sonia Khan case must never be seen as some form of precedent for the way these people are treated? It must never happen again.
Earl Howe
My Lords, No. 10 has always been involved in the performance management and appraisal of special advisers and other personnel management issues. Disciplinary matters fall under the heading of performance management. That reflects long-standing practice. It is also set out in successive versions of the Ministerial Code.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, are not special advisers appointed to assist their Secretaries of State and Ministers in the performance of their duties? What on earth is the purpose of Dominic Cummings holding meetings with all the special advisers, who should be responsible to their Secretaries of State and not to him?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the 2010 Act, to which I referred, says that all appointments of special advisers must be approved by the Prime Minister and that the Prime Minister may terminate the contract by withdrawing his consent at any time. That is also made clear in the Ministerial Code.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, paragraph 11 of the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers states:
“Any special adviser found to be disseminating inappropriate material will be subject to a disciplinary process”.
Can I ask the Minister about the process? What is the process that should have been applied, or that should be applied in these cases more generally?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the terms of employment for any special adviser, as I have said, are set in their model contract. They are bound by the Code of Conduct. The process will depend on the terms of that contract. Dominic Cummings is ultimately accountable to the Prime Minister for his conduct, as is the case for all special advisers.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, is it not acutely embarrassing to this Government that they have put Parliament in a position whereby it is granting a pass to somebody who is deemed to be in contempt of it? I hope that any compensation to Sonia Khan comes not from the pocket of the taxpayer, but from Dominic Cummings.
Facial Recognition Technology
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Clement-Jones
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, and with his permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper. I remind the House of my interest as chair of Big Brother Watch.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, the judgment in the South Wales Police case confirms that there is a clear and sufficient legal framework for the police to use live facial recognition. We will keep governance under review and work with the police and others to ensure that public trust and confidence in the police’s use of new technology are maintained.
Lord Strasburger
I thank the Minister for that reply. The Government have previously confirmed that this highly intrusive technology is being deployed in a legal vacuum. Alarmingly, we have recently discovered that private companies have for years been secretly using automated facial recognition in public spaces, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has warned that we are sleepwalking into an “Orwellian … police state” and called for a code of ethics and a strict legal framework. Parliament must provide these. In the meantime, will the Government impose a moratorium on the use of this intrusive technology?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The Government do not intend to place a moratorium on the technology’s use, but the noble Lord is right that such use needs to be carefully governed and be in line with the law and human rights, and with a clear oversight framework. Use of the technology in the private sector—the noble Lord might have alluded to this—is currently being looked at by the ICO.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)
Will the Minister consider the utter incompetence of the private and public companies which create facial recognition technology? You have these machines and you pay a vast sum of money for them, but when you put your face on them, they cannot recognise you for anything. Is it not better to press for the improvement of the system rather than trying to clamp down on something that is in no way ready to be used properly yet?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I hate to differ on this with my noble friend, but e-gate technology is in fact superb at matching facial recognition to passports—in some cases, better than humans. However, the human eye in these things is of course not to be dismissed and it can detect all sorts of other things in terms of e-gates.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)
My Lords, the Surveillance Camera Commissioner reported in July that not only facial recognition but gait analysis, lip-reading technology, algorithms that can predict fights and sensors that can detect explosives and radiation are all in development and all linked to surveillance cameras. Given the enormous potential of those developments, both positive and negative, and the need for trust on the part of the public, will the Government commission an independent review, with clear parameters, into how, if at all, such investigatory powers should be used and how that use should be supervised in the public interest? Does she agree with the commissioner that there is a case for placing the oversight of all these powers with the existing Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I agree with the noble Lord that the emergence of these new technologies necessitates a very careful approach. The live facial recognition technology is currently being trialled rather than fully rolled out, so we need to be very careful about it. In terms of oversight, the Surveillance Camera Commissioner has provided guidance for the police. We have established an oversight board, and the police are bringing forward proposals for new trials. We are working with the police on the development of national operational guidance, which will capture the lessons learned, as well as best practice. However, the noble Lord is absolutely right: with all these new technologies, we need to tread with extreme care and balance their proportionate use with the interests of the public.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I refer to my interests as listed in the register. Is it not the case that the genie is out of the bottle as far as many of these technologies are concerned? They are in current use in the private sector, as well as being used by investigatory agencies. Can the Minister confirm the regulatory frameworks for the use of these technologies which apply and which are legally binding on the private sector, and will the Government give an undertaking that the police and the other agencies will not be disadvantaged compared with the private sector in accessing and using these technologies?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Lord makes a good point. As I said to the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, the use of this technology is being looked at by the ICO. It has launched an investigation following concerns about the use of LFR by managers of shopping malls in and around King’s Cross. I have explained the oversight process to the noble Lord but, as I said to other noble Lords, it is very important that the technology is used proportionately and within the law, and of course the court judgment last month confirmed that that was the case.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, is the Minister not concerned that using custody image databases that include pictures of unconvicted people in conjunction with facial recognition technology is potentially a breach of innocent people’s human rights? Is this not another reason why the Government need to take action?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
It might be helpful to the noble Lord if I outlined the types of people who could be on a watch list. They are persons wanted on warrants, individuals who are unlawfully at large, persons suspected of having committed crimes, persons who might be in need of protection, individuals whose presence at an event causes particular concern, and of course vulnerable persons—we must not lose sight of the fact that the technology can be incredibly useful in detecting vulnerable people.
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)
My Lords, surely the problem is that the law in this area is deficient. It is very difficult to balance the utility of the technology against the intrusion on personal rights. Does the Minister not agree that the debate should be held in Parliament and, to that end, that the Government should commit to bringing forward a robust legislative framework for consideration?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
As I said before, we must proceed very carefully with such developing technologies. It is very important that the police have clear legal frameworks within which to operate. However—not one month ago—the High Court said that there is a sufficient legal framework for police use of facial recognition technology. This consists of common-law powers, data protection and human rights legislation, and the surveillance camera code.
Brexit: Medicines and Medical Devices
Baroness Thornton
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to safeguard the supply of medicines and medical devices in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, the Department for Health and Social Care is doing everything possible to prepare for an exit from the European Union, whatever the circumstances. We have worked with trade bodies, product suppliers and the health and care system throughout the UK and have made great progress towards ensuring continuity of supply to the whole of the UK and its Crown dependencies. I reassure patients that our plans to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines and medical products when we leave the EU are as solid as possible.
Baroness Thornton (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his Answer. This Question was prompted by the National Audit Office report published last week, which justified considerable concern among NHS workers and patients about the availability of basic medicines if the UK crashes out of the European Union.
I wish to raise two specific concerns with the Minister. It seems likely that the availability of the flu vaccine will be affected by a no-deal exit. Andrew Goddard, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, said:
“I can’t … say, ‘Don’t worry, no deal will be fine, no one is going to come to any harm, no one is going to run out of medicines.’ What we can see is we’re likely to not have enough flu vaccine … and that is likely to have an impact on the NHS”.
So will the Minister inform the House whether the department has a plan to deal with this eventuality and, if so, what it is? Secondly, what is the plan for the availability of medicines and treatments that cannot be stockpiled, such as isotopes, which are vital for cancer treatment and which by definition have a short shelf life?
Lord Bethell
The noble Baroness makes a very fair point about concerns about easily diminished medicines such as vaccines and isotopes. I reassure her that plans are very well advanced to provide adequate stocks. The Government have procured a buffer stock of 400,000 adult vaccines, and a large number of measures have been put in place, including the use of air freight, the search for alternative vaccines where necessary and the central stockpiling of very large numbers of medical supplies.
On isotopes, the Government recognise the concerns raised over the transport of products with short lives such as radioisotopes, which is why we have put in place a range of measures. These plans are being developed in close collaboration with the relevant manufacturers, NHS experts and other relevant departments.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, in my local pharmacy there is a poster on the wall asking patients not to blame pharmacy staff for the current shortages of medicines and medical devices. While accepting that it is not the pharmacies’ fault, can the Minister say whose fault it is?
Lord Bethell
The noble Baroness makes a very fair point that touches on the challenge of medical supplies that we live with whatever the circumstances, whether Brexit exists or not. Medical shortages happen and are part of the life of the NHS. If anything, this preparation for a no-deal Brexit has shone a light on our arrangements for medical supplies, and they have never been in better shape. One of the advantages of the process that we have gone through is to improve the circumstances. However, as the noble Baroness pointed out, shortages do happen in every country in Europe, including Britain. But I predict that these will happen less and less because of the investment of time and resources into understanding our medical supplies.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, on precisely that point, my noble friend will be aware that, as he said, shortages of medicines are occurring across Europe. That was highlighted in the latter part of last year when a survey of 1,600 hospital pharmacists across Europe found that 92% were experiencing shortages, particularly of antibiotics, vaccines and cancer drugs. So this is an opportunity to secure greater long-term resilience in medicine supply in this country if we work with other Governments across Europe. Will the Government commit to doing that?
Lord Bethell
The Government are working very closely with European partners on the supply of medicines. As my noble friend will be aware, a large proportion of the medical supplies in this country originate from our European partners, and therefore that collaboration is absolutely essential.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register. Are Her Majesty’s Government able to confirm that, whatever the nature of our exit from the European Union, they will not allow the clinical trials regulation to become an impediment to the orderly flow of medicines and medical devices?
Lord Bethell
Clinical trials are one area of particular concern for the supply of medicines, which has therefore been an area of great focus. Special measures have been put in place to ensure the adequate supply of medicines to ensure that existing medical trials can continue whatever the circumstances, including in the case of a no-deal Brexit.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the Minister may be aware that there has been an extreme shortage of EpiPens, which treat anaphylactic shocks and severe allergic reactions. Will the Minister assure the House that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, significant attention will be given to ensure that enough EpiPens are available for the treatment of anaphylactic shocks and allergic reactions?
Lord Bethell
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for bringing to the House’s attention the shortage of EpiPens. It is not a situation I am aware of in particular, but I reassure her that medical devices have exactly the same scrutiny and focus as medicines, and that they will be very much part of the process of ensuring sufficient supplies in the case of a no-deal Brexit.
Lord Tebbit (Con)
My Lords, can my noble friend help me? I cannot understand who these wicked people are who noble Lords opposite think would try to hold up the supply of these vital drugs and other materials. Why would they do it? What would be their motive? Who are they? Who are these mysterious and wicked people who will be so angry about Brexit that they will want to take it out on sick people in the British Isles?
Lord Bethell
The Government are aware that there is a high degree of public concern on this important issue. We are also aware that the supply of medicines and medical devices is an extremely complicated process, which may have been overlooked in the past. However, thanks to the dry run in March and the ongoing efforts of officials, which I commend and pay tribute to, it has never been in better shape.
Brexit
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Callanan
To move that this House takes note of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.
The Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Callanan) (Con)
My Lords, the Motion before us today asks the House to once again consider the UK’s withdrawal from the EU—which will take place on 31 October, with or without a deal. Of course, this House and its committees have been considering this topic with great scrutiny and interest ever since the 2016 referendum. I pay tribute to the stamina and continued focus of noble Lords in fulfilling this vital constitutional role.
The Government are committed to delivering on this instruction from the British people without any further pointless delay. The outcome that we want, and have always wanted, is a deal with the European Union—but if we cannot agree a new deal, we will have to leave without one.
I must commend noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, on their excellent timing in scheduling this debate today; events are indeed unfolding fairly rapidly as we speak. I first highlight to noble Lords that, a short while ago, we published details of the Government’s proposals for alternatives to the backstop. A copy of the Written Ministerial Statement and supporting documentation is now available for noble Lords to collect from the Printed Paper Office.
I recognise, of course, that noble Lords would like to take time to review and consider the content of the WMS and documents, the details of which I will set out in a moment. Before I do that, I reassure noble Lords by confirming that they will have the opportunity to discuss this further in a Statement tomorrow.
This Government have made considerable progress in their negotiations with the EU. We have been working hard to negotiate changes to the withdrawal agreement and political declaration. The Prime Minister has been clear on the nature of these changes. We are unconditionally committed to finding a solution for the north/south border which protects the Belfast agreement, the commitments of which can best be met if we explore solutions other than the backstop. The backstop risks—
Lord Hain (Lab)
Will the noble Lord confirm, in the light of the Prime Minister’s speech earlier today and the proposals that have just been published, that effectively the Government are saying, “We won’t impose border controls of a customs check character at or near the border, but since that border is the external customs union frontier of the European Union and the Republic of Ireland, it is up to them to do it”? Is that not a despicable, pass-the-parcel, grubby approach to all this?
Lord Callanan
The noble Lord makes his point in his normal forthright manner. If he has a little patience, I will come to the details of our proposals in a little while.
The backstop risks weakening the delicate balance embodied in the Belfast agreement between both major traditions in Northern Ireland, grounded in agreement, consent and respect for minority rights. Removing control of areas of the commercial and economic life of Northern Ireland to an external body over which the people of Northern Ireland have no control risks undermining that balance. Any deal ahead of Brexit on 31 October must avoid the whole of the UK or just Northern Ireland being trapped in an arrangement where they are a rule taker.
These discussions with the Commission and EU leaders have intensified, with regular sessions taking place over a number of weeks. The Prime Minister’s EU sherpa, David Frost, has continued to lead a cross-party team for these detailed discussions with the Commission’s Taskforce 50, in line with the Prime Minister and President of the European Commission’s agreement to intensify the pace of discussions. Within the last couple of hours in Brussels, he has delivered to the EU the UK’s proposals on a replacement to the backstop. These are the proposals which we have laid in Parliament today.
I know that your Lordships will probably not have had the time or opportunity to read the document published a short while ago. I will therefore set out the main points of the Prime Minister’s offer to the EU. First, this proposal is based above all on our commitment to find solutions which are compatible with the Belfast agreement, the fundamental basis for governance in Northern Ireland.
Secondly, it confirms our commitment to long-standing areas of UK-Ireland collaboration: the common travel area; the rights of all those living in Northern Ireland; and north/south co-operation.
Thirdly, the proposal provides for the creation of an all-island regulatory zone on the island of Ireland, covering all goods and eliminating regulatory checks for trade in goods between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Fourthly, and unlike the backstop, this regulatory zone will be dependent on the consent of those affected by it. This is essential to the acceptability of arrangements under which part of the UK accepts the rules of a different political entity. In our view, it is fundamental to democracy. The Government therefore propose that the continuation of the regulatory zone after the transition period will be subject to the principle of consent of the people of Northern Ireland.
Fifthly, the proposal ensures that Northern Ireland will be fully part of the UK customs territory, not the EU customs territory, after the end of the transition period. It has always been a fundamental point for this Government that the UK will leave the EU customs union at the end of the transition period, since control of trade policy is fundamental to this country’s future prosperity.
Finally, in order to support Northern Ireland through our withdrawal from the EU, and in collaboration with others with an interest, this Government propose a new deal for Northern Ireland, with appropriate commitments to help boost economic growth and Northern Ireland’s competitiveness, and to support infrastructure projects, particularly with a cross-border focus. Taken together, these proposals respect the decision taken by the people of the UK to leave the EU while dealing pragmatically with that decision’s consequences in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. Together, we believe that these will allow us to reach agreement with the EU under Article 50 and to leave the EU with a deal that both respects the referendum result and provides a strong platform for our future relationship.
As I am sure noble Lords will agree, leaving the EU with a deal on 31 October is the preferable outcome. However, we have stepped up preparations across government and will be fully ready for Brexit on 31 October whatever the circumstances. As the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster made clear in his Statements to the other place, and as I repeated in this House last month on 3 September and again on 25 September, we have indeed ramped up our no-deal preparations. The Government are committed to prioritising stability for citizens, consumers, businesses and the economy. I know that many noble Lords have previously raised the important issue of citizens’ rights. I yet again reassure noble Lords that this Government are clear that citizens’ rights will never be used as a bargaining chip. That is why the Prime Minister has provided an unequivocal guarantee to the more than 3 million EU citizens living and working in the UK that they can have absolute certainty of the right to live and remain in the UK whether we leave with or without a deal. Under the EU settlement scheme, over 1.5 million EU citizens have secured their future in the UK, and the Home Office continues to process up to 20,000 applications per day.
As well as the smooth flow of people from the UK into the EU and vice versa, our economic priorities include ensuring the continued flow of goods. The Government have committed to a number of steps in order to do this. For example, we have committed to introducing temporary easements for traders and hauliers to smooth the transition to new controls; and to maintain continuity of trade, we have signed or agreed in principle 15 trade continuity agreements to date, covering 45 countries and accounting for 72% of the trade for which we are seeking continuity in a no-deal Brexit. The work that we are taking forward will ensure that businesses are ready for exit.
The precise impacts of a no-deal Brexit are of course difficult to predict but we have taken steps to define the potential impact and develop reasonable worst-case planning assumptions upon which we can build our contingency plans. Operation Yellowhammer is the cross-government programme of work to ensure that the Government are prepared to mitigate the potential impacts of Brexit in the event that the UK leaves without a deal.
The Government are ready for and committed to withdrawal from the EU, with or without a deal, on 31 October and without further pointless delay. We have ramped up all our preparations to deliver that. This Government are clear that people want to see Brexit delivered by 31 October, and we are determined to deliver on their wishes. I beg to move.
Lord Goldsmith (Lab)
My Lords, this is the first full opportunity that this House has had to debate Brexit since the Supreme Court told the Prime Minister unanimously that his Prorogation plan was,
“unlawful, null and of no effect”,
because it had the effect, in their view, of frustrating or preventing the constitutional role of Parliament in holding the Government to account. It is right that this House should have the opportunity to debate where we are because the Supreme Court particularly recognised that this House too had a role in holding the Government to account, part of our responsibility under our constitution.
During the short period since that decision, much has already been said, and I am sure much will be said today by noble Lords and that their words will be wise and informative. We will also have to deal with and comment on the new information that the Minister has just provided, and I will come back to that in a moment. However, I shall concentrate on two particular matters. Assuming that this new proposed deal does not get either support from Parliament or agreement from the EU, what are the Government going to do? That is what I want to spend a few minutes on, particularly on how the Government intend to achieve what they, including the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, have repeatedly said: that they will comply with the law yet still leave on 31 October.
That mantra of compliance has been much repeated, but we still do not know what the Government mean. This will be the third time that I have raised the question in the House. Of course, it is not a question of generalised compliance, or compliance with the law in general, but of how the Government will comply with the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act. That is what has been termed by the Prime Minister the “surrender Act”, which is his favoured term. Language is powerful, as the Prime Minister in particular, as an experienced journalist, knows; but that is a misuse of language and a dangerous one, as colleagues have pointed out, particularly in the other place. Language has been a political tool, at least ever since Erik the Red misnamed frozen Greenland to attract more settlers to his new land. This Act in fact surrenders nothing. It is Parliament which, in the Act, has set the date of an extension of three months, which is to be triggered. If the EU accepts that date, then that is the extension. If the EU proposes another date, that has no effect unless Parliament accepts it. So it is Parliament that is in control. If there has to be a nickname for this, other than the Benn Act, the “parliamentary sovereignty Act” would be a more appropriate name.
Let us look for a moment at what compliance with the Act means. It means more than a bare adherence to the minimal interpretation of the words of the law; it means an acceptance, too, of the spirit of the law—what Parliament, what we, intended by the law. So what are the Government actually doing? From all the statements that have been made, it looks as though, if the Government cannot get this deal through, either with the EU or in the other place, they are looking for a way to circumvent the law, to try to find a way round it. We expect more from people in high office. We expect good faith and respect for the spirit of the law. Mr Johnson has impoverished our society and our politics with his unlawful scheme to shut Parliament up. Let us hope that he does not impoverish it further by looking for shoddy tricks or shabby stratagems to get round what Parliament has ordained.
What will the Government do? The internet has been buzzing with different ideas of loopholes and workarounds. There are none. As the former Supreme Court Justice, Lord Sumption, said on the BBC, the courts disfavour finding loopholes. The earliest of the “loopholes” suggested was that the Prime Minister could accompany the letter of request that he is obliged to send with another letter saying that he does not want an extension at all. However, that would clearly be contrary to the Act. The Act requires that he should “seek an extension”, and you do not seek an extension if, at the same time as asking for it, you say, “Please don’t give it”, or keep your fingers crossed behind your back, as in the playground. This is not playground politics.
My first question to the Minister, when he winds, is on what reassurance he can give about what the Government plan to do in the event that this new proposal does not meet favour with the EU or with the other place. Let me spell out the question more clearly so that there is no room for misunderstanding or, forgive me for saying so, evasion. The Government say that they will comply with the law yet leave on 31 October. The Act allows two ways in which that can happen. First, if, by 19 October, a deal has been agreed with the EU—it will have to be this deal, according to what the noble Lord has said—which the House of Commons has approved and, indeed, this House has debated too. Or, if the Commons has agreed that we can leave without a deal and, again, this House debates that question as well. The clear question becomes: if, by 19 October, neither of those things has happened—there has been no agreed and approved deal and the House of Commons has not agreed that we can leave without a deal—will the Prime Minister “seek to obtain” an extension under Article 50(3), as the Act requires? Secondly, and importantly, will the Government agree not to undermine the request by second letters or other messages or statements which contradict the request?
One of the most disturbing suggestions that we have heard in recent days is that the Government could rely on the Civil Contingencies Act. This is the second “loophole” that I want to mention. That would mean using the powers in the Civil Contingencies Act to override or indeed revoke or set aside the Benn Act. There are a number of reasons why that would be wrong. First and foremost is because the great powers that do appear in the Civil Contingencies Act only arise if there is an “emergency”. That arises only when the Government are satisfied that,
“an emergency has occurred, is occurring or is about to occur”.
According to the Act, “emergency” means,
“an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare … in the United Kingdom”,
or in a part or region of it. It would still be necessary to show that urgent provision has to be made to address that emergency. Noble Lords will agree that that situation does not apply at the moment. However, the suggestion that this Act might be employed is worrying, because if civil unrest or riot, or the prospect of them, were invoked, the Government might then claim that the statutory conditions to revoke the Benn Act were in fact in existence. It is a worry that some Ministers appear to be talking up the risk of unrest, perhaps precisely with that intention in mind. That would be cynical and unlawful.
Another idea which has been floated, and apparently attributed to the Foreign Secretary, is that the Benn Act somehow conflicts with EU law. There is a lovely irony in the Government relying on EU law to get out of this particular problem. However, I do not understand the argument at all. It is no way inconsistent with Article 50 to ask for and agree extensions to the leaving date. That is what we have done at least once already, and it is fully consistent with Article 50. All the Benn Act does is require that a request for an extension is made if certain conditions are fulfilled: namely, that the Government have not persuaded the other place to agree to a deal that they have reached or to agree that we can leave without a deal. What is more, although I do not think it arises, Article 50 requires our notice to leave to be given in accordance with our constitutional traditions. That is what has happened. If it further required that extensions should be requested in accordance with those traditions, that has happened too, because it is pursuant to an Act of Parliament passed by both Houses that the Prime Minister will be required to make this request.
I will not deal with other suggested loopholes, save to say that all, in my view, are wrong. However, even though they are wrong, dealing with such arguments will take time. The worry is that the Government will run down the clock so that there is inadequate time to get decisions from either Parliament or the courts. Therefore, I am not surprised to read that other legal actions are already being planned. Clear answers from the Government today could help to render those unnecessary, so we look forward to hearing what the Minister will say in winding up.
The second issue I will raise—the Minister touched on this in his remarks, but I want to probe him a little further—is what the consequences of a no-deal Brexit would be. If the House of Commons is to approve a no-deal Brexit, clearly the Government are under an obligation to give full, frank and honest advice about the consequences for the British people. How do they intend to do that? We started with the leak of Operation Yellowhammer documents. Will the Government update and release the results of that inquiry? If so, when? We need to know.
I turn now to the subject of the Minister’s opening remarks. Of course, the third important issue is what new terms of the deal there are. If the Government can persuade the EU and the other place to accept those terms, that is one thing. They, and we, will need to examine them closely. During the course of today, others will no doubt comment on them. I want to make some brief initial comments. First, it is telling that this statement is released just as the Conservative Party conference comes to an end. The result of that was that the Prime Minister did not have to debate its contents and merits with the conference itself, which might have been a difficult job. It also means that we and the other place have less time to deal with it. Secondly, as noble Lords will recall, there was a commitment that there would be no more infrastructure or physical checks on the Irish border. I am not at all clear from reading and listening to the Minister whether that is in fact what these proposals will do. That needs to be probed as we go through this. Thirdly, it also seems that this provides for separate regimes for Northern Ireland and the rest of Great Britain. Again, the Minister will no doubt confirm that remark, or otherwise. That is a very important consideration which has been a terrible problem for many people in the past.
Those issues will need to be examined. I will say no more about them at this stage, but I have no doubt other noble Lords will during this debate, including my noble friend Lady Hayter. I am glad to hear—and for this I thank the Minister—the announcement that a Statement will be made tomorrow. The usual channels will have to consider how long to allow for that Statement, as I imagine many noble Lords will want the opportunity to speak to it.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)
My Lords, these Benches also welcome the debate. A benefit of the purported Prorogation being nullified is that we are able to hold the Government to account on this crucial issue, at such a crucial time—just 29 days before the date, set back in April, for the further extension of Article 50. Donald Tusk was reputed to have advised the United Kingdom not to waste this time.
Today we have learned, and have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, that the Prime Minister has made what was being trailed this morning as his final offer. It could equally be described as his first offer. We will have to study this in detail. If one looks, for example, at the suggestion that it provides for the potential creation of an all-Ireland regulatory zone on the island of Ireland, it might appear that the Government’s attempt to get around the border problem is to create two borders. Maybe that is why the Prime Minister has the idea of a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland—so it can have a regulatory checkpoint half way across.
The Irish border has been a real difficulty ever since Theresa May set out her mutually contradictory red lines: out of the single market, out of the customs union and no hard border on the island of Ireland. The last of these commands widespread support, but the first two amounted to acquiescence to the right wing of the Conservative Party. It treated the outcome of the referendum as if it had been 95:5 and not 52:48. It was in the interest of holding her party together, rather than the national interest. In December 2016, the European Union Select Committee of your Lordships’ House, in its sixth report, said:
“Retaining customs-free trade between the UK and Ireland will be essential if the current soft border arrangements are to be maintained … Nor, while electronic solutions and cross-border cooperation are helpful as far as they go, is the technology currently available to maintain an accurate record of cross-border movement of goods without physical checks at the border”.
That conclusion of the Select Committee has stood the test of time.
Clearly what we have been seeing today will require analysis, but the real concern with any infrastructure, whether at the border or 10 miles removed from it, is that we will see a reversal of the gains of the Good Friday agreement. It will significantly disrupt all-Ireland trade, as well as impact local communities. When the Minister replies, can he confirm that the proposals that have been submitted to the European Commission today would, if carried through, mean there will be no need to amend Section 10 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 at all? It says that:
“Nothing in section 8, 9 or 23(1) or (6) of this Act authorises regulations which … create or facilitate border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after exit day which feature physical infrastructure, including border posts, or checks and controls, that did not exist before exit day and are not in accordance with an agreement between the United Kingdom and the EU”.
It is important to get that reassurance.
The immediate priority of my party—indeed, of many—is to ensure that the United Kingdom does not crash out of the European Union on 31 October, without a deal. That is why we wholeheartedly supported the legislation promoted in your Lordships’ House by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, which is now the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019. That has sometimes been traduced as an attempt by remainers to frustrate Brexit in its entirety. It is worth pointing out that that Bill was supported by both remainers and leavers. It is fair to say that, in the House of Commons, there were ex-Cabinet Ministers who had voted for the leave agreement more often than the Prime Minister himself had. Therefore, it is wrong to characterise it as being a device or ploy by remainers to frustrate Brexit. It was intended to frustrate Brexit without any deal, which is an important distinction.
When questioned last Thursday, the Minister—as picked up by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith —said that the Government would obey the law, but refused to say what the Government understood the law to be. I very much hope that the very detailed analysis the noble and learned Lord has given will be fully responded to by the Minister.
We oppose no deal because, while we believe that leaving the EU at all on any terms would be damaging to jobs, the National Health Service, small businesses, farmers, the aspirations of our young people, to others and to our prosperity, we believe that crashing out without a deal, as foreshadowed in Operation Yellowhammer, would inflict serious damage indeed, not least on the most vulnerable members of our society. Serious job losses, the anxieties of cancer patients, bleak prospects for rural farmers: these were never displayed on the side of buses during the referendum campaign. Indeed, in April 2016, just two months before the referendum, the now Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, said on the BBC’s “Daily Politics” that,
“the idea that Britain would be apocalyptically off the cliff edge if we left the EU is silly”.
In March this year, in a newspaper article, Mr Michael Gove said that,
“we didn’t vote to leave without a deal. That wasn’t the message of the campaign I helped lead”.
There is no mandate whatever for leaving without a deal.
In his remarks, the Minister said that the Government have ramped up no-deal preparations. We had a Statement last week on Operation Yellowhammer on the dire consequences of a no-deal Brexit, and the publication of a document about which the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said she could see no difference from the one she had previously seen, except that what had previously been described as a “base scenario” had now been changed to “worst case scenario”. But can the Minister tell us about some of the other operations we believe the Government have prepared briefings and detailed analysis of, such as Operation Snow Bunting—the policing response in the event of a no-deal Brexit?
On the subject of policing, will the Minister comment on evidence given yesterday to the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, in which the deputy chief constable of Police Scotland was reported in the Times as having said that Police Scotland has been denied access to sensitive plans to handle civil disruption after Brexit? He said:
“We have, frankly, at times struggled to access some of the more sensitive elements, or layers, of those planning assumptions … Some of those planning assumptions have tended, at times, to be quite London or south of England-centric, and we’ve been constantly reinforcing the different legal and constitutional arrangements in Scotland”.
It would be very helpful if the Minister could tell us what attempts have been made to address these concerns expressed only yesterday by the deputy chief constable of Police Scotland.
We are told that there is an Operation Kingfisher—a bailout fund to prop up businesses in the event of a no-deal Brexit; and an Operation Black Swan, a worst- case disaster scenario for surprise events with huge repercussions. Can the Minister give us more details of these contingency planning analyses, which we understand are going on within the Government but they are not being totally open about? Are they planning to have any other birds? One could speculate whether Operation Emu might be for a plan that will not fly.
At the time of the attempted Prorogation, a number of pieces of legislation had not been completed. The Queen’s Speech that started this Session back in June 2017 foresaw,
“legislation to ensure that the United Kingdom makes a success of Brexit, establishing new national policies on immigration, international sanctions, nuclear safeguards, agriculture and fisheries”.—[Official Report, 21/6/17; col. 5.]
How many of these Bills have actually been passed? What about the ones which have not? Are the Government saying, having thought that they were necessary to make a success of Brexit, that Brexit will not be a success because they have not passed them?
If one listened to the exchanges in the Supreme Court on the final day of the recent case, the Advocate-General for Scotland, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, appeared to say that the Government had provided the court with an explanatory note on Brexit-related primary legislation not required for an exit date of 31 October. It would be very helpful, if that note exists—I understood that it was given to the court—if it could be placed in the Library so that we could see the Government’s analysis of legislation that has not been passed. In the event of an agreement being reached, can the Minister also tell us how quickly he thinks the implementation legislation could go through your Lordships’ House?
I have two concluding points. We are told constantly that the theme of the Conservative Party conference is, “Get Brexit done by 31 October”. That conjures up an idea that simply leaving with or without a deal is all that is required. Should that happen, people will very quickly realise that that is only the end of the beginning; that a new, and likely very long, phase of negotiations on our future relations with the European Union would ensue, even longer and more difficult were we to crash out without a deal. There is no sign that the Government have given any thought to the way forward, so what kind of public disillusionment will be created by the kind of simplistic sloganizing that does not bear out reality?
On these Benches, we believe that the best way forward is a people’s vote. Can any of us for one moment think that if the June 2016 result had been 52 to 48 the other way around Brexiteers would have said, “Fair cop, guv, we’re packing up our tents and we are going to quit the field”? Of course they would not. Painful though it would have been to have heard Bill Cash continue to go on, I would have respected the long-term and long-held beliefs of people who have opposed our membership of the European Union for a long, long time. Why, therefore, should not my colleagues and I be afforded a similar respect for the beliefs that we have held for a long time? Why should we abandon those views that we have held for decades? If there is not a people’s vote, we have said that we will campaign in a general election for a majority and a democratic mandate to revoke Article 50.
Brexiteers do not have a monopoly on patriotism. I believe passionately that the prosperity, security and the well-being of our country and the communities that we serve—and not least future generations—are best achieved by our continuing membership of the European Union. No one is going to deny our right to campaign for it.
Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)
My Lords, since we last debated Brexit, much has changed and yet, in many ways, nothing has changed. In some respects, we have gone backwards. We are looking for a new departure arrangement having renounced Theresa May’s agreement, which many of us, however reluctantly, were finally willing to support—including the present Prime Minister. Yet in the gloom, I believe there are some hopeful signs, to which I will return.
Let me first say in parenthesis that I saw nothing surprising or constitutionally revolutionary in last week’s ruling of the Supreme Court. Since the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, was sitting beside me, let me say that in view of the large television audiences for the proceedings of the court and following the ending of the televising of the Ashes contest, my noble friend has a claim to have become the Ben Stokes of the legal profession.
My career was spent in an era when judicial review became established as a means of challenging unreasonable exercises of power by the Executive. Although Prorogation took place geographically in Parliament, it was an act of the Executive: Parliament did not have a chance to vote on it. For me, the crucial sentence in the judgement was:
“It is impossible for us to conclude … that there was any reason—let alone a good reason—to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament for five weeks”.
A five-week Prorogation of Parliament at a crucial time when, as we will see next week, only a few days are needed to prepare for a Queen’s Speech, was an unreasonable exercise of the prerogative by the Executive. That is what the ruling was about; it was not about Brexit.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I have huge respect for the noble Lord and I value his advice. He is arguing that the process of Prorogation did not constitute proceedings in Parliament. Does he think the same is true of giving Royal Assent to Acts of Parliament?
Lord Butler of Brockwell
That is a legal issue on which I do not want to reply immediately. I think that is a proceeding in Parliament, but this was an act of the Executive, which happened to take place in Parliament.
The result of the Supreme Court’s judgment is that this House is sitting today and we have an opportunity to make our contribution to the debate, so I welcome this occasion. I hope that the Government get a deal with the EU; and there are some hopeful signs, although perhaps not as many as the Prime Minister claims. The DUP now seems prepared to support a deal on the broad lines the Prime Minister is outlining. The Irish Government, although by no means convinced by the details so far reported about the Prime Minister’s approach, appear to have realised that no deal would be a severe economic blow to them. The European Union wants a deal and is prepared to accept a greater role for the Northern Ireland Executive regarding the arrangements affecting Northern Ireland. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, pointed out to us in our previous debate, constructive suggestions about alternative arrangements for border controls have been made by the commission established by Prosperity UK.
Yet the prospects of reaching an agreement on all the necessary details by 31 October, let alone 17 October, are so remote as to be impracticable. So what sort of agreement do the Government envisage by that date? I understand that the Minister will not be able to tell us any more tonight, beyond what is in the Prime Minister’s so-called final offer to the EU and the documents that have been placed in the Printed Paper Office. But realistically, we must accept that it seems impossible that an agreement will be reached on 17 October, except perhaps on ways of temporarily mitigating the effects of no deal.
In that case, a request for a postponement under the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act seems inevitable. People understandably ask, “What would be the purpose of an extension?”. The Minister described it as “pointless”; I was surprised by that adjective because one benefit would be the general election which the Government have been seeking. It would, presumably, take place in late November or early December and might produce a Government able to hammer out a policy which would command a majority in Parliament, and with whom the EU would have to negotiate seriously. If that were the outcome, it would be a price worth paying for a further extension. It would at least be preferable to the present paralysis and, in my view, greatly preferable to leaving on 31 October without a deal.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, as the Government are in mid-negotiation with the European Commission, with Belfast and Dublin, and no doubt with other political forces in the other place, it is a little difficult to debate this issue this afternoon with full confidence—particularly as we have had about 10 minutes to absorb the outlines which my noble friend the Minister so kindly gave of the Government’s new proposals. The rest remains not only in negotiation but deliberately veiled. I understand that the Government want Brussels to try to keep these matters secret. That is a pretty forlorn hope but anyway, the veil has not yet been fully lifted so it is a little hard to see the full picture. Nevertheless, I intend to concentrate on that and, as the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said, to try to be positive about these matters rather than getting too bogged down in the sort of endless “What if?” speeches we have had, such as that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith.
It is assumed that there will be no withdrawal agreement and that we will arrive at 31 October with the Government saying that they are determined to leave and the Benn Bill saying that they should not. Let me put that aside to look at the positive prospects and what we can deduce from what has been said in the various capitals about the attempt to find an alternative to the backstop. I note that in this House only a fortnight ago, some of us who dared to raise the idea that there was a question to be asked about an alternative to the backstop were told by all the experts—distinguished former Northern Ireland Secretaries and others whose judgment I greatly respect—that it was out of the question. We were told, “It can’t happen. It’s never happened anywhere else. There is no conceivable alternative to the backstop and nothing else will be considered”.
Since then, even Jean-Claude Juncker has said that there is an alternative. Since then, the Times and the Financial Times have pronounced with great authority that there can be no alternative, it is quite wrong to assume that there can be any possible difference from the past, the backstop is here to stay, and it is all out of the question. Now it turns out to be in the question. I do not say that we have an answer. Maybe the critics and the sceptics on both sides—both the remainers who do not want there to be a deal of this kind and want to stay in, and the super no-dealers who do not want there to be any kind of withdrawal agreement because they want to leave without a deal—will go on questioning and hoping for a negative answer, but I am not so sure at all. I noticed in the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and in many other comments, a hint of possibilities and that the simple, crude backstop, which was so indigestible, does have alternatives. They are complex and technical and involve very special arrangements of a kind that have never happened elsewhere in the world—but Ireland is special.
I just make a few comments on the situation in Ireland. It is worth noting that there has always been a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, not only before we all joined the European Union, but for the last 40 years. It is a border that is heavily policed by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. There have always been massive, complex cross-border tax and regulatory issues that have had to be dealt with by endless experts and consultants. If you ask any senior businessman in Northern Ireland, they will tell you all about the arrangements that arise as a result of there being a border. The most obvious one is VAT: 23% in the Republic—with a whole range of derogations, right down to 4.8%, I think, on greyhounds—and 20% this side of the border, in the United Kingdom, although we have been in the EU so far. That is just one example of the whole list of differences on payroll, labour provisions, the currency, which is of course quite different, transfer pricing and a whole range of other issues. Yet everyone has managed quite well with an invisible border.
Why, when we move into this new situation, it should become so impossibly difficult, I do not understand. I do not understand the voices that are still coming from Dublin saying, “No, we don’t want any of that at all”. I have to ask—I think any reasonable person has to ask—what exactly does Dublin want? We want co-operation and constructiveness with the Republic of Ireland. We have a very close relationship, bad in the distant past but better in the last 50 years, and we want it to be better still. Do those in Dublin want to get rid of the common travel area that has been with us since 1922? If they do, it will be very painful for them. Do they want to build a physical border to mark the edge of the EU? Again, I cannot believe they really do, but that is the consequence of being negative about the proposals and allowing things to drift to no deal.
Under the new proposals, as I understand it, we have two, or maybe even four years—I am not quite sure; I am going by the Daily Telegraph, which may not be all that reliable—to sort out how these new arrangements could really work in practice. Over those several years, a lot will change. A lot will change here, because we will see far greater devolution to all the regions, including Northern Ireland, Scotland—if it does not go independent—and Wales. We will see the status of all devolved Governments vastly increase in this country in the digital age. We might as well recognise that that is what is coming and that a new pattern will develop if we can show patience. If this Parliament can show patience and can agree to a withdrawal agreement, then we can go forward constructively. If this Parliament remains paralysed and cannot ever reach agreement, then I fear the obvious outcome—which many of us predicted all along—is a general election and a new pattern, which may be slightly better than that which, so far, the House of Commons has been able to deliver.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I fear that we are on the verge of a very great constitutional crisis—probably the greatest since the Conservative Party leadership flirted with defying the law in the last days of the Asquith Government before the First World War on the question of Irish home rule. It was only the First World War that saved us from that, and no one would want to see that as the deus ex machina which saves us this time. What is the crisis? It is that, from what, on a quick reading, we know of the Government’s alternatives on the Irish question today—and of course we have not had a lot of time to look at it—I cannot believe that they are a serious proposition. To me, they come across, I am afraid, as a ruse invented in London to put the blame on the European Union for a no-deal breakdown.
They are not serious for four principal reasons. First, they breach the solemn promise that was made in the December 2017 joint agreement between the EU and Britain—a promise, by the way, to which Boris Johnson was fully a party, as a member of the Cabinet who did not resign at the time—that ruled out the reintroduction of a customs border in Ireland and promised a solution based on full regulatory alignment. It is all very well for Mr Johnson now to claim that these reintroduced customs checks would not be “at or near” the border, whatever that might mean. The central point is that the new Government have changed the whole basis of their approach to the Irish issue from that of their predecessor under Mrs May—from one of how to achieve the full alignment that makes talk of borders unnecessary, to one of how to minimise the disruption of customs controls. The fact is, for all that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, says, there is nowhere in the world where customs controls do not require physical infrastructure.
Secondly, the British Government are expecting the Republic and the whole of the EU to sign off on this principle without detailed agreement on the practicalities. That suggests that the Government do not actually have an answer on the practicalities.
Thirdly, the UK is apparently proposing that this arrangement will be temporary: it will have a life of only four years and then it will be up to the Northern Irish. However, in practice, the way they have put it, as I read it, is that it would give the DUP a veto: it would not be representative of Irish opinion in Northern Ireland as a whole.
Fourthly, is this a take it or leave it offer or not? I hope that the Minister will enlighten us, because if it is take it or leave it, it does not fill me with optimism. Therefore, let us not be under illusions: under this Government we are heading for no deal. And let us not kid ourselves that the deal they would actually seek if they avoided no deal would be that much better, because their firm intention is that Britain will leave both the single market and a customs union at the end of the withdrawal agreement’s transition period. We may avoid chaos in December, but 14 months later we would have the certainty of no frictionless border with the EU, a self-imposed calamity for all our manufacturing industries with integrated supply chains, and potentially significant disruption to our present competitive position in services.
The Government may say that that is nonsense, and that by then they will have negotiated the most wonderful Canada-style free trade agreement with the EU. Let us be clear: they will not have done. That is not just because of the shortage of time. There has been, again under Mr Johnson, a very significant change of government policy. Boris Johnson wants Britain to be a competitor with the EU, not to converge with the EU’s standards. He wants to jump EU regulations; he wants to remove EU protections; he wants to slash taxes. Can he be serious on this point? How can our EU neighbours offer us preferential access to their markets if our policy is to create a deregulated tax haven across the channel, 20 miles away? It is not going to happen, and we will suffer a great deal as a result. So I fear that we are in a very difficult situation on Brexit.
I will end with a word about democracy. A general election, which the Conservatives want, could result in a majority in Parliament for no deal—but that could be won, under our first-past-the-post system, on 33%, 34% or 35% of the vote. For me, and for many others in this Chamber, that would have absolutely no legitimacy. The only democratically legitimate solution to the problem that we have is a referendum. If we want to avoid a constitutional crisis, that is where we should now go.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, I too planned to talk about democracy, but I thought I would start by referring to a brief encounter I had with a policeman at the bottom of my staircase this morning. I arrived and said, “Good morning”, and he said, “Brexit today, ma’am”. I paused, and momentarily thought, “I wish”. Then I remembered that, as a Liberal Democrat, I clearly do not wish that it were Brexit today. But I suspect that I am not alone in wishing that we were not four years from the day when this House started to debate the European Union Referendum Act 2015, because for the past four years, we seem to have been debating the same issues day after day in a stultifying Chamber, in a stultifying parliamentary system, which seems not to be getting us very far.
The Minister suggested this afternoon that we are finally making progress—indeed, this debate is to note our withdrawal from the European Union—but it is not clear how close we are to withdrawal. There are questions about the nature of our withdrawal, what it will mean and where the United Kingdom ends up. Much of the rhetoric during the referendum was about voting leave, taking back control. Taking back control could mean whatever the voter wanted it to mean about borders. The Home Secretary yesterday seemed to get very excited about the opportunity to take back control of borders.
Another issue appeared to be taking back control to Parliament—bringing decisions back to the United Kingdom—because the leave campaign told us that the European Union is not democratic. Yet the European Union has free and fair periodic elections once every five years to elect the European Parliament. This year, that included the United Kingdom. We were not supposed to have European elections this year, but so glacial is the process of our departure that we did. The United Kingdom, like the other 27 members, has the opportunity to elect Members of the European Parliament. That is a type of democracy. The House of Commons is also democratically elected. The House of Commons and your Lordships’ House are supposed to take part in the legislative process, but also in scrutinising the Government.
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, made clear in his opening remarks, one of the points that the Supreme Court made last week is that it is also up to this House to scrutinise the Government—yet we seem to have a Government who wish to ignore Parliament. We heard earlier in Questions about the role of special advisers and of one Mr Dominic Cummings, a special adviser to the Prime Minister who is in contempt of Parliament. What does it say about the Government’s approach to Parliament that such an important special adviser is in contempt of Parliament?
The attempt to prorogue Parliament for five weeks, if not a contempt of your Lordships’ House and the other place, suggests that Nikki da Costa, the director of legislative affairs, perhaps does not fully understand the role of Parliament. In the advice given to the Prime Minister, there was a suggestion that while 34 days might be lost through Prorogation, that was actually only five sitting days—as if sitting in plenary session is the only thing that Parliament does. Had that Prorogation taken effect, we would not be able to ask questions, the Government could not be held to account and committees could not sit—and that is what the Government seem to want.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
The noble Baroness is making an interesting speech about democracy, but would she explain one mystery that I really do not understand? How is it that the Liberal party was the first party to propose an in/out referendum on this issue? Indeed, the present leader of the Liberal party repeatedly criticised David Cameron for not proposing an in/out referendum before he did. How can the Liberal party, having been in that position, now say it is going to ignore the results of the referendum?
Baroness Smith of Newnham
My Lords, I am delighted to take that intervention, and particularly delighted that I am taking it not from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench. Four years ago, when I was speaking from the Front Bench on the referendum Bill, I was intervened upon by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who, when I said I was rather sad to be having to speak in a debate about a referendum, reminded me that the Liberal Democrat position had indeed been to support an in/out referendum. That has been our party policy. Like that of other parties, the Liberal Democrat position is one—
I hear from a sedentary position something about opportunism. I am a Liberal Democrat; I believe in democracy. I did not vote against triggering Article 50. I personally accept the result of the referendum but, as we have already heard, Michael Gove, who is currently responsible for the Government’s no-deal preparations, also said we were not preparing for a no-deal Brexit. That was not what people voted for.
We are in a position in which Parliament is incapable of delivering Brexit unless this Prime Minister manages to pull a rabbit out of a hat with his letter to Jean-Claude Juncker.
I can hear my Whip saying “time”. However, I was intervened on, and nobody else has so far taken any notice of the Clock, so at this stage I am not going to either.
We are in a position in which the Government have not been able to deliver Brexit and Parliament has not been able to come to a solution. The way around that is another referendum. The Liberal Democrat position is that if a general election came first and we had a majority, we would want to revoke—so be it—but we are not at that stage.
I would have had another minute had I not been intervened on. I ask the Minister: what are the Government proposing to do? Unlike other noble Lords, I will assume that the Prime Minister gets his deal on 17 October and we get to the point of the House of Commons accepting the deal. That might be 19 or 21 October. Do we not need a withdrawal implementation Bill to deal with that agreement? How do the Government propose to get that through Parliament? There was filibustering from the Government Benches when we tried to get through a very brief piece of legislation before the non-Prorogation. This would be a much more serious piece of legislation. Do the Government really envisage getting it through both Houses in 10 days—calendar days, not working days? If so, how does the Minister propose to do that?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, there is an advisory Back-Bench speaking time of six minutes. We have been consistently over that time. For the fairness of the House, I wonder if we can try to stick to that.
The Earl of Kinnoull (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, who spoke with her customary zeal and energy. Before I make my brief remarks, I want to note how busy the EU Committee structure is. The family of committees is meeting and the great machinery that is scrutiny has restarted and continues apace. The 43rd of our Brexit reports is in its final stages of preparation. The 16th of our Treaty reports will be out next week. I pay tribute to our 26 staff.
I wanted to use my time on one issue of great concern to me and the EU Committee. Indeed, at our meeting yesterday the majority of our time was taken up with it. I speak of the new policy on UK participation in EU meetings—the empty chair policy. On 20 August the UK wrote to the EU Council and said that going forward, UK Ministers and officials would participate in EU meetings only where,
“the UK has significant national interests involved”.
Some guidance was given in the letter about what that might mean, and later in the letter the position of our vote was discussed. I quote from the letter again:
“Where necessary therefore, the UK will make appropriate arrangements regarding its vote”.
This was subsequently clarified as meaning delegating the UK’s vote to Finland, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency. The committee understands that UK officials and Ministers now attend about one-third of EU meetings.
On that stark set of facts, I have three points to make. The first is one of perception: our partners take this badly. I have spent a number of days in Europe talking to partners since I became chairman. The Government have often said that we would take a full part in the affairs of the EU until we left. On 16 September the General Affairs Council of the EU met—the EU format that would have expected to welcome our Foreign Secretary. Sixteen Foreign Secretaries from other nations were present; the other countries sent either their Deputy Foreign Secretaries or their permanent representatives. Our chair was empty. As one senior European put it to me, “I don’t see how one develops a deep and meaningful relationship by being absent”.
Their bafflement is all the greater as there is a far from zero chance, given the provisions of the Benn Act, that we will continue our membership beyond 31 October. Even if we do leave on that date, the next step will undoubtedly be to seek to open fresh negotiations. What sort of preparation is it for those negotiations for the UK to sign out of discussions on the entire range of EU legislation? Our UKRep team—recently beefed up—is hugely experienced and able to deputise for Ministers where necessary.
The second problem is that there is insufficient clarity about which meetings we will attend. The EU Committee in a letter of 4 September asked for more detail on this. The Minister answered very quickly on 9 September—I thank him for that speed—but I regret that his answer had the effect of reducing clarity. The test is now only,
“what the Government considers to be in the national interest”.
It was also noted that:
“Attendance will be decided on a case by case basis”.
That lack of clarity is bad for our EU 27 friends and partners and for Parliament in our scrutiny work. Our correspondence on this matter continues.
The third problem is one of accountability. The scrutiny reserve resolution of March 2010 sets out the Government’s commitments on how scrutiny operates and how Ministers will vote on matters that are still the subject of scrutiny. Some 200 files are currently under scrutiny by the EU Committee, which is very clear that it expects the Government to continue to attend any and all meetings that relate to files held under scrutiny. We are not imagining that scrutiny will continue unchanged after Brexit day. It is clear that on that day the scrutiny reserve will fall and that our internal processes will change fundamentally. However, we had a clear understanding with the previous Government that until exit day the existing scrutiny processes would continue and the Government would give the committee their full support. Can the Minister confirm that that is still the case?
In his letter of 9 September, the Minister made reference to delegating the UK’s vote to the presidency country, Finland. Can he further confirm that the Government share my understanding that any vote cast by the presidency on behalf of UK will engage the terms of the scrutiny reserve?
I am pressing the Minister on those points in part because of an alarming letter that we recently received from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy concerning our scrutiny of a draft regulation for the single market programme. It is quite an important regulation. The letter asks us to clear this matter from scrutiny on the basis that:
“HMG officials will no longer attend the working party responsible for drafting the Regulation for the Single Market Programme. Consequently, the Government will not be able to provide a meaningful update to the Committees”.
It continues:
“As UK ministers and officials will have no further role in shaping the Regulation ... I am writing to formally request that”,
it,
“be cleared from scrutiny”.
The empty-chair policy is being used, it would appear, to try to circumvent the scrutiny of both Houses on matters of direct and, in all probability, continuing interest to the UK and UK businesses.
In our democracy a major and core ingredient is respect for institutions. Indeed, we now know that this respect is a matter not just of convention but of law—Lady Hale has told us. The empty-chair policy raises questions over the Government’s respect for this House, for the scrutiny reserve and for our ongoing relationship with the EU institutions. I suspect that we will hear more about this today, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow a fellow Scot, although I will deal with a rather different matter.
We are dealing with the proposals in Article 50 for withdrawal from the European Union. It is important to note that, once a country such as ours has given such notice, it is the duty of the Union—I want to read the exact words—to,
“negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union”.
In other words, the withdrawal agreement has nothing whatever to do with the future relationship, except that it be in the light of that future relationship. That is the agreement we have to reach, and it is that agreement and that agreement only that defines the date on which we leave the European Union. There is no requirement to agree any arrangement about future relationships. That is a framework, not an agreement—a framework which is set up at that time. Therefore, it is extremely important to realise that, in order to satisfy the rules of the European Union set out in Article 50, we are not required to agree the future relationships. Those are for the future. The immediate matter is to agree the terms on which we withdraw. One term which has been negotiated so far, and which I hope will continue, is that there will be an implementation period in which the rules remain substantially the same.
Therefore, the question of the withdrawal agreement is quite simple. It deals with matters and obligations that arise at the withdrawal date, and that date—the one on which the withdrawal agreement is agreed—is the date for leaving the European Union. Also, Article 50 does not mention anything about crashing out or any expression of that sort if it is not possible to reach an agreement two years after the original notice; it just says that that is what will happen.
In my submission, it is absolutely essential that future relationships on the one hand and the obligations of withdrawal on the other are distinct and separated out from one another. Otherwise, we have a terrific burden of trying to agree the future relationships at this stage, when Article 50 clearly contemplates that that is a distinct matter and does not require agreement for now. I am hoping to be well under the six minutes, because that is what I have to say.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, whom it is always a pleasure to follow, and I shall take up some of his points. It is also a pleasure to come shortly after the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. I congratulate him on the record for not only becoming the chair of the EU Select Committee but making absolutely crucial points on the future and current roles of that committee in the light of the empty chair decision.
In some ways, I find the usual style of the House of Lords and the rather strange title of this debate rather bewildering. I personally wanted to do more than “note” the withdrawal; I would quite like an amendment that says “regret”. I shall probably weep on Halloween, because I have always regretted the Brexit decision. Immediately after the decision, like many other remainers, I was prepared to take a constructive approach to that situation and look at how we could negotiate our way into a new relationship with the EU. By that we then meant an early fulfilment of the withdrawal treaty, a decent transition period when the arrangements could be sorted out—in the meantime, we would be on a level playing field—and we could then start on the very serious prospect of negotiating a proper future free trade agreement with our largest trading partner. What has happened since then has destroyed that vision. We have had the most appalling negotiations, on which I have previously commented. Any first-time shop steward or negotiator in the commercial world would throw their hands up in horror at the way this British Government have negotiated—I mainly blame the British Government, although I have some criticism of the EU as well.
This is the first time that we have been able—at 10 minutes’ notice—to look at what the Government describe as the “first and final offer” on a change in the backstop. The Northern Ireland situation, specifically the backstop, has largely prevented us from concluding the withdrawal agreement. However, it is not at all clear whether the manner in which the Prime Minister is presenting that agreement is likely to win him many friends in Brussels. While we have had some positive and diplomatic responses from Berlin and Brussels, it is by no means delivered. We will have a chance to debate that document tomorrow.
It is worth noting the point that I have made from the beginning, and that is that including Northern Ireland and the border issue in the withdrawal treaty was probably the first and most profound mistake that David Davis made in his period as negotiating Secretary. In the end, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland’s relationship and trade arrangements can only be resolved in the context of a longer-term trade deal. We are still dealing with a very short-term situation. It would appear on first reading of the new document that we are doing so in a way that has been objected to by a substantial proportion of unionist opinion in the north. In other words, we are keeping Northern Ireland in the EU single market to a large extent and differentiating the treatment of Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom. I think that was always inevitable, and the resolution of it rests in a long-term trade agreement.
The way the Prime Minister has presented this new solution is designed both to offend the negotiators on the other side of the channel and give cause for concern to many within Northern Ireland itself. The “two borders for four years” proposition is not what anybody in Northern Ireland was looking for. Even if there were a narrow deal and we could move on to the next stage, there are signs in the Government’s attitude that suggest we will be in very serious difficulty. What has been reported, although it does not appear to be in these letters, is that, in addition to the points on Northern Ireland and the backstop, the Government have signalled—in relation to the political declaration, not the withdrawal treaty—that they wish parts of the declaration to be altered so that the commitment to a, broadly speaking, level playing field is omitted. If that is true, it means, as my noble friend Lord Liddle has indicated, that the Government are retreating to a position of not being committed on consumer rights, employment rights, environment protection or a host of other regulations which at present allow us to trade on a level playing field with our trading partners in Europe. In other words, this Government wish to have the ability to cut the rights that exist at the moment and to undercut the European Union in a way that makes a free trade agreement much more difficult.
This is, frankly, what most progressive opinion in Europe has always feared. It is just what will prevent us from reaching a real long-term trade agreement with the EU, and this whole fiasco will drag on and on. We have a debate tomorrow in the name of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on human rights and democracy in future trade agreements. If our first step in that direction is to delete the human and employment rights that we have in our present arrangements with Europe, I will weep on Halloween not only because of Brexit but for the standing of this country in the world.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, in preparation for this debate, I both watched and listened to the Prime Minister’s speech. I have come to the conclusion that it was not time well spent.
I would like to concentrate on the consequences of Brexit, and in particular the impact on the rule of law. If the rule of law is to be effective, it must be observed both in substance and in process. Yet we continue to have the threat from the Prime Minister, supported by others in his Government, that somehow a way will be found to avoid implementing the obligations contained in the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act. Not only does that Act carry the imprimatur of both Houses of Parliament; it has Royal Assent. So, by his very conduct in even suggesting it, the Prime Minister is yet again undermining the position of the monarch.
I was stimulated to deal with this topic by an article written by the noble Lord, Lord Hague, which appeared in a national newspaper this week. He argued that the rule of law was of great importance for the Tory party. That ought to be true, but I am not sure it is what we have been seeing in practice—and it is perhaps most important for the country. After the announcement of the judgment of the Supreme Court, Minister after Minister sought to undermine that judgment—some covertly, others by way of open attack. To attack judges in that way is a contempt of court; in Scotland it used until 1971 to be called “murmuring” a judge. To attack them in that way is to defame them; you are behaving in a defamatory way.
All that culminated in the suggestion that there should be public hearings of confirmation before individuals could ascend to the Supreme Court. I do not shrink from saying that that was a full-frontal attack on judicial independence. How would we apply it? Would we draw on the recent experience of the United States? Would that be our benchmark? Would we say to people, after Senator McCarthy, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Conservative Party?”. Exactly what would the questioning amount to?
Lord Framlingham (Con)
Does the noble Lord acknowledge that both the Master of the Rolls and the Lord Chief Justice disagreed entirely with the view of the Supreme Court?
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem
I acknowledge that, but the fact of the matter is that, in our system, the Supreme Court is, as its name suggests, supreme. That decision having been taken, it is in my view wholly unacceptable to have the kind of treatment that was made covertly and, in some cases, openly in relation to the judgment issue. The same would have been true if, for example, those of the same cast of mind as Gina Miller had attacked the decision made by the divisional court. Attacking the independence of judges matters not for what they have decided; what matters is their independence, and that must be emphasised and encouraged at all stages.
Will the Minister name a legal jurisdiction which is more independent, impartial or incorruptible than the two legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom? Politicisation will be the death knell of all three of these vital qualities. The fact is that, if the Supreme Court had found in favour of the Government, it would have been praised for its Periclean wisdom. Medals might even have been struck.
Lord Heseltine (Non-Afl)
Of the 11 members of the Supreme Court, nine were appointed under a Conservative Prime Minister. Might that not have been used as an argument, if they had found for the Government, indicating corruption?
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem
There are plenty of illustrations of how those who have had a political affiliation, when elevated to the Bench, are able to put that beyond them.
The Prime Minister did not dare to publish his proposals before his party conference; he did not dare to tell his conference what the proposals were; and he declined to tell Parliament until after their publication. I think that tells us quite enough about the Prime Minister and his willingness to adopt attitudes of openness and accountability.
I hope that the Minister will respond to the last matter I will raise. Yesterday, it was said on behalf of the Government that the proposals did not involve infrastructure. How can customs checks be carried out in the middle of a field? Who will carry out that check? What, if any, infrastructure will there be, even if it is only a camera at the end of a pole? Would not these things be of an attractive nature to the dissidents, albeit in a minority, whom we still find in Northern Ireland? We are too close in many respects to the consequences of the Troubles not to accept that to introduce anything that seems in any way to prejudice the Belfast agreement could cause unrest and even, beyond that, death and damage.
Viscount Waverley (CB)
My Lords, we cannot be dismissive of 45 years’ shared partnership. There is much to reflect on and respect. We need the EU 27 by our side. It has been a long haul and our country deserves a long bout of optimism. We are apparently in the Brexit home straight. It could all have been so different. I believe that the EU journey should have been managed differently by the UK from day one. The lack of appropriate messaging and misplaced actions from the start have created the situation in which we find ourselves.
The UK has devoted too much of its thinking to single-focused economic priorities, rather than balancing them with the plethora of the important, unrelated advantages of EU membership. There is an adage in life: “You get out what you put in”. We have not been an easy bedfellow, but I accept that respect, as well as genuine sadness, is felt in the high echelons of the Commission and around the Union regarding our departure.
Everything that could have been said has been said in one form or another since the triggering of Article 50, yet a mountain of issues remain and are being taken to the wire, both in negotiations with the Commission and internally in the UK. Only high politics will sort this out, and that is not my bag. However, I ask the Minister: how can his Government be sure of their numbers on large-scale investments announced at the current Conservative Party conference yet feel able to set out a legislative programme in the Queen’s Speech on 14 October when no one, including the Government, knows the lie of the land on 31 October, Brexit day?
Frankly, I never thought Brexit would happen as I felt that our systems were too entwined, so in that regard I have some sympathy with the no-nonsense approach. It will, however, be a huge relief when this tortuous period is brought to an appropriate non-cata- clysmic closure. I understand that proposals regarding the political declaration are also being put forward today.
Whereas we should now have been at the stage of crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s in the negotiations, we are now driven to populist rhetoric saying that we are fed up and should just get the job done with scant regard to the consequences or, on the other hand, pragmatists counselling delay to get this right. History will judge whether all this will have been a triumph for democracy, but “unedifying” encapsulates this endgame process.
Last week I participated in the Greater Eurasian parliamentary speakers conference, made up of speakers and parliamentarians from 41 countries, which took place in Kazakhstan with the theme of trust, partnership and dialogue. Reaction to the Brexit process was one of bemusement, bewilderment and incredulity. To top it off, possibly in the manner of things to come, when I re-entered the European Union at Frankfurt the German immigration officer asked what the purpose was of my entering the EU. I trust your Lordships will have found favour with my response.
It will take decades for the true long-term effects of departure from the EU to be felt. The saving grace is that it is the gift of the Government of the day, year on year, to tailor policy to suit the circumstances of the day. We can take solace that it is the catering to those circumstances that hopefully will come to the fore. I am therefore reconciled to “Que sera, sera” and resigned to reality. What we must all do now is rally around the flag, react to the consequences and work to create opportunities in the best interests of the kingdom. I will do my bit in any small way I am able.
However, I believe that we have an opportunity to move on from ways of old. We have a chance not only to modernise but to instil a rhythm of inclusiveness and moderation in a newly-branded UK. The winning ticket will be to bind our country together with ethnic, cultural and religious tolerance, and with this harmony will come all manner of success as we chart a future globally, humble but effective in our approach. To that end, I think Brexit could, perversely, be a catalyst to preserve the sanctity of the United Kingdom. I hope not to be proven wide of the mark when I suggest that our Scottish cousins will reflect on the political and economic complexities of separation. We are all in this together and we need each other.
The Minister commented on the question of citizens. I would feel uncomfortable if I did not conclude on a note close to home that could affect Portuguese living in the UK and British citizens in Portugal. Many EU countries, and in my case Portugal, have made provision for UK citizens properly registered to remain in the event of a no-deal circumstance. The existence of such legislation is certainly good news for Britons living in Portugal, and the Portuguese Government and parliament should be given credit and thanked for that law. However, a big “but” emerges. While Portuguese law 27-A/2019 is described in the official bulletin as approving contingency measures to be applied in the event of a no-deal exit, article 19 addresses the issue of reciprocity. The law refers to “equivalent treatment”. Is the Minister satisfied, and will he confirm today, that all the elements of the EU citizens’ rights package have been fully incorporated into a robust government policy with the necessary legislation in place, including the settlement scheme? Are all the immigration rules and other secondary instruments to this end legally in place? The Government of Portugal’s António Costa and Governments around the continent would welcome an unequivocal assurance from the United Kingdom Government given concern about the UK protecting the rights of EU citizens living here.
Will the Minister accept that anxiety prevails? To put this situation into context, extraordinary though it is, today there are 154 passenger flights leaving and departing between the UK and Portugal. There will be an almighty fuss if HMG do not grapple with this situation. Will the Minister state exactly what the situation is? What he has to say will be reflected on carefully by EU member states. If he feels unable to do that, will he confirm his intention to write in a timely manner, addressing the issues that I have raised in detail, and to place a copy of his response in the Library, ideally before the Queen’s Speech?
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, with whom I share an interest in central Asia. Like him, I have always found, when in Kazakhstan and neighbouring countries, that they have great sympathy with our decision to leave the European Union, having themselves left the Soviet Union.
I have always argued that the best outcome of our negotiations would be a free trade agreement negotiated before we leave; but the most likely outcome is that we leave without a withdrawal agreement—although hopefully we will succeed in negotiating a free trade deal once we have left. Unfortunately, although the most likely outcome is leaving without a withdrawal agreement, the whole prospect has been demonised to the point where no serious thought or consideration is given to it. If I may, I will deal with some of the misunderstandings that relate to it.
First, there is no likelihood of us leaving with no deal, for the simple reason that we have already agreed lots of mini-deals. We used to be warned that the planes would not fly. The EU then legislated that our planes would be able to fly over, land in and return from EU airports, if we reciprocate. We reciprocated; deal done. Then we were told that our hauliers would not have enough licences to operate. The EU created extra licences, as long as we reciprocated. Deal done. Then we were told, “That’s only going to apply up until the end of the year”. Quite true—because it is going to be followed by a better arrangement, because the EU, in conjunction with us, has agreed that henceforth ECMT licences will be available for all 43 countries covered by that arrangement, not just for the 28 of the European Union.
The EU also supported our renewed membership of the Common Transit Convention, which means that our hauliers and traders will not have to pay duty or complete customs declarations until they reach their destination. Another deal done. We were told that we would not be able to export Airbus wings, because their safety certificates would not be recognised. The EU realised that the Airbus could not fly without wings, so it agreed to continue recognition of those and other aerospace component safety certificates. We were told that there would be no visa arrangements between the EU and us—but, again, we have agreed reciprocally that there will be 90 days of visa-free travel with all members of the European Union.
So there will be a series of mini-deals. However, with those scares no longer available to frighten people, the language moved on to abstract adjectives such as “catastrophic”, “disastrous” and so on. Most of the remaining specific fears, such as that there will be shortages of fresh food and medicines, or that just-in-time factories will have to close down, are based on the assumption that there will be disruption on the Dover-Calais crossing because, for the first time, traders will have to fill in customs declarations and pay tariffs.
These are just a few facts. First, customs declarations will be required whether we have a free trade agreement or not. Secondly, they are not checked at the border but by computer in Salford. They are made electronically. Likewise, tariffs are not paid and collected at the port. As the head of HMRC said, they are paid computer to computer.
Physical checks of cargos are carried out only if the algorithm in the computer at Salford shows that there is something suspicious about them, or if there is other intelligence information. Fewer than 1% of consignments are subject to physical checks, and usually these are carried out away from the port, at the destination or point of origin. Almost all checks relate to suspected smuggling of tobacco, other excisable goods, drugs, arms or illegal immigrants. HMRC does not expect any more information leading to suspicion of such smuggling and therefore does not expect to have to carry any more checks in future than it does at present. However, it has said that if for any reason there are incipient delays on traffic going through Dover, it will prioritise flow over compliance. That does not mean that it will neglect compliance, but checks will be carried out away from the port, at the company’s HQ or at the destination of the goods.
The port of Dover has said that it is 100% ready for Brexit. So there will not be any disruption in the flow coming through Dover. Fears all relate to what will happen if there are any delays at Calais. Calais has said that it is better prepared than Dover. It now has more than a dozen lanes for handling lorries, where previously it had only two. It has a smart border and two inspection posts away from the border to ensure that there is no congestion when checking animals and animal products. So it is very unlikely that there will be any delays at Calais, either.
But if there were, what would happen? We know what would happen: we would have to activate Operation Stack. We have had to do that on more than 11 days a year on average for the last 20 years. In 2015, it was activated for 23 consecutive days; 7,000 lorries were stacked up on the M20 and had to wait for 35 hours. I simply ask Members of this House who threaten us with dire consequences if anything remotely like that were to happen again: do they recall anyone dying from a shortage of medicines? Do they recall any shortages of fresh food? There was certainly disruption of supplies of fresh food and of just-in-time production, but it did not lead to the closure of any factories. So let us not have exaggeration but stick to the facts. Then we will be ready to face up to leaving with no withdrawal agreement and negotiating a free trade arrangement.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, I will simply say of the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that his likening of the European Union to the Soviet Union will be hugely resented by all those countries of central and eastern Europe that were colonies of the Soviet Union but are free and democratic members of the European Union.
From the outset, Ireland has been the Achilles heel of Brexit and I believe it will ultimately defeat it. That is not because the impact of Brexit on Ireland is different from its impact on the whole of the United Kingdom. The three key impacts or problems of Brexit—that it will impede and imperil free trade, the free movement of people and close relations between European neighbours—apply to the United Kingdom as a whole, in our relations with the European Union as a whole. However, they are magnified in the case of Northern Ireland because it has a greater proximity to the Republic of Ireland than we have to the generality of the European Union and because they threaten a straightforward breach of the Good Friday agreement. That agreement does not regard it as acceptable that there should be any move towards a harder border in Ireland, but that is of course the policy of Brexit in respect of our relations with the European Union as a whole. That is why Theresa May agreed the backstop. It is why the Minister has many times justified the backstop to this House, in the way that he descried it earlier.
Since the Government changed and Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, the Brexit policy has descended into doublespeak. What now happens all the time is that Ministers say something is sensible and workable when it is clearly nonsense and unworkable, and that something is true when it is manifestly false. We have seen that with Ireland in just the last 48 hours. We have been told that there will be different customs regimes and regulatory rules over time—the question is what time—that will not require any customs checks on or near the border.
I have only had the chance to look briefly at the documents to which the Minister referred earlier, which were published today, although they will be forensically examined over the next few days and weeks. On my immediate reading, it looks as though these propositions will disintegrate. In the Prime Minister’s letter to the President of the European Commission, he says one key aspect of the proposals is that they provide,
“for the potential creation of an all-Ireland regulatory zone on the island of Ireland, covering all goods including agrifood”.
While this regime is in place,
“goods regulations in Northern Ireland are the same as those in the rest of the EU”.
It is worth stressing those words: they are,
“the same as those in the rest of the EU”.
However, a following paragraph says:
“Under these arrangements Northern Ireland will be fully part of the UK customs territory, not the EU Customs Union … It has always been a fundamental point for this Government that the UK will leave the EU customs union at the end of the transition period”.
Those statements cannot both be true. If the island of Ireland is going to be an all-Ireland regulatory zone, which is the same as that of the rest of the EU—i.e. the customs union and the single market—it cannot also be true that Northern Ireland will be fully part of the UK customs territory. The Minister’s explanations of these matters are so clear to the House, so I look forward to his explanation at the end of the debate.
This doublespeak suffuses all the Government’s statements on Brexit. Like the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, I have read the Prime Minister’s speech in Manchester, and we see it in that speech too. The Prime Minister tells us that “the alternative” to these proposals just published “is no deal”. That is not correct. The alternative to these proposals is not no deal. Parliament has said that, this House has agreed that, and her Majesty has given Royal Assent to a Bill that says that the alternative is not no deal. The alternative is that the Government will be required to apply for an extension of our membership of the European Union. That is the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act, so that was a straightforward untruth. What then happens will be for Parliament to decide. Parliament is the sovereign body in the United Kingdom. If it decides there will be a referendum or a general election, it will happen in the context of the United Kingdom not leaving the European Union at the end of October.
The Prime Minister also said in his speech that, if we stay in the EU at the end of October, we will pay,
“a billion pounds a month for the privilege, followed by years of uncertainty for business and everyone else”.
The key point that Members of your Lordships’ House will be well aware of—because of the hour after hour that we have spent debating the EU (Withdrawal) Act and the agreement reached last year—is that, if we leave the European Union at the end of October, we will pay £39 billion as part of the exit deal. As far as I am aware, but the Minister may correct me at the end of the debate, the Prime Minister is not proposing to unpick that. One certainty about us leaving with the withdrawal agreement and whatever changes are agreed between now and then is that we will have years of uncertainty for business and everyone else, because there will be no long-term relationship between the European Union and us. We are faced with constant doublespeak, which misleads the British people and debases the quality of public debate.
I am afraid that this doublespeak goes to the heart of the character of the Prime Minister. He believes, he tells us, in having customs checks and simultaneously in having no customs checks. He says he will comply with the law, but he has no intention of doing what it says. He uses vile, crass, inflammatory language, while claiming to be a model of restraint. He is unfit to hold office and the sooner he goes, the better.
Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, the three years since the 2016 referendum have stress-tested every aspect of our parliamentary democracy. At times we seem to have been living out Yeats’s words in his poem “The Second Coming”:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”.
I was in the room at Transport House in 1971 when Anthony Wedgwood Benn proposed that the Labour Party, when returned to office, should hold a referendum on our membership of the European Common Market. He could not get a seconder for that proposal; referendums were held by tinpot dictators and banana republics, not by mature parliamentary democracies. My old mentor, the late Lord Callaghan—no relation—remarked sagely at the time, “That’s one lifeboat we may all have to climb in one day”. So we did in the 1975 referendum, which was an exercise undertaken to hold a divided Labour Party together. The 2016 referendum was held for exactly the same reason, this time to paper over the yawning divisions in the Conservative Party over Europe.
All too often, in all our parties, expediency has topped principle in presenting the case for Europe. In the end, we have been hoist by our own petard. Successive British Governments have used the same tactics the SNP has used in Scotland: it takes credit for everything that goes right and blames Westminster for everything that goes wrong. For 40 years, successive British Governments have taken the credit for the influence and prosperity that membership of the EU has brought, while blaming the Brussels bureaucrats for any tough decisions that had to be implemented. It was perhaps not surprising that the case for Europe, which has been undersold for 40 years, fell victim to a Brexit campaign of such mendacity and falsehood.
Some of the damage we are now experiencing could perhaps have been avoided if we had not rushed to engage Article 50. In so doing, we have arrived at a point where we are in very real danger of crashing out of the EU without a deal—something which was never put to the British people in 2016. It is absurd to pretend that the 2016 decision was as informed about the truth and consequences of us leaving Europe then as we are now by the realities that have been laid bare over the past three years.
In the Times on Saturday, Philip Hammond—only recently Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote:
“The radicals advising Boris do not want a deal. Like the Marxists on the Labour left, they see the shock of a disruptive no-deal Brexit as a chance to re-order our economy and society”.
He points out very clearly that the Prime Minister is backed in this strategy by,
“speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit—and there is only one outcome that works for them: a crash-out no-deal Brexit that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring”.
We are told by the political analysts that it was the elderly and the left-behinds who provided the Brexiteers with their majority in 2016. In my youth I read a book called The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which tells of how those who have the least are complicit in their own exploitation. If we crash out without a deal it will be the elderly and the left-behinds who bear the brunt of the consequences that follow, while speculators make a killing in the chaos that follows.
This is not the Eton wall game: get over the line any way you can, dust yourself down, all shake hands and move on. This is about the future of our country for the rest of this century. Those who have to live with the consequences of that decision—the young—have the right to vote again on the matter, and those who will not live with those consequences should at least be given the opportunity to think again about whether this is the future they wish to bequeath their children and grandchildren.
We should be able to make those decisions protected, as far as possible, from the black arts of modern electioneering. In the last month, Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings have been working to the Trump-Bannon playbook. Only the intervention of Parliament and the Supreme Court saved us from an illegal Prorogation, a bounce-out of the EU and a general election fought on a phony people-versus-Parliament basis. Leaving the EU without a deal or via some loophole hinted at by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, which subverts the will of Parliament, will leave an open wound in our politics that will take a generation to heal. There is still time for the one-nation Tories, the liberals and the social democrats to speak for the liberal and tolerant society that is at ease with itself and its neighbours. But time is short and the time for action is now.
Fifty-odd years ago, I visited Strasbourg for the first time as a junior official of the Labour Party. I remember how we were greeted then: not as people who had won the war, but as a country admired for its good governance and the rule of law. There was a desire to see this country play a leading role at the heart of Europe. My son—now about the same age as I was then—works in the space industry in Germany as part of a multinational European team. I asked him what the reaction of his colleagues was. He said, “Dad, it’s a kind of bemused sadness”. From how we were met in the 1960s to that bemused sadness now is something that we should all ponder.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)
My Lords, it is a little hard to take note of something—the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union—that may or may not happen. It is harder still to predict how it will turn out, a task that I happily leave to the large number of your Lordships whose political antennae are more finely tuned than mine. However, there is one aspect of the withdrawal process of which I take note and express concern: the strain that it is placing on the system by which we are governed.
Our constitutional settlement is based on the accountability of the Executive to Parliament, and on the rule of law. These are foundational principles, to which our utter fidelity should not be in doubt, but successive Governments have been tempted to stray from both. Understandably frustrated in their attempts to implement the referendum result, they have identified an alternative pole of attraction: the so-called will of the people, as expressed, however tentatively and enigmatically, in that vote in 2016.
The previous Government may not have always welcomed their accountability to Parliament or done all they could to defend the rule of law, notably against the description of senior judges as “enemies of the people”. However, as the compelling drama series Brexit enters its fourth season, it is the current Government who have jumped the shark. The principle of executive accountability to Parliament was not only threatened but, as the Supreme Court unanimously found, breached when Parliament was prorogued without sufficient reason. The Government have appeared at best indifferent to the rule of law in their repeated assertions that we will leave on 31 October with or without a deal. The Act of Parliament that takes the fulfilment of that promise out of the Government’s hands is barely acknowledged, save for the purpose of designating it, quite inaccurately, as the surrender Act.
The legal editor of the Times this morning reports a Cabinet Minister briefing that,
“Mr Johnson would refuse to sign a letter requesting an extension even if the Supreme Court ordered him to”.
Whether or not such brazen words are followed through, the rather significant principle that we must all obey the law is corroded merely by their being spoken.
These are destructive themes indeed: people versus Parliament; people versus the courts; people versus the laws; people versus Brussels, Ireland, foreign states or foreign powers; Brexit as a World War II re-enactment. Then, for good measure, there is more: people versus the BBC; people versus the universities; people versus the elites—other elites, that is, never those who are whipping up the outrage. Those themes are destructive, not least, because these populist calls are not the preserve of any single party or grouping, but might in future prove just as attractive to Governments of a different, and even more dangerous, colour. The neglect of fundamentals, and the coarsening of our national dialogue, are genies more easily released than put back in the bottle.
Thank goodness for our Supreme Court, which has decisively and dispassionately applied the relevant principles, conducting itself before the eyes of a watching world without fear or favour, affection or ill will. Relied upon in its judgments in both Miller cases was the Case of Proclamations 1610, in which Sir Edward Coke set limits on the prerogative power of the monarch. At one meeting between the two men the King was famously described as,
“looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike”,
him, whereupon Coke fell flat on all fours and beseeched the King to pardon his zeal.
The pressures on modern judges may not be quite in that league but plans to tame the judges need to be strongly resisted. The transparency of the Supreme Court is already exemplary: 4.4 million people are said to have accessed its live stream on the first morning of the Miller-Cherry case—hoping no doubt to catch the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. The fine work of the Judicial Appointments Commission, with its substantial lay element, deserves to be better known. But the judiciary cannot and should not be made more directly accountable to “the people”, or even to their representatives in Parliament. The true independence of our judges, bred into them from their early years in the Inns of Court and admired around the globe, is as vital to our constitutional integrity as it is to our standing in the commercial world.
Democracy, properly understood, is about so much more than winner-takes-all populism. It is: inclusive, tolerant, pluralistic; founded on respect for law and institutions; a mechanism for not only quantifying but reconciling our differences. Whatever else we may lose from the fiasco that is Brexit, let us hold fast to that and make it the basis on which we build for ourselves a better future.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, let us remind ourselves that the case for leaving the European Union is to reclaim the legislative sovereignty that we lent to the European Communities in 1972—and that is a prize of great value. The delegation of so much policy and legislative responsibility to the democratically defective institutions of the European Union has been, I believe, a powerful factor in the growing disaffection with parliamentary democracy that we have witnessed in our country. To take back these responsibilities gives us an opportunity to renew our democracy.
Our country is indeed “full of passionate intensity”; that is not surprising, because Brexit is a struggle for the soul of the nation and the future of our democracy. When people were asked in 2016 to vote to leave or to remain, they were in effect asked, “Do you wish to preserve the status quo?”. That question prompted an outpouring of long pent-up anger against elites and a howl from those who had been failed by the neoliberal orthodoxy practised by all parties in government. Many leavers now take the view that their Parliament is intent on cheating them, while many remainers are fearful of the mob. This is a dangerous state of affairs and we urgently need an access of moderation and reason.
To resume self-government in the sense that Brexit would permit is not to consign our nation to Faragism, to reaction, to racism and to xenophobia. It will be open to us to choose to be a liberal and internationalist society, and that is what I believe people will want to choose. For the centre-left, so unconfident about a post-Brexit future, the challenge is to put forward a vision of a sustainable economy, social justice and policies for climate change, and to win elections.
It is hard to see how compromise between the leave and remain positions can be achieved. Leavers see the Brexit issue in terms of freedom and democracy; remainers choose to frame Brexit in terms of the economy and standards of living. These two sets of considerations do not engage. The withdrawal deal, which I believe was an honourable attempt to find a compromise, was rejected vehemently by both sides of the argument on three occasions.
Is the present condition of our politics therefore a massive failure? There is certainly immense frustration in the country and a paralysis of decision-taking. The parties appear to have descended into chaos. There is too much excessive language, whether of surrender or of catastrophe, in our political discourse. Abuse and threats abound. It was very wrong for the Prime Minister, in a system of parliamentary government, to rouse the people against Parliament. He should desist from the use of populist language and seek to speak for the country as a whole. Among the many divisions in politics is that between those politicians who seek to appeal to,
“the better angels of our nature”,
and those who conjure demons.
On the other hand, it could be said that what has been happening in our politics is rather admirable. There is a mighty contest between politicians who have passionately held but conflicting views of what will be for the good of the country. When the Government have been unable to advance, Parliament has chosen to take the initiative; the Speaker has upheld the right of the House of Commons to do so; politicians have worked across party boundaries and some have been willing to sacrifice their careers for their principles; and the Supreme Court has proved an effective check on arbitrary government—the Prime Minister should never have made that stupid and improper attempt to prorogue Parliament for five weeks.
Whichever view noble Lords may take, we now need as quickly as possible a resolution to the essential Brexit issue of whether we leave or remain, and we need a return to mutual respect and reconciliation. But I fear that neither a referendum nor a general election will produce those outcomes.
Meanwhile, as we look at the time horizon between now and 31 October, it is I suppose possible, although it seems unlikely, that the Prime Minister will negotiate a deal with the European Union. If he does, that deal will presumably be the withdrawal deal with the backstop tweaked. But for many leavers that will be viewed as Brexit in name only.
I will quote Professor David Collins, professor of international economic law at City University:
“We must keep in mind that there are many features of the Withdrawal Agreement which are just as bad as the Backstop, but which have received far less attention, notably from our Prime Minister. The Withdrawal Agreement would maintain the supremacy of EU law over the UK, including new laws created by the EU over which the UK would have no voice. This means that UK courts would be required to strike down Acts of Parliament if they are determined to be inconsistent with EU law. Worse, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice would be retained, either directly or through a dispute settlement system modelled on the one the EU has with the Ukraine through which a notionally neutral tribunal would be bound on issues of EU law by decisions of the ECJ. Since the UK would have no judge on the ECJ, it would effectively be under the jurisdiction of a foreign court”.
Have we come this far for that? What kind of sovereignty is that? There will be anger if that is the nature of the deal, and it is very questionable whether the House of Commons would vote for it.
Alternatively, we may leave with “no deal”—I use that as a term of art; the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, explained that there are many deals that mitigate the notion of an absolute no deal—should one of the member states of the European Union veto an extension. I believe that that would not be a catastrophe. We would of course have been much better prepared for such a contingency had the previous Chancellor, Mr Hammond, not forbade further public expenditure on preparations for no deal at a crucial phase—but the present Chancellor, Mr Javid, is seeking to make up for lost time. Yes, we would go through choppy waters, but we would go through no hurricane. We could come through, as we have come through many periods of economic disruption and difficulty before. Then, as we worked towards a free trade agreement, we would be doing so with our heads held high as a self- governing nation.
Lord Tugendhat (Con)
My Lords, there is one matter on which I am able to agree with the Prime Minister: that the Government should get on with Brexit. As much as I regret the result of the referendum, I think it has to be honoured, as indeed do the pledges in the major parties’ manifestos in the 2017 election. It grieves me to make this point, but I also fear that, after all that has happened, it is no longer practical to think in terms of a return to the status quo ante and Britain simply resuming its position in the EU as if nothing had happened.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, I wish the Government well in their efforts to secure a deal; I hope they succeed and I look forward to supporting it if they do. This brings me to the first point on which I disagree with the Prime Minister: the repeated assertions by him and his allies that it is somehow because of remainer plots and prevarications that we are still in the EU. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, referred to this. The reason why we are still in the EU is, above all, that the Prime Minister—before he became Prime Minister—and other leavers in the Conservative Party, among our so-called allies in the Democratic Unionist Party and in the Labour Party would not support Mrs May’s efforts to secure a deal. Far more people who voted remain in the referendum supported her than opposed her, and it was the so-called leavers who created the difficulties.
My next point of disagreement with the Prime Minister concerns his insistence on a departure date regardless of terms. To announce in advance that one will walk away from a negotiation on a given date means announcing in advance when one will be giving up the struggle. I have to say that if ever there were an act of surrender, it is that. Instead of leaving in a huff, like a child not getting its way in a game, the Government owe it to the nation to stay at the table until they get the best deal they can. That is what Mrs Thatcher did during the epic struggle over the British budget negotiation, which I remember all too well on a personal basis. That is what Mrs Thatcher did and what the Government should do now. This point is particularly apposite in the light of all the documents concerning the Government’s plans that were issued just before this debate. Obviously, like everybody else, I have only had an opportunity to glance at them, but a glance is quite sufficient to show that they contain a number of new elements, to put it mildly, and move a number of goalposts. To expect our negotiating partners to get their minds around all that and reach conclusions in the time allotted is really asking too much.
As the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, pointed out, there is all the difference in the world between a deal and no deal, between an orderly and a disorderly departure. Leaving is a massive step: it changes the whole direction of Britain’s trade and external relations after a period of over 40 years. It is vital that such a manoeuvre be conducted with the minimum disruption possible. As older Members of this House will recall, when we joined the European Community, as it then was, we had a transition period in order to adjust to the disciplines, the rules and so forth we were taking on. We had a transition period going in and it would be greatly in our interest to have a transition period going out. I say that not just because short-term disruption will cause pain to the British people—whether it is more pain or, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said it will be, less pain—but because it is certainly going to be disadvantageous. I have not heard anybody argue that the consequences of a no-deal departure would actually be beneficial to the economy.
So, there is that short-term reason but also, the manner in which we leave will create the platform on which we will be building for the future. If we are, as far as possible, to minimise the disadvantages of leaving the European Union and maximise the opportunities it may offer, we need to go about the process in a deliberate and orderly fashion. Growing apart from the European Union should be a managed process, like separating conjoined twins, not some exercise carried out in a rush in order to meet an arbitrary timetable. One reason we are in the mess we are is that those who campaigned to leave the European Union had no idea what means were required to do so. They wanted an end but they did not understand, or did not think about, the means. If we were to crash out now, whether it will be as easy as my noble friend Lord Lilley says or as difficult as others say, that would be the worst possible basis for building for the future, for minimising the disadvantages and for taking advantage of the opportunities.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, we have repeatedly heard this week the Conservative conference slogan: “Get Brexit Done”, followed by, “then we can get on with our domestic priorities”. That is an entirely false prospectus. Deal or no deal, if we leave the EU, our leaving on 31 October or on any other date is only the first stage in the process. No serious commentator doubts that, if we leave, we will be preoccupied by our future relations with the EU for at least a decade.
What is more, the Government’s approach to our domestic priorities involves spending commitments as unbelievable as the £350 million a week on the leave bus. Such commitments depend on continuing economic success, when all economists agree that leaving the EU on any terms, let alone with no deal, would carry major economic cost. Notwithstanding that, Mr Johnson today advanced a tax-cutting agenda. Despite all those contradictions, the Government assert that “Get Brexit Done” is the people’s demand, but that assertion, in its unqualified terms, is unsupported by any evidence.
Certainly, the electorate is sick of the hostility, the political paralysis, the corrosion of our public life and the failure of the Government to do anything but Brexit, but “Get Brexit Done” will not address that. No, the real majority is for the blunt proposition: “Make it stop!”. The simple truth is that the only way to make it stop is to abandon Brexit altogether, whether by a remain vote in a referendum or by revoking our Article 50 notice.
Yes, there would be national embarrassment, but we would at least be turning back from disaster before we suffered the consequences of leaving. Yes, there would be many disappointed people who voted leave conscientiously, but many of them now recognise the impossibility of leaving without massive disadvantage. Many also recognise how international circumstances have changed: the dangers of an expansionist China, an aggressive Russia, a dangerous Iran, a still explosive Middle East and the mercurial unpredictability of President Trump’s United States.
In addition, our citizens increasingly see combating climate change as a priority and appreciate the EU’s massive contribution to that effort. Young people, more even than in 2016, value their freedom to study and work throughout the EU. More people now see the value of European co-operation in research and innovation, security and policing, law enforcement and co-operation in civil law. Yet, if these new proposals on the Irish border are rejected—as well they may be—we are threatened with an immediate end to all those benefits in a no-deal Brexit, with all its catastrophic consequences, graphically set out in the Yellowhammer documents, because our apparent willingness to accept no deal is said to increase the chance of securing a deal.
We now finally have the Government’s outline proposals to replace the backstop. The conduct of Ireland and the EU to date suggests that they are not so easily cowed and are too sophisticated to be threatened into accepting them against their interest. So was Parliament in passing the Benn Act. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, my noble friend Lord Campbell and others have questioned how the Government may respond.
Yesterday, we celebrated the opening of the legal year with international leaders of the legal profession, who have long admired Britain as a standard-bearer for the rule of law. The rule of law requires more than obedience to our courts, although the Supreme Court has fully demonstrated its quality and independence in striking down the purported Prorogation. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, pointed out, the rule of law also requires that the Government conscientiously strive to act according to law. The Benn Act is now the law. The Government must seek to comply with it, not merely because they fail to find a loophole but because our system depends on respect for the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament. If the Benn Act’s conditions apply, will the Government conscientiously strive to agree an extension with the EU? Then there can be an election or a binding referendum.
I add that it is in no way undemocratic to allow the people to revisit a generalised decision made in the spring of 2016 and express their view again in the light of the present circumstances and new knowledge at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020. Let us have an end to this loose talk of Parliament against the people. At the heart of our democracy is the principle that Parliament represents the people. It is a principle worth defending.
Lord Birt (CB)
My Lords, we are mired, the road to our present misfortune littered with miscalculation and error. A referendum called to resolve a party division has torn that party apart. Remain was the anticipated answer, but after a clear-sighted, if misleading, campaign on the one hand and a somewhat clumsy and unconvincing one on the other, a country unsettled by the 2008 financial crisis, flat incomes, public sector austerity—and, as we know from surveys, a rapid rise in immigration—gave an unexpected answer. In advance of the negotiation with the EU that followed, red lines were drawn around our future trading relationship with by far our biggest trading partner without any serious national consideration of the alternatives. Article 50 was triggered without any prior agreement with the EU on the framework for negotiation: a disastrous decision which further weakened our already poor negotiating hand.
All that could then be agreed with the EU were the divorce terms: the critical issues about our future trading and other relationships were deferred. Thus cornered, we have arrived in the bizarre position of having to agree a backstop arrangement covering the most sensitive land border in Europe in the event that future trade negotiations may fail. Northern Ireland is where the Brexit rubber truly hits the road.
The Brexit process intensified division when every attempt, however difficult, should have been made to promote reconciliation. It was not. As a result, we are more divided now as a nation that we have been for hundreds of years. In the nearly seven years since David Cameron gave his Bloomberg speech, we have been transfixed by this single issue and have given scant attention to all the other matters that press on us.
As a nation, we need rapidly to recover our composure and speedily to resolve the way forward on Brexit. We must now, I fear, enter the realm of least worst options. At all costs, we must avoid a car crash Brexit. As Sir Ivan Rogers memorably declared, there is no such thing as a no-deal Brexit—the noble Lord, Lord Marks, made essentially the same point a moment ago. For, the day after we leave, we would still have to negotiate a trade deal with our neighbours, the biggest economic bloc in the world, in circumstances where our hand would be weaker still and where feelings would be even more bruised than they are now. Our nightmare could well continue for another seven years.
So, like it or not, the least worst option is likely to be Theresa May’s deal reinstated, with perhaps a few face-saving tweaks—as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said. The non-binding political declaration is a perfectly acceptable basis for future negotiation, and we may have to swallow the risk of the backstop or some variation of it—however unpalatable—for fear of something worse if today’s alternative offered by the Prime Minister is not accepted.
We should know within weeks or even days if this Government can produce a deal that a majority in Parliament can stand behind and that the EU will accept. But if this does not happen, a general election cannot be the response. It would waste yet more time and the outcome is profoundly uncertain, as Sir John Curtice opines and as Theresa May, from her own experience, can surely testify. Nor is impeaching the Prime Minister the way forward—that would be a massive distraction and would not begin to answer the exam question before us.
We are in 1939. If a deal is not forthcoming in the short term, parliamentarians must forgo manoeuvring in their party interest—this happens in all parties—and act only in the national interest. In the absence of a deal, after a vote of confidence a temporary national Government should be formed, made up of members from all the main political parties, with independent leadership and constituted for only one set of purposes: to negotiate a Brexit deal, hold a confirmatory referendum and call an election immediately the result is known.
I hope there will be a confirmatory referendum for, whatever the answer, it will be emphatic and will put an end to our misery one way or another. I see nothing at all wrong with the notion of a second referendum. In every other walk of life—on a company board, for instance—an initial decision in principle would return for ratification once due diligence is complete and the terms of the final deal are set. It is the natural process for any important and complex matter.
There is one bright light shining in the murk. In 1688, the Bill of Rights asserted the supremacy of Parliament over the tyranny of kings. More than 300 years later, a combination of a bold and courageous Speaker and the calm lucidity of our Supreme Court has once again established the supremacy of Parliament, this time over an overreaching and divisive group within a single party. The Speaker and the Supreme Court have together made history, and they may well prove our salvation.
Lord Livermore (Lab)
My Lords, in the House of Commons one week ago, the Prime Minister delivered a Statement demeaning in its tone and inflammatory in its language. Deliberately provocative, it was clearly an exercise in distraction, designed specifically to divert attention from the Supreme Court’s ruling 24 hours earlier that the suspension of Parliament was unlawful. But while the Prime Minister’s Statement was reckless, it was also revealing, providing us with the clearest insight yet into the no-deal playbook, the rhetorical strategy designed to achieve the most extreme form of Brexit.
The first and most pernicious part of this strategy is to question the patriotism of their opponents, duly articulated by the Prime Minister in the phrase “surrender Act”. Although undoubtedly offensive, this phrase also betrays an extraordinarily warped world-view. Like the Japanese soldier emerging from the jungle, unaware that the war had ended some 60 years earlier, members of this Government deploy confrontational language, unable to comprehend just how much the world has changed or where Britain’s national interest now lies. They fail to realise that we are not in a war; that we will not succeed by standing alone, isolated; or that cutting ourselves off from our closest allies will only diminish, internationally and economically, the country they profess to feel pride in. It is not patriotic to knowingly make Britain poorer and less powerful, and the only thing that risks being surrendered by this process is Britain’s prosperity and reputation in the world.
Having sought to undermine the motives of their opponents, the second step in the no-deal playbook is to distort the verdict of the referendum and the mandate it delivered. The vision of Brexit that 52% of voters put their faith in three years ago carried with it some very specific promises. In 2016, Boris Johnson and those who are now leading members of his Cabinet promised that,
“there won’t be a sudden change that disrupts the economy”;
that:
“The idea that our trade will suffer … is silly”;
that,
“we will negotiate a new settlement with the EU”;—[Official Report, Commons, 10/9/15; col. 529.]
and that:
“There will be no change to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic”.
These are the promises made by the proponents of Brexit, and these are the promises their mandate required them to deliver.
However, it is impossible to reconcile these promises with a no-deal Brexit, an outcome that the Government’s own analysis shows will reduce GDP by 9.7%, increase borrowing by £30 billion, disrupt trade to the extent set out in Operation Yellowhammer and inevitably create a hard border on the island of Ireland. Yet still the Prime Minister seeks to misappropriate this mandate, distorting it to impose a totally incompatible version of Brexit, gaslighting us into believing that no deal somehow respects the referendum and honours the result. The reality is that there is no mandate for any Brexit that fails to deliver on the specific promises made. The problem for the Government is that these promises are fundamentally undeliverable; you cannot leave the European Union and retain the benefits that being a member provides.
So, the third step in their strategy is to assert that democracy demands they deliver something else entirely. Despite having no personal mandate and heading a minority Government, the Prime Minister claims that by pursuing a policy nobody voted for, he is somehow upholding democracy. He says that elected MPs who point out that this is not what their constituents voted for should “stand aside”. The truth is that it emphatically is not democratic to promise one thing and then seek to deliver something completely different. That is the opposite of democracy. When we have travelled so far from what was promised in 2016, the only democratic route is to put the decision back to the British people in a confirmatory public vote.
Having failed to deliver their impossible promises, the fourth step in the no-deal playbook is to deflect responsibility for this failure on to anyone but themselves. The Prime Minister and half his Cabinet may have twice voted against a deal, but it is now the fault of Opposition MPs that Britain is yet to leave. The Prime Minister may have acted unlawfully, but it is now the fault of the judges for saying so. The Conservative Party may have spent months on a leadership election, but it is now the Labour Party’s fault that time is being wasted. When the Government are again found to have failed to come up with workable proposals, it will of course be the EU’s fault that a deal remains elusive.
As each of the once-claimed benefits of Brexit have in turn disintegrated, the Government are now left only with the mundane entreaty to “get Brexit done”. Gone are the promised sunlit uplands. Instead, in the Prime Minister’s words, let us “put Brexit behind us”. This is the fifth and final step in their strategy: to pretend Brexit is an event, not a process—a chore that, once completed, frees us up to do the things we enjoy. Yet having first built a fallacy, they are now selling a fantasy. The truth is that, with or without a deal, any form of Brexit would be only the start, not the end, of a long and painful journey. An entire generation would be consumed with a process that would devour our politics and diminish our resources. Gone would be the time and money to tackle the challenges that first drove Brexit or the priorities that have been neglected ever since. In reality, getting Brexit done is yet another attempted deception.
This is the no-deal playbook: a strategy to crash Britain over the cliff edge to achieve the most extreme form of Brexit and fulfil their long-held ideological obsession. It is a strategy designed to bend the facts—to insist black is white. However, let us not be fooled into thinking that this is the strategy of a confident project that believes it is winning. It is the last resort of an ever-more desperate Government; of a project built on lies now colliding with reality.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, wishes to take note of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. However, as a country we have not done so yet and, according to the polls of the last 18 months, the majority view is that we should not do so. It is essential that those of us who want to remain in the EU continue to make that case, even as others wrongly believe that that debate ended in 2016. This is crucial, in part because a second referendum looks increasingly likely, in part because the public over the last three years have continued to learn what being in—and indeed outside—the EU means. Last, but by no means least, it is crucial because we are in a continuously changing environment which, as we approach this 31 October deadline, is already causing huge problems for business and for ordinary citizens.
Yesterday at the Conservative Party conference, the Home Secretary said that free movement will end “once and for all”. She added that instead we would have an Australian-style points system. It may be news to the Home Secretary that we have had such a system for the last 13 years. Introduced originally through secondary legislation, it has proved more than a headache since it was formulated—that is an understatement—creating increasing difficulties for, among others, academics working here or even visiting. The latest among many recent shocking cases is that of Amber Murrey, an associate professor of geography at Oxford University, who found out that, appallingly, her children are not allowed to join her in the UK from America. If this system is extended to Europe and the hostile environment deepened, it will prove disastrous for academia, research, science and the arts. They need this free movement link with Europe to work both ways.
We have never had a proper debate about free movement in this country, although I sense that beyond the confines of the Conservative Party conference one is now beginning. I applaud the passing of the motion at the Labour Party conference to support it. Ending free movement would end the hopes of many young people wanting to travel to, work in and study in Europe. One of the leavers’ maxims is “short-term pain for long-term gain” but what is important here is the permanent negative effect that ending free movement would have, not just on the present generation but on those to come, in curtailing opportunities and lowering horizons.
There would be an equally permanent effect on the service industries, so many of which depend on free movement. Service industries are hugely undervalued, yet they account for 80% of the UK economy. The possibility of us leaving the single market on 31 October is already proving a nightmare for those working in services, including many freelancers based here and in Europe. For them, Brexit is already happening. This is a large group, among whom are musicians and others in the creative industries, caterers, drivers, interpreters and IT workers. The great irony is how much of this work provided by British workers is in demand even as their livelihoods are on the line, since free movement, particularly onward and cross-border movement, is essential to this work.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley—who is not in his place—is wrong about mobility. The CBI says that the UK would default to third-country status under EU immigration rules if no deal happens. Indeed, some workers are being turned away already and others are having their contracts rewritten at length. There is concern and confusion over work permits, tax and conditions of employment. People are urgently asking for guidance on Brexit, which they cannot access as the advice being given is too general. Will the Minister promise that the Government will address these concerns directly with those affected, and will he write to me confirming what they intend to do?
As the Minister will know, the EU is taking what precautions it can to protect its 1.2 million British citizens—as my noble friend Lord Waverley mentioned—with countries drawing up their own legislation, although ultimately the protection of British citizens should be our responsibility. The Minister will be aware that Spain has recently legislated but has included with that legislation the possibility of vetoing it within two months if its guarantees are not reciprocated for EU citizens here. The Government are providing no analogous legislation—at the very least, there should be a declaratory system—and it is clearly significantly more difficult for many to obtain settled status than the Government appear to make out. As the Minister will be aware, the media is reporting people having some awful experiences making those applications. In Spain, in particular—and in all the other countries—have there been meetings to ensure reciprocity and what has been the outcome so far?
I raise these specific issues in no way to excuse Brexit but simply because they are urgent. If we leave, we will become a smaller, greyer and meaner country. However, I believe that people are more and more seeing the benefits of EU membership and that the causes of their grievances lie elsewhere. Austerity, cuts to services and the proliferation of food banks are nothing to do with the EU, which has been cast as the scapegoat throughout, but everything to do with how our country is governed at home.
Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, the Prime Minister said this morning in his Manchester speech that no deal,
“is an outcome for which we are ready”.
The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, repeated that in his introduction to this debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has been trying to give some substance to that optimistic remark. I will focus my remarks on whether we are ready and the areas in which a no-deal operation could result in major problems for this country, and maybe seek a ministerial update on some of the problems with no-deal planning and whether we can assess whether the UK really is ready in a number of key areas.
It is about a month since we learned via a leak about Operation Yellowhammer. Members of this House will remember that this was a gloomy assessment of the state of the UK’s preparedness for no deal. However, the Government, in the shape of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, explained that Yellowhammer was a worst-case scenario, that the issues flagged up in it were being addressed, that the assumptions were being regularly updated, that a review was under way and that substantial progress had been made. The Government continue to make reassuring and optimistic noises about there being no problems beyond, in the words of Mr Gove,
“some bumps in the road”.
So exactly what progress has been made? Can we learn whether Mr Gove’s cheerful assessment is still justified, or are the sobering, rather depressing messages of Yellowhammer still blindingly relevant? I will select a few issues out of many in the Yellowhammer leak. Perhaps the Minister will be able to bring us up to date on at least some of these in his reply. First, in the event of no deal, is it still the case that between 50% and 85% of trucks on the Dover-Calais route are not ready for French customs, despite the work that has been done on the Calais port facilities? That was what Yellowhammer said. Is it still the case that it could take three months to sort this out between Dover and Calais, meaning in the interim that a truck could expect to be delayed by between one and a half and two and a half days on that route?
I read in the paper this morning, rather contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said, that the chief executive of Dover had said that a no-deal situation would cost Dover £1 billion a week. That did not seem to me to be too optimistic about what no deal would mean. These are key factors in our future trade relationship with the European Union. Yellowhammer said there was a need for an agricultural food supply chain. Is that yet in place? If so, what is it and how will it work? Perhaps we can be told about that.
Shifting away from trade for a moment, in the event of Brexit UK citizens will lose their EU citizenship and access to services such as free emergency healthcare in other countries. What arrangements are being made to protect and advise British citizens in those circumstances? Is anything being planned? Can anything be done? What steps are being taken to limit expected rises in food prices in the event of no deal—rises that will impact particularly on the poorer sections of our society? Finally—this is perhaps an issue that has not been addressed in recent debates in this House—how can we stop clashes at sea between UK and EU fishermen if existing arrangements on respective shares of the channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea lapse with nothing to replace them? We know that some fishing fleets are staffed by pretty excitable people in some countries, probably including parts of the UK.
As others have said, we are hearing a lot this week about “Get Brexit Done”, but my brief list of questions—there are many others, not least on the Irish situation, which I could easily have quoted—shows just how difficult a no-deal Brexit would be. As others have said, 31 October will not be the end, or even the beginning of the end; it will be merely the start of a tortuous negotiation that will take years, given the accusations and bad faith that will cloud it from the start and the poison in relationships that will develop from any no-deal situation. Does the Minister accept that that could be the case, and can he provide us with any enlightenment on progress, or the lack of it, since Operation Yellowhammer and on what a no-deal Brexit would really mean?
Lord Taverne (LD)
My Lords, I had not realised that I was the next speaker—
Lord Saatchi (Con)
My Lords, the Minister was kind enough to praise your Lordships’ House for its stamina. With your Lordships’ permission, I should like to return the compliment and praise him for the calm and reasonable way in which he has handled our debates.
It has all been a big misunderstanding. You hear it said that the people have spoken, that we had the biggest democratic vote in British history, that we must respect—that is the word used—the will of the people. It is said that we made a decision. It is true. We did make a decision in the referendum. The decision was: we cannot decide; we are not sure. The misunderstanding of that result is the cause of all our present difficulties.
You hear it said that the referendum result was the same as a general election, in which one vote is enough. But we, the people, do not agree. We know better. We never challenge a general election result, even if it is a victory by only one vote. That is because we know that, if we change our mind, we can change the Government at the next general election. This referendum is not like that. The result cannot be changed, and therefore one vote is not enough. In the court of public opinion, this would be called a “hung jury” or “deadlocked jury”; that is,
“a judicial jury that cannot agree upon a verdict after extended deliberation and is unable to reach the required unanimity or supermajority”.
That is the definition.
The problem arises all because of one word: “sovereignty”. What is in that word? Is there such a thing? What about the weather? For temperature, we do not seem to mind centigrade rather than Fahrenheit. For distance, metres and centimetres are okay rather than feet and inches. Regarding time, we are about to put our clocks back with Europe. On weight, I do not know about other noble Lords, but I have only kilograms on my digital scales, not pounds and ounces. We do not seem to object to the same procedures on science and medical research, terrorism, security, banking regulations, et cetera. Therefore, we now need a more grown-up conversation.
Usually, one conversation is enough to change history. It has happened many times before, so why do we not try it now? There are only three people in the room for this conversation, which is as it should be: our Prime Minister, the “PM”, and “Them”, the German Chancellor and the French President. This is the conversation that should take place—it is not too late:
“PM: Lately it seems we can’t talk without arguing.
Them: Well, what do you want now?
PM: We need to have a little talk, that’s all.
Them: About what?
PM: We’re through. Out. You know that—31 October.
Them: We don’t really care whether you come or go. All we care about is that you don’t set a precedent for anyone else.
PM: What about the Irish border problem?
Them: Northern Ireland? Where’s that again?
PM: We want a deal.
Them: Trade deals? Of course. No problem. My assistant will book a conference call.
PM: I know it annoys you to set a precedent. I’m not asking for any special treatment for us. Just a few changes in the EU for the benefit of all fellow members.
Them: Fellow members! From you! You think only of yourself. You’ve been sulking for years! Variable geometry! Two-speed Europe! Opt-outs!
PM: Yes, sorry about that.
Them: And we’re sorry that you’re leaving.
PM: Oh, you didn’t want us to leave? Why didn’t you say that before?
Them: So what?
PM: So, I’ve only got one question for you. We’ve had three years of arguments about our terms for leaving. How about three minutes on terms for remaining? If we agree to stay, what are you offering?
Them: What do you want?
PM: We don’t want anything. We’re leaving anyway. But you keep saying how sad you are to see us leaving, how bad that would be.
Them: So? Go on.
PM: We want equality. With you two. That’s all. Not a subordinate. Not a junior member. We don’t want you to boss us around. And we don’t want to boss you around. Equality. Equal voting rights with you on all EU legislation.
Them: What else?
PM: We want to recognise free movement of people, but we also want to recognise the legitimate concerns among members about uncontrolled immigration. All members want that too.
Them: Is that it? Anything else?
PM: No, nothing else. That’s it. ‘Remain-plus’ we could call it.
Them: Then you’d stay?
PM: Yes.
Them: What about America? America wants us to fail. They think your departure hurts us. America wants you to leave.
PM: They do now, but they’ll come round.
Them: And what about your Parliament? Will they go along with it?
PM: Yes, because it’s the only way to ‘heal the wounds’, ‘unite the nation’.
Them: And what about us? What do we get out of it?
PM: You get what you always wanted: unity, no breakaways, no precedent for anyone else. We all stick together. Peace, security, and the EU to be a vanguard force—a frontier spirit, an economic superpower to match America and China. What say you?
Them: OK! Done! Let’s go! When do we start?”
That conversation would change the course of European history: Britain to have voting power equal to that of France and Germany, and reasonable control of immigration. It is called leadership, and if Germany and France accepted that we were equal to them in votes, which currently we are not, everyone would be happy. Remainers would be pleased because it would make the case for remain more defensible, as we would not just be going back to where we were before, and leavers would be pleased because it would resolve their No. 1 problem—sovereignty—as we would not be subordinate to anyone.
Therefore, I encourage your Lordships’ House to end the current dismal choice that we, the people, have between the least-worst options that nobody wants. We need a North Star—a guiding light—and your Lordships’ House can help to provide it. We are at a historic moment of maximum British power in Europe. Now all we have to do is use it: one conversation to change history.
Lord Taverne
My Lords, what a delightful speech. There was a lot of wisdom in it.
Let me cast caution to the winds and start by making three predictions. First, Boris will not get his deal. This now seems an almost uncontroversial forecast, judging by all the comments from Brussels.
Secondly, any challenge to the Benn Act, which the Government seem to ignore, will fail for the reasons advanced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith. So, without a deal at the end of the EU summit, Boris will be legally required to send a letter requesting an Article 50 extension of the Brexit debate.
Thirdly, and most controversially, Boris will not be Prime Minister at the end of October but will probably still be leader of his party. Why? He cannot send the letter that he will be legally obliged to send—he would sooner be dead in a ditch. He said that he will not disobey the law, but he also states that he will achieve his goal of Brexit by 31 October. The two aims are incompatible. The Supreme Court will almost certainly find means of making the law prevail. The only course left for him is to resign as PM or be deposed.
At this point, my crystal ball clouds over. It begins to look increasingly likely that, if Boris has not resigned, there will be a vote of no confidence and he will be replaced by a temporary Government of national unity. This will not be led by Corbyn. It is beginning to look likely that someone such as Margaret Beckett would be an acceptable Labour temporary PM.
The first act of such a Government must be to secure an extension of the date fixed for Article 50, and the second must be to call for a new referendum as the only way to resolve the present impasse. This must precede, and cannot be part of, a general election, because the referendum must offer a clear choice, this time based on actual knowledge of what Brexit means. By contrast, in a general election voters vote for different parties for a great variety of different reasons. It seems that Labour has sensibly come round to this view.
There are many problems surrounding the wording of the choice in a referendum, but the obvious clear referendum choice, without a withdrawal treaty, will be between a no-deal Brexit and remain. A general election is bound to follow. It will be very nasty, with the future of democracy at stake. As was eloquently described by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich—and as Boris has made clear—it will be the people against their enemies: Europe, Parliament, the courts and lawyers, the Civil Service and anyone who still believes MPs should be representatives, not delegates.
One reason that it will be unlike any previous election is the change in the Conservative Party. I am now in my 10th decade. When I was first elected as an Opposition MP in 1962, I had great respect for eminent Conservative leaders such as Macmillan, Butler, Macleod and Carrington, as well as thinkers such as Ian Gilmour.
Boris’s Conservative Party has ceased to be the party of parliamentary democracy of Locke and Burke. It has instead become the party of populist authoritarianism, which has adopted hook, line and sinker the doctrine of Rousseau—that the will of the people, as interpreted by the Government, must prevail over all dissent, the rule of law and the rights of the individual and minorities. Rousseau’s was the doctrine preached by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, much favoured ever since by every autocrat from Mussolini to Hitler to Erdoğan. Is this really the kind of campaign and party that once-moderate Tories are now ready to support? Locke and Burke must be turning in their graves.
Lord Dykes (CB)
My Lords, I very much thank the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, for his remarks. I agree with every single comment he made. We thank him.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi. I think he is the only person I have ever seen getting up late in a debate—I have never seen it before. I forgive him because he made a very amusing speech.
I am also thankful for the speeches by the noble Lords, Lord Livermore, Lord Monks and Lord Taverne, as well as by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for showing once again that the madness is still carrying on but will not last forever. We know that it is coming to its nemesis. No one knows when, but I think and hope that it is fairly soon.
I liked that, on 5 September, the front page of the Daily Mirror—a very strongly pro-European newspaper —said “Britain’s worst PM”, with a large picture of Boris, of course. It then said: “(since the last one)”. I still very strongly blame Theresa May, who had the wonderful opportunity in the election on 8 June 2017 to say, “I have lost the mandate that I was seeking. I had a 20-point lead when I launched this campaign. That no longer exists. We must therefore have a national consultation in this country about the way forward and what we do, involving everybody”. She did not, but repeated the absurd mantra, “Brexit means Brexit”. The nightmare continued.
We still have the nightmare, with an even worse Prime Minister—I think I help Theresa May a little bit by saying that—in the form of Boris Johnson. He is a person who has only a glancing relationship with true facts and says that he definitely did not do something but cannot actually remember, which is a unique new way for him to say, “Once again, I am indulging in a terminological inexactitude, as I am accustomed to do”. What a pity that we have this nightmare continuing and it is taking longer than we were originally hoping—those of us who wanted, after the 8 June election, to see a change and common sense beginning to prevail.
The Conservative Party used to be a wonderful and encouraging party of moderate views. I was a member of it and an MP in the House of Commons for many years. As the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, said, there were very excellent, eminent people—Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and others led the party to great success. Macmillan was a convinced European, partly because of his memory of the First World War.
The lead that we get in the Lords now is because the Lords has a built-in majority for Europe, which is always very comforting for us who join that majority in these debates. We thank above all the Liberal Democrat group in this House, who have the maximalist attitude towards positive views on Europe. They believe themselves à outrance—for others, of course—that there should not even be any further contest and that we should go straight into the withdrawal legislation and then decide to extend the date.
This stance that we have now in the Lords also mirrors the striking change in public opinion away from the 2016 referendum. We need to remind ourselves that it was advisory—giving an opinion. Cameron deciding to say, “I will immediately accept the result of that referendum” was a matter for him—yet another mistake by a Tory Prime Minster in more recent times. We are living with the effects of that. His book has not convinced many people of his wisdom as a Prime Minister.
We now have this change in atmosphere, public opinion and views. The people’s marches have gone from 100,000 originally to 700,000, and to 1 million last time—in October last year. I am sure that we are due to see more than that at the march on 19 October. Nearly 70% of the voting public have become anti-Brexit. People may think that that figure sounds too high, but it is not. It is true from all the analyses given by the various polling examinations and private research.
The Prime Minister—known for his lack of wisdom in all respects, I am afraid—was supported by 97,000 original votes, mostly from elderly, disgruntled Tory association members. I think that the total Tory membership is now 130,000—there may be one or two hangers-on from the previous Brexit Party formation, UKIP and so on, but I would guess that that is the rough figure. That is fewer than the Liberal Democrats, who have 140,000 members. We see Labour with more than 500,000 members, most of whom are much younger people who, as other speakers have said, regret the tragedy of losing free movement in Europe above all—for their careers, holidays, working, meeting other people, learning languages, all the precious things that the younger generation in this multinational and multi-ethnic country want in the future.
Instead we have this: the majority against Europe is only in England. The majorities in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and now in Wales—it has changed there—are strongly pro-Europe. That is the reality. We must show this phoney PM with his phoney views that the time is now up. The DUP remains the most unpopular and unsavoury party in Northern Ireland. Its views are dismissed by more and more people there. Brexit is absurd. England needs to grow up and live in the real world with the other countries of the United Kingdom.
Viscount Chandos (Lab)
My Lords, however much all of us are suffering from Brexit fatigue, we should welcome the fact that we are able to hold this debate today. The Prime Minister would like to have announced the submission of a novel “first and final” offer to the EU solely to the party faithful in Manchester, without the risk of any parliamentary interrogation at all. While it is deeply regrettable that he did not instead make a Statement to the House of Commons, we can in this House try to provide a warm-up to what I hope will be tomorrow’s main event in the other place.
I should like to address two principal points in the short time available: first, on the damage that the Prime Minister continues to do to our constitution and parliamentary democracy, which in turn makes a non-damaging resolution of the Brexit problem even harder to achieve and, secondly, giving an initial reaction to the proposals published by the Government this afternoon and what they may imply.
“There is one part of the British system that seems to be on the blink … if Parliament were a school, Ofsted would be shutting it down”—
the Prime Minister said this in his speech in Manchester earlier today, having been unsuccessful in trying to play the role of Ofsted. It is just the latest comment in the relentless stream of denigration to which he has subjected Parliament, let alone the arrogant contempt he has shown for the Supreme Court. Neither the Prime Minister nor any other individual has the authority to interpret the decision of the 2016 referendum and determine its implementation. That authority lies with Parliament.
In reasserting that the 2016 referendum was advisory, or, in the terminology of the 2015 House of Commons Briefing Paper, “pre-legislative” and “consultative”, I do not think its result can or should be lightly dismissed; but Parliament is mandated to implement it. Indeed, on 16 June 2015, during the Committee stage of the EU referendum Bill, the Conservative Minister said:
“The legislation is about holding a vote; it makes no provision for what follows. The referendum is advisory, as was the case for both the 1975 referendum … and the Scottish independence vote”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/6/15; col. 231.]
In turn, the High Court, in its ruling on the first Gina Miller case in November 2016, wrote that the EU referendum Act,
“falls to be interpreted in light of the basic constitutional principles of Parliamentary sovereignty and representative parliamentary democracy … a vote in the referendum in favour of leaving the European Union would inevitably leave for future decision many important questions relating to the legal implementation of withdrawal from the European Union”.
Does the Minister believe that Parliament has been fulfilling its proper, legitimate role and that the impasse of the past nine months reflects the intractability of reconciling the Government’s multiple objectives and the range of public opinion, rather than, as the Prime Minister said, it refusing to deliver Brexit and refusing to do anything constructive? Could this Parliament have delivered Brexit? If the last Conservative Government had behaved constructively and consensually, yes, I believe it already could have done. Could this Parliament still deliver Brexit? The past failures have polarised positions, and the language and behaviour of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues, notably the Attorney-General, have made it even harder.
Will this Parliament approve a Brexit deal based on the proposals contained in the Prime Minister’s letter today to the President of the European Commission? First, the EU would have to agree to them and, I have to say, the rudeness and hypocrisy of the letter’s opening paragraph set a deeply unhelpful tone, even if there is greater willingness on the Government’s part to negotiate than they have signalled. I do not believe that the EU would have been any more likely to agree a deal based on these proposals had the Benn Act not been passed; or that the Prime Minister’s attempts to signal an ability to ignore or get around it enhances his negotiating position.
In the, frankly, unlikely event of the deal as tabled being agreed with the EU, will, and should, Parliament approve it? It is, as the leader of the Opposition has said,
“worse than Theresa May’s deal”.
Reading between the lines of the proposed “two borders, four years” approach to the Irish border, it appears certainly to threaten the delicate and complex balance that underpins the peace process, even if, by some miracle of science fiction, no new physical infrastructure is introduced at or near the border. The direction of travel towards a free trade agreement for the UK as a whole is the opposite of the one that could deliver a future relationship with the EU with minimal negative economic impact.
I look forward, without holding my breath, to hearing the Minister answer the questions of my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith as to what the Government’s intentions are in relation to the obligations under the Benn Act. In any event, as with other noble Lords, it seems to me that we are heading very soon to a general election. While I fear that the tone set for it by the Conservative Party will be deeply negative, I believe that the British people and electorate will see through that.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, there was a very interesting quotation in the Times this morning. On the leader page, there is always a tiny column headed, “The last word”, which today was a quotation from Aldous Huxley:
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”.
That is something that the Prime Minister and all members of his Government should take to heart, because there are two salient facts that should run through this debate and two underlying facts that we all neglect at our peril and that of our country.
The first salient fact is this: in a bitterly divided nation, we have cause to give thanks to those brave Members in another place who put country before party and who—conscious of the fact that the vast majority of people in this country do not want to leave without a deal, and that Parliament would be neglecting its duty if we left without a deal—voted even knowing that they would probably be expelled from their party and mine. We all owe them a great deal. We also owe a great deal to the Justices of the Supreme Court who, far from being enemies of the people, have shown that they understand what is necessary for the continuance of parliamentary democracy.
The two underlying facts that I ask all your Lordships to bear in mind are these: we would be letting down this country if we allowed anyone to lead us into an election which was Parliament versus the people. As has been said earlier in this debate, Parliament is the representative of the people. Individually in constituencies and collectively at the other end of this corridor, those men and women are not the enemies of the people. Anyone who seeks to engineer an election where that is the underlying theme is himself an enemy of the people. The other underlying fact is that we cannot be proud Members of this House if we do not recognise—as I think we all do—how important it is that laws that are passed are obeyed.
I have a Question on the Order Paper tomorrow which I hope might flush out from the Government the answer to the dilemma that has run through our deliberations since we came back from the non-Prorogation. How do we achieve an exit on 31 October and, at the same time, comply with the law? Of course, like my noble friend Lord Tugendhat, who made an admirable speech which I commend to everyone, I wish the Prime Minister success in getting a deal. But what a complete defeat it would be for him, the Prime Minister of a minority Government, who has himself been responsible for expelling some of the finest members of his party, if he gave up negotiations when they were perhaps approaching success.
Of course, we cannot go on for ever and ever. I am one of those, a bitterly disappointed remainer, who has accepted from the word go that we have to come out. However, the Prime Minister himself should remember, and Mr Jacob “languid” Rees-Mogg should remember, that they voted for the deal that Theresa May had negotiated. If we begin, because it is beginning, a long, protracted series of further negotiations on the basis of a quarrel with our European friends and neighbours—on crumbled hopes—what chance do we have of being able to work out a long-lasting, constructive relationship with them?
The stakes are high. Parliament has a real role to play, but I beg my noble friend to recognise—it is important that we all do—that, if Parliament is trampled on because the Prime Minister wants to stick to a particular time on a particular day, that will not serve the national interest.
Lord Shutt of Greetland (LD)
My Lords, this is my first appearance on matters European since the Article 50 notice was triggered. Your Lordships may well say that it has all been said many times, but not by me. That is true up to a point, but my contribution has to be put into context.
The referendum took place on 23 June 2016—three years and three months ago. Many of us believe that the leave campaign put out a false prospectus. We can all say all sorts of things that we thought were wrong: £350 million a week on the bus; easy-peasy to get a good deal—by the way, last week that changed to a “walk in the park”. There was not a word on the case for the UK giving leadership. There was no mention of the problems that leaving the EU would bring to Ireland, north and south, and the potential damage to the peace process. There was no mention of the threat to the UK as a whole and the potential of a Scottish secession; no mention of economic damage and all that that brings to employment. Well, that is enough of that—it was a false prospectus.
I turn back to the referendum. It was consultative, not binding—but it is why we are here. Some 46.5 million people were eligible to vote; 17.4 million voted to leave, as is frequently mentioned by the Brexit Minister in this House; 16.1 million voted to remain; but 13 million did not vote at all. I have checked half a dozen opinion polls which were taken shortly after the referendum. It was quite clear that the bulk of those who did not vote regretted it but were remainers.
Now, in October 2019, three years and three months after the referendum, there has been a distinct change in the make-up of the electorate. According to the Office for National Statistics, just over 600,000 Britons die each year. Therefore, in the region of 2 million of those eligible to vote who were on the register are unlikely to be able to vote today. The other side of that coin is that 750,000 youngsters each year become eligible to vote at 18 and therefore 2.5 million people between the ages of 18 and 21 who are alive today were never consulted in 2016—quite a change.
What has happened since? Other people have voted many times, here and in the other place. According to information supplied by the ever-helpful House of Lords Library, MPs have voted 227 times on UK/EU matters since 23 June 2016 and your Lordships have voted 52 times. In other words, the people were given one opportunity, but MPs and Peers were given 279 chances, and counting. Why is an out-of-date consultative referendum decision still thought to be valid? When does the Minister think it will cease to be valid? Surely, people are entitled to take the view that, if MPs and Peers have had 279 chances to vote on this crucial issue during the last 39 months, they, the people, ought to have a second chance now that they are more informed. This Government are not on firm foundations.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, we are all well aware that, for the last three years, the country and Parliament have wrestled with the problem of Brexit. I therefore pay tribute to the current Government for the way in which the Prime Minister, the Ministers in charge of Brexit details and, in particular, the hundreds if not thousands of civil servants are wrestling with producing a workable basis on which we can move forward with either a deal or no deal.
The noble Lord, Lord Monks, asked whether there had been any progress over the last six months. I can only vouch for one particular industry in Northampton, which is a distribution base. I am told by the hauliers in Northampton that, yes, they are confident that they can continue as they do today under any changes that are made, and that their relationship with Calais and other ports is a good one now and will continue as such. So I say a big thank you to them, and to all the people who are involved at the moment.
I do not say thank you, frankly, to those MPs such as Messrs Grieve, Letwin and Burt. Alistair Burt is my MP and was the Tory side of the Benn Bill. I do not think that they did play a role—or at least not a role that I have ever seen in Parliament before. I do not say thank you to the two former Prime Ministers. I hardly think that John Major was a great success over Maastricht, or indeed in the 1997 election, if I remember rightly—not least as I lost my seat, along with over 100 others. I do not say thank you to Mr Cameron, whose idea it was to have a referendum in the first place and who saddled us with this extraordinary business of a fixed-term Parliament.
I am by profession an economist—a practical economist who spent 20 years in business working in the UK, India and Sri Lanka. Anybody who is a businessman looks at the general situation that they face in the markets that they are in. I was interested to note today two headlines in the Telegraph about the world economy. The first is that Swedish economy is the canary in the coal mine, and it has just keeled over: there has been a violent drop in manufacturing output right down to 2008 levels. Secondly, the risk of global recession grows as factory woes go from bad to worse, particularly in the US, the EU, France and Germany. So the background is not good.
I have mentioned the haulage industry in this country. Add to that the pharmaceutical industry, which I know well. Every company that I ever worked for in that industry had reserves and action plans for reacting to shortages, whatever the difficulties might be, and I am totally confident that every company in that industry is ready and able, whatever the result may be. There will be some potential difficulties. I drove back from Devon and noticed all the overhead signs telling every lorry driver and every other driver that, if they are not yet aware that things may change on 1 November, they should take action. So well done the Government on that front.
I have just come back from Sri Lanka, where there is the port city of Colombo. It is open for business, similar to the Victoria Dam, and there is a conference in the City of London. I am also involved in Chile. I declare an interest as chairman of the Cofradía del Vino Chileno. That country, on its own basis, has now contracted 26 individual deals with other blocs and countries covering 86% of global GDP. If Chile can do that on its own, I am totally confident that we can do it on our own.
Of course there will be challenges, but what on earth is the Bank of England there for if not to react to challenges? What is the Treasury there for if not to provide some incentives and help in the interim? The idea is being put about that MPs want to see the list of industries and companies that may be in difficulty. That is entirely wrong. It would undermine that particular company, its employers, its employees, its pensioners and its supplier relationships. That information must remain confidential.
As colleagues will know, I spent a few years as Chairman of Ways and Means and as Deputy Speaker; I took through the Maastricht Bill. I had a little look at the proceedings of the Benn Bill, and by any yardstick they are unusual. Standing Order 24 is not something that you normally see being used for a Private Member’s Bill. That does not necessarily mean that it is wrong, but it is certainly quite extraordinary, particularly when a Private Member’s Bill has massive consequences for the nation and our economy—and it never seemed to follow any of the normal parliamentary procedures. Maybe that is right and maybe that is what should happen, but I say this: a law has now been brought in over Prorogation, and if I were in government I would have a long, hard look in relation to the letter. I see that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, is getting a bit worried that there is something amiss with that particular element of the Bill. I suggest that if I were sitting there, I would have a long, hard look at it as well.
Lord Heseltine
My Lords, three days after the referendum I wrote an article in the Mail on Sunday saying, “The fightback starts here”. I have no hesitation at all in reiterating that position. I believed that, in the light of circumstance and the evolution of truth, we needed a referendum or a second election to deal with the issue. Why was I so preoccupied to argue for a further look? It is because I believe passionately that power in this country rests here in Parliament, and it is within our framework that we understand all too clearly how the system works. The Prime Minister depends on a majority in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister chooses the Cabinet, in which the Prime Minister is first among equals. All my political life I have argued that—as the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, eloquently pointed out—after the end of the impoverishment of the Second World War and the conversion of Empire to Commonwealth, all Britain’s interests lay in a new destiny with our neighbours, whom we had spent a thousand years fighting, in creating peaceful parliamentary democratic institutions.
It is interesting and coincidental that today, the first Question centred on what might be seen as rather a small incident in the context of things: the sacking of Sonia Khan by an apparatchik in Downing Street. If that had happened to me, I hope I would have resigned, but it is symptomatic of something much more serious, to which many of your Lordships have referred. First, three Privy Councillors were sent to advise Her Majesty on the proroguing of Parliament without the Cabinet knowing what was happening. Secondly, Parliament was closed down illegally and therefore had to be restored by the Supreme Court. I listened to Liz Truss on a BBC programme this morning conceding that the letter that went to the European Commission today had not been seen by the Cabinet in advance. So, how are the Government constituted? Who is it that is pulling the strings? Who is taking these decisions? How is it that the Cabinet are prepared to rubber-stamp the most controversial issues of our time, of which they were not briefed in advance? What do they think they are there for, as members of a Cabinet?
I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, who felt that watching the Prime Minister’s party conference speech this morning was a waste of time. Far from it. First, he is without any shadow of doubt the best music hall turn in politics, and it was full of great jokes. But it also revealed very clearly what the strategy is, and what it has been since day one of his premiership: to combine an agenda of right-wing hard-line politics with Brexit to try to get it through a general election campaign by attracting back Nigel Farage’s supporters. It is as blindingly obvious as that. You had only to listen to the speech today, in which the ultimate target was Jeremy Corbyn. But Boris has got it wrong. Jeremy Corbyn is probably the only person on the Labour Benches who actually agrees with Boris about Brexit. To focus on Corbyn is completely to miss the point.
The real problem for the Conservative Government led by Boris Johnson is the Conservatives. It was Conservatives in the ERG who would not support the previous Prime Minister, which frustrated her ability to get a deal. It is the sacking of 22 of the more renowned members of the Conservative Party by this Prime Minister that has removed the majority on which he would otherwise exist. And where did the word “chicanery” come from? It came from Sir John Major, a former Prime Minister, talking about what he thinks this Government are up to. There are two audiences for every party conference. Without doubt, the hall erupted. I know what it is like; it is a wonderful feeling. But there is a second audience, and that is the audience with which this Government should be concerned. I have indicated the parliamentary consequences of what is happening, but there are millions of Conservatives who are now voting for the Liberal Democrats, because they will not swallow the line that is peddled about Brexit.
So, I go back to the Prime Minister’s speech:
“Let’s get Brexit done, and let’s bring this country together”.
This country is more divided, more fundamentally, in more directions, than I have ever seen it in my life. The idea that we are going to give up our position of influence across the Atlantic, across the Commonwealth and within Europe and mould it all together in one by standing isolationist as an individual nation state is unreal in the changing world of today. The idea that President Trump is going to do a soft option for Britain’s trade in a pre-election period in America is a delusion of the most naive sort. The idea that 2.6 billion inhabitants of the Commonwealth are longing to open their trade doors to us while the Home Secretary is clamping down on the immigration that they want to encourage into our country is another delusion. And the idea that the Conservative Government are risking the future of the United Kingdom itself, on a dogma that was driven by extreme populism, is to me unbelievable. We need to go back to the people for an endorsement of the decision and, much better, its rejection.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, I want to begin by commenting on two of the speeches made earlier on by the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Howarth. They were both very original speeches; those Members of the House always make original speeches. Both were the subject of considerable reflection. Nevertheless, I detected in those speeches a considerable degree of complacency about the threats facing us. I believe that complacency is such a danger in economics and in politics, in business and generally in life, that it needs to be commented on if it arises. I may say that both noble Lords have been long-standing personal friends of mine for over half a century, and we have been arguing about politics and economics together since we first met at a university in the Fens, 55 years ago. I hope that this is not the end of a beautiful friendship.
The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said that we may go through some choppy water if we have a hard Brexit, but that is all right; we will get through that okay, with the help of the Bank of England, fiscal spending and so forth. I have to tell him that fiscal spending is not a cost-free policy. As you build up your debt—and public debt in this country has risen from less 20 years —you are gradually reducing your capacity to intervene in the future. We learned in the 1970s where that can eventually lead, and it is not something that one should do lightly.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, managed to make out that in fact there would be no increase in customs checks as a result of our leaving the European Union. That seemed to me inherently implausible; but he completely left out the subject of the longest delays in any border checks, which is the issue of certificates of origin, which is extremely complicated and a nightmare for those who are organising international logistics. I think that should be taken into account. I have to tell him, too, that the continental customs authorities do not share his very optimistic view. In June I happened to be in the Netherlands, with two or three colleagues who were equally interested in the subject. We were very kindly received by the head of the Netherlands customs in Rotterdam; we saw the port there and met many of her leading staff. They told us that they have taken on about 900 new employees, simply to deal with additional UK business after Brexit. The Dutch are serious people; they do not hire 900 people just to watch the traffic and do nothing. Noble Lords can make the arithmetical calculations as easily as I can, but you can imagine, if there are 900 people who intervene with a lorry every hour or two hours, for two minutes, three minutes or five minutes, how much that will induce delays in the process of clearing trucks through Rotterdam that are destined for the United Kingdom. There is clearly a material change happening there, and the same thing is happening in other ports and suppliers. Rotterdam is of course the major port that supplies us. I do not think that complacency is in order there, either.
Lord Howarth of Newport
I am most grateful to the noble Lord and very much appreciate his kind personal words. If he would be good enough to look at Hansard and see what I said, he will not find that I mentioned either the Bank of England or the Treasury. What I do believe, though, is that our businesses in this country have a great deal of resilience, a great deal of power and a great deal of creativity, and they will be able to weather the transitional difficulties. I do not think that that is complacent, but a reflection of reality.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I must apologise to the noble Lord for adding words that he did not pronounce. I got the distinct impression that what he was talking about by way of remedial action was monetary or fiscal spending. Fiscal spending would have had the consequences that I have just outlined. I apologise to him and hope that I have not unduly traduced the message he was delivering to the House. I feel very strongly on this matter of complacency, faced with a possible recession. I know that the noble Lord will agree with me on this: recessions are very unpleasant things. They destroy businesses, they destroy jobs, they destroy the jobs that people might have had and will never have. They destroy the economic sense of security of families. A lot of the human destruction and economic destruction takes a very long time to repair. It is not something that we should walk into lightly. I am very worried indeed and I hope that he understands why that is—that we may be heading in that direction.
Lord Howarth of Newport
I very much agree with the noble Lord about the damage that recessions cause. Does he have any reflections on the fiscal policy of the Government, which has now become quite explosive and puts the country at very great risk, of exactly the nature he has been describing?
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am so glad that I am once again in thorough agreement with my noble and long-standing friend. Of course, I am very worried about that; I mentioned it in our debate last week, so I will not go into that subject now, but I could not agree more on that subject.
I must turn to the proposal that the Government made today to the European Commission. It seems to me to be a thoroughly dishonest and disreputable document. It is exactly the sort of document that one would expect our Prime Minister to deliver and was probably not one where there was any expectation that it would be accepted. I suppose that Mr Johnson wanted to be in a position where he had made some offer, so that he could then say that it was all the fault of the European Union for not accepting it—albeit that he did not produce anything until a month before the deadline. The document does not address at all the matter that is of greatest concern to the Irish, which is the long-term avoidance in Ireland of an internal border or frontier. A border, in my definition—and in the definition of most reasonable people—is an administrative line on the map which, if you cross it, has practical and probably financial consequences. That does not mean that the border has to have an infrastructure at any particular point. It means simply that if you cross this line, you will be deemed to be liable in one way or another. That is exactly what we must avoid in Ireland, if we want to respect the Belfast agreement. It is what the Irish are determined to avoid. That is the position at present: there is no internal border on the island of Ireland. You can go between any of the 26 counties and the six counties, any time you want, with no consequences whatever of an administrative or practical kind. That is what we need to preserve. That is not achieved by this proposal and I imagine that for that reason alone it will and should be rejected.
The contradictions have already been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Adonis. They are quite serious because they have completely devalued the document. On page 3, the document says:
“This is entirely compatible with maintaining an open border in Northern Ireland”.
In the next paragraph, it says that,
“all customs processes needed to ensure compliance with the UK and EU customs regimes should take place on a decentralised basis”.
If there is an open border in Northern Ireland, why do you need customs processes and regimes? That is completely contradictory. I am taking a little more time, but I had two interventions.
The other notable contradiction in this document is on page 2, where it says that the proposal,
“provides for the potential creation of an all-island regulatory zone on the island of Ireland”.
Two paragraphs later, it says that under these arrangements,
“Northern Ireland will be fully part of the UK customs territory”.
These are blatant contradictions and devalue the whole document.
Baroness Berridge
My Lords, while there has been grace because of interventions, I remind the House that the advisory speaking time is six minutes.
Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)
I think that is the cue for me to stand up. As an ex-Chief of Defence and a relative newcomer to the House, I do not make my contribution with great enthusiasm. In fact, my motivation is brought about primarily by friends in North Yorkshire with whom I spend my weekends. I feel a duty to reflect some of their anger, frustration and confusion about the state of the country and what this House does. I want to make some observations about the state of the country and our political institutions, both of which, to me and those I talk to, seem currently to lack integrity in the true sense of that word.
I start by offering four bits of context. The first is that, since the end of the Cold War, liberal democracies have ceased having to fight for internal legitimacy. As a result, populations have been neglected. Societies feel increasingly isolated from government. They feel increasingly that their concerns are not understood and not represented. Too much of politics seems to be about the pursuit of power and relatively narrow interest.
My second bit of context is that the population does not know what to believe. We live in an age in which truth is a rare commodity. The vast majority of news is either junk news, which I define as the sensationalisation of the unsubstantiated, or fake news, which I define as misinformation or disinformation designed to influence and deceive. I fear that much political debate involves as much of the junk and the fake as it does the truth.
My third bit of context flows from the first two and is probably not a new revelation. It is that the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum had little to do with the rational response of a well-informed public. The Brexit referendum was not a judgment on the benefits or otherwise of our relationship with the EU; it was the vehicle by which large parts of the country expressed anger at their isolation from and neglect by government. For those who study global strategic megatrends, as I used to, the referendum outcome was no more or less than the British version of the Arab spring. President Trump was the American version.
My fourth bit of context—one to which I have borne witness even in this Chamber—is that intolerance has become one of the dominant elements of the political climate. We seem to have become unable to listen to the views of those people we disagree with.
What do I deduce from all this? My first deduction is that we are consumed by the wrong issue. Our relationship with the European Union is not existential to the United Kingdom in any meaningful sense. The right or more important issues are: first, how do we sustain the integrity of the United Kingdom? Secondly, how do we restore the integrity of our political system? These are the issues which should inform future action.
Given the context I have described, my own view is that we should pursue Brexit, but it should be the least damaging Brexit that we can secure. We should then be supportive of a government approach which is fairer and more inclusive; which maximises the amount of activity delegated to local discretion and accountability; and which rebuilds public trust in political leadership and activity at all levels.
We should, in tandem, set out to restore the integrity and civility of government and political discourse. Perhaps, dare I say it, even in this Chamber we should take far greater notice of how others view us rather than simply being dazzled by the opinion we sometimes hold of ourselves. If we can achieve all this, we will go a long way towards regaining some national self-respect.
Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to join in at this stage in the debate and recognise the contribution that the House of Lords is making to showing that you can debate the issues of Brexit without the sort of bad temper and extraordinarily bad conduct that has existed in the other place and led to a serious loss of public respect for Parliament.
In the various exchanges that have taken place, I particularly enjoyed the contribution of my noble friend Lord Heseltine, who is of course an authority on good jokes in conference speeches. I seem to remember him on one occasion describing Labour’s economic policy as “all Balls”, in reference to the shadow Chancellor of the time, which the Conservative conference much enjoyed. I also very much agree with him that the failure to consult the Cabinet on recent issues is extremely poor and certainly should not be repeated. It is also a severe reflection on the present membership of that Cabinet.
I also believe that it was a very serious mistake to seek to prorogue Parliament when we did. There was no need for it and I certainly was opposed to it at the time. But that is probably as far as I go in supporting my noble friend. His enthusiasm for all things European was perhaps helped by the fact that he used to delegate to me the responsibility of going to all the Environment Council meetings in Europe, avoiding the problem of getting involved himself in some of those discussions—but I will let that pass.
The reason I am concerned about the paralysis we have had over Brexit is that we now live in an extremely dangerous world. Look around at the situation in Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan. Look at Iran and its activities. Look at the growing strength of China, the risk of American isolationism and the push from China at this stage, just after its great 70th anniversary. Russia and China both have 2 million men under arms at this time, in a dangerous and unstable world. There is the difficulty and embarrassment of Hong Kong, coming at a time of semi-paralysis, when the people of Hong Kong are looking to see what the United Kingdom might or might not be prepared to do and getting a pretty big lack of clear signals.
There are other challenges that are quite new to the world. Undoubtedly, there are dire warnings about climate change. There are the far too inadequately considered problems of population growth, which will lead to continuing mass migration, particularly out of Africa, and the changes that that will produce. There are the new developments of cyber and social media. There was the issue of drones even before we had the attack in Saudi Arabia, and the new, cheap weapons that are available around the world to terrorist groups and hostile Governments, for extremely dangerous activities. And at this time, here is the United Kingdom, paralysed pathetically and battling through this issue. Against that background, we have proudly used the phrase that the United Kingdom has “a contribution to make”. We talk about being a force for good in the world, but this force is paralysed and is not making the contribution that is seriously needed.
I come to this situation. I had the honour to move a Motion on the Address for the Queen’s Speech. That speech referred to the proposal for a referendum Bill. I said in that speech that I hoped we would remain, but also that there would be a substantial vote in favour of leaving. I represented the United Kingdom for six years in different Councils of Ministers, and I found that the strength of the United Kingdom’s position was that we did have reservations about Europe and that, if we did not bring some attention to the issues that we were raising, there was a risk that we might leave. We can talk about the budget rebate, about no thank you to the euro or no Schengen. But that card is now lost. I also see the developments happening in the European Union. I notice that it is seeking to appoint a new commissioner for the eastward progression of the European Union.
In making these very truncated remarks necessary to oblige all noble Lords today, I feel that we now have to accept that Europe is moving away. I used to represent the United Kingdom when there were nine around the table. With 28 and rising, and an increased pressure for a united states of Europe, now is the time to enter into a sensible agreement to remove from the European Union, but to set down straight away work to establish the friendliest relationships going forward with all those countries in Europe and the European Union itself.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord King. We are here to take note of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, which of course has not happened. I agree with my noble friend Lord Tugendhat that the divisive rhetoric that blames the fact we have not left on a remainer Parliament is entirely wrong. It is the Brexiters who have blocked Brexit. Sadly, extreme Brexiters have taken this Conservative Government further and further from compromise. After two years of negotiations, the withdrawal agreement negotiated with the EU was rejected by Parliament, but not because of remainers or the Opposition. In the third vote in March 2019, Hansard reports that 286 Members supported the withdrawal agreement, including the backstop, while 344 voted against—a 58-vote defeat for the Government. But 28 Conservatives and 10 Democratic Unionist Party Members voted against their Government. If these 38 had supported the deal, there would have been an 18-vote majority and we would presumably not be facing no deal now.
Since then, the current Prime Minister has apparently changed his mind and, despite voting for it in March, has decided that no deal is preferable to accepting the backstop. I have witnessed good colleagues resign the Whip or leave the Tory party altogether, and 21 brave MPs expelled for voting in the national interest against the no-deal Brexit that many agree would be catastrophic for our country and party. Like my noble friend Lord Cormack, I consider these MPs to be people of high integrity and true Conservatives, who should be part of a party that is traditionally a broad church, not a narrow sect that panders to a group of extremists who wish to override the will of Parliament and dismiss court rulings.
Thus far, I am grateful that Parliament and the courts are protecting normal democratic values against the extremes, but I fear politics is being put above democracy and economic logic. We must respect the result of the referendum, but we have done. Pandering to the Brexit Party or ERG extremists, and going back on one’s previous words, are not the normal Conservative values as I understood them. The Prime Minister, in his victory speech after the referendum, on 24 June 2016, declared:
“The most precious thing this country has given the world is the idea of parliamentary democracy”.
This is not just an idea; it is a reality. Our parliamentary democracy does not consist of pitting the public against Westminster and the courts. Parliament has rejected no deal time and again, and many on these Benches are incredulous at current events. Dismissing an 11:0 Supreme Court ruling as “wrong” scarcely squares with the Prime Minister’s pre-referendum promise to make British courts supreme.
Leaving with no deal has no democratic legitimacy. Michael Gove, in April 2016, assured referendum voters that the UK would continue to be part of the EU’s free trade zone. He stated:
“The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and Ukraine would remain part of this free-trade area—and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus—is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP”.
No deal means losing our free trade with the EU. As my noble friend the Minister said in his opening remarks that business should be ready for no deal, I ask him when the temporary tariff regime will be published. How will smaller businesses be supported, given that we are just four weeks from 31 October? Could he tell me if there is any democratic evidence that the British people insist that 31 October must be a hard Brexit deadline?
No deal is not the will of the people. For example, in the general election in 2017, more than 17 million people voted for parties opposed to no deal. In the 2019 EU elections, 54% of voters rejected no-deal parties. How does this square with the Prime Minister’s conference speech today that we must,
“dedicate ourselves again to that simple proposition that we are here to serve the democratic will of the British people”?
In his article after the 2016 referendum, the Prime Minister stated that 16 million wanted to remain, so:
“We who are part of this narrow majority … must reach out, we must heal, we must build bridges”—
at that stage, I do not think he meant from Britain to Ireland—
“because it is clear that some have feelings of dismay, and of loss, and confusion”.
I totally support these sentiments, but what has happened to the man who penned them? Today’s supposed plans for the Irish border are, as many noble Lords have pointed out, not necessarily going to produce a deal. They do not seem to be designed to. Therefore, we are still heading either for an extension or no deal— 40 years of integration discarded.
Burke warned against sudden extreme change, so I finish with his wise words, which have helped me keep going in the face of so much madness:
“Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair”.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, I followed many of the speeches in this debate with interest, and I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and to say a few words. Whichever side of the divide you are on, the country is going through enormous pain. The country is suffering. Public discourse has become nasty. We are putting ourselves through a lot of torment. If we are to do that, there has to be good reason for it. I was not present for all the debate but, although many points have been made, I have heard little about why we are going through this pain and what the benefit is. The only argument seems to be that there was a referendum; therefore, we must go along with it. What is the benefit to this country? How will we be better off as a result of the pain we are inflicting on ourselves? During the war there was pain. We knew why; we willingly took the pain because we wanted this country to survive and we wanted to put down the nasty dictators—the Nazis—who were threatening the peace of Europe and this country. That pain was worth while, but today the pain seems to be for no particularly good purpose.
Many of us who support remain will be the first to say that of course the EU is not perfect. We could go through a list of faults, but on balance it is better for us to be in than out. I do not hear many people who advocate leave saying that there is anything good about the EU. They regard it as absolutely the sum of all evil that is possible.
When we passed the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, I moved an amendment, which was passed, to say that family reunion for refugees should remain under the terms of the Dublin treaty even after we have left the EU. At that point we all assumed that we would leave on the basis of a deal and we would therefore protect that family reunion provision. I ask the Minister: if we leave without a deal, will the Government still consider incorporating whatever agreement we have with the EU in the future on a no-deal basis and that family reunion for child refugees will still be possible?
Yesterday evening I attended a function organised by the Multiple Sclerosis Society. There was a lot of discussion about the implications of Brexit. There were some academics doing research into MS and other neurological conditions who were very concerned. I will quote some of the figures I was given. UCL benefits to the extent of £150 million to £200 million-worth of EU grants. Many other leading universities get the same benefit. Some 30% of the academic staff are from the EU and between 20% and 30% of students are from the EU. When they finish their studies they often stay here and make an important contribution to our academic life. All these things are in danger. The Minister shakes his head. I was talking to academics yesterday evening and this is what they said to me. If events prove me wrong, they prove me wrong.
I turn to Northern Ireland. I was privileged to be a junior Minister there at the time of the Good Friday agreement and beyond. I do not think that there is anything in the Government’s proposals that will save the situation. I believed all along that even if one was a leaver, which I was not, there was one argument for voting remain, which is Northern Ireland, because the problem is insoluble in any terms that will protect the peace and well-being of Northern Ireland and the Republic. We are jeopardising something fragile and long argued for, which was achieved as a great success and resulted in thousands of lives being saved between then and now. Yet we are endangering it. It was John Hume, a great Northern Ireland politician and statesman, who said that the European Union was the most successful peace process in world history. He was right.
I went with a Select Committee to Dover about a year ago looking at the traffic from Calais. We were told in Dover that to clear a container from within the EU takes between two and four minutes. To clear a container from outside the EU takes on average one and a quarter hours. When I have put it to leavers and said, “What are you going to do about that?”, I am told, “We can solve it”. That is always the answer: “We can solve it, we can solve Northern Ireland”. When I ask how, we are never given any of the arguments. Dover will come to a halt, which is why the motorways in Kent are all ready for a stacking operation and why there are portaloos being put all over the motorway so that when the lorry drivers are stuck there all night they can use them. Yet we are jeopardising all that. It will take us years to disentangle ourselves from the EU even if we proceed down this particular path.
I believe in a new, further referendum because I trust the people of Britain to have their say. I do not think what was decided three years ago was based upon the facts made available. I believe that a lot of people in this country voted as they did because they felt left out by the political system and by political parties, and they had not been given the chance to have their say. They voted to a large extent for that reason; the other reason was immigration. I believe a new referendum is perfectly justified and a perfectly democratic thing to do. I regret that the people most affected by the decision to leave are the young people—the 16 year-olds—the EU people living here, and British people living in the EU. All three of those groups did not have any chance at all to have their say.
I do not think that take it or leave it is a negotiating position. It is a shabby way of proceeding. People say that Parliament is divided. The country is divided and it is not surprising that Parliament and the Commons are divided. The only way to deal with this is to have a referendum and say to the people, “Tell us again what you think”. I believe that they will have changed their minds between 2016 and now.
Lord James of Blackheath (Con)
My Lords, I have a very tenuous connection to justify taking your time at this late hour of a long debate. On 6 September I participated in a debate in which I tried to run a small amendment to encourage a greater concentration on the issues of sovereignty in whatever we came to as a Brexit solution. I very quickly withdrew it, but somebody got hold of the video clip of it and put it out on the internet—not me, I hasten to add. Within three days I had had more than 3 million hits, nearly all favourable.
I did not know what to do with these, so I suggested on the places where this was occurring that we should put up a copy of a report I had written called the Black Vulture—the Black Vulture being the most obvious alternative I could think of to the Yellowhammer. Yellowhammer deals with the problems that come from a no-deal Brexit; Black Vulture is to deal with the problems that might come from not doing a no-deal Brexit and what would come if we got put into a remain situation instead. I set out 19 questions to which I did not give answers and asked people to consider them for themselves. I expected to get very little response, but I got a flood of mail through the letterbox as well, usually very deeply considered.
Whereas I would have had a bet that the first question they would have dealt with was, “What’s going to happen with defence? Tell us what the EDU is”, it was not. It was my fourth question, which asked, “What is your situation with regard to the possible imposition of the euro as an alternative to the pound if we remain and how do you think it will affect us?” The result on this one was almost unanimous: if this happens it will be a disgrace because they will use qualified majority voting to impose it on us and we will have no choice. This will mean that all our taxes in this country will be sucked in by Europe. We will not have anything left for our own defence forces, our schools, our education or our welfare. All this will be taken by Europe to fund bust European countries. We will not have it. That was certainly the number one point I was getting back.
The next point was, yes indeed, what do we do about the EDU? Are we really giving them our Army, our Navy and our Air Force? They have not had that one for me, but they have got it from a lot of very careless stuff coming out of the EU itself, in which it is pretty well saying that it is going to get so much co-operation from us post remain that they will effectively have control of our Armed Forces and our own security and intelligence services as well. If you ask around and say, “What’s the answer to this?”, the official answer from within government is, “It’s rubbish, of course it couldn’t happen. We shall still be in NATO and we have the protection of NATO”. But people out there have seen that one coming and they have an answer for it. “No”, they say, “if we go into it with NATO then Europe will say, ‘Goody, we’ve got NATO now’, but America will look across and say, ‘If you’re going in with the EU defence and taking your NATO connection with you, we’re out of NATO, and, by the way, we’re out of Five Eyes as well. You can’t do that on the side’”.
All of this would coincide with a lot of the stuff coming out from Madam von der Leyen and her successor in European defence. They ran a conference in Munich in the spring of this year at which they said, “Look, all of this started with the Maastricht treaty. We said we were going to do this and we said we’d have it done by 2019-20. We’re nearly there. Now we’re going to be able to do this once we’ve got past discussion with the UK and we shall go into 2019-20 with everything that we’ve ever wanted”. They are standing on a platform saying this and Mrs von der Leyen or her successor is saying, “And it’d be lovely to have two such beautiful aircraft carriers”. Oh yes, that will go down well with the British public. Then, who is standing beside her but a former Prime Minister of this country? He is not showing dissent, but he is not showing assent either, but what a presence to put on the platform at that time. This has a profound effect. The public out there want to know.
I have a big suggestion to make to the Government, whether they stay, go or whatever they are going to do. They should issue a definitive statement on these two contentious issues and say categorically whether, as the pubic clearly suspect, they have done a private deal with the European Commission to relinquish control of our Armed Forces and our intelligence services. If they have not, they should say categorically that they have not: there is no binding issue which could be triggered post Brexit or if staying on a remain basis or anything; it is simply not an issue. Otherwise, it is going to be a running sore which will disrupt and destroy anything that the Government were going to do on the subject.
I return to my original point about the need to restore our sovereignty. It is the one great unanimous issue. There is no longer a population out there saying, “We want to take back control”. They are saying, “We want our sovereignty back”. They are saying it in every nook and cranny in our national debate. We should not be in doubt: we cannot do anything—either Brexit or remain—without cracking those problems. I thank noble Lords for their time and wish them well in the rest of the debate.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, yesterday in this Chamber, as reported in Hansard, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, the noble Lord, Lord Duncan of Springbank, said:
“It is not the intention of this Government to have Northern Ireland treated any differently from any other part of this, our United Kingdom”.—[Official Report, 1/10/19; col. 1622.]
Will the Minister stand over that statement when he winds up this evening? I do not know how he can, because the document that has just been circulated to us before this debate creates the very thing that most of us feared most: the border up the Irish Sea. If anybody doubts that that is what this is, the Government says in paragraph 4 of this paper:
“The proposal set out in this note would see regulatory checks applying between Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
There are border inspection posts or designated posts of entry as required by EU law. They talk about the boundary of the zone, the zone of regulatory compliance governed by laws into which they have no say, because, of course, Northern Ireland would be in the single market and subject to its rules. Then we are supposed to go into a form of purgatory because this proposal would be that before the end of the transition period, and “every four years afterwards”, the UK will provide an opportunity for a democratic consent to these arrangements.
This would mean that all our subsequent political discourse at every election would be a row over this. While of course I, like every other Member of this House, will have to take time to read the document carefully, at first sight it looks worse to me than the last one, which was the EU withdrawal agreement negotiated by Mrs May. I am not surprised that the DUP Peers have scuttled out of the Chamber, because they set out their views here in one statement after another. Mr Dodds, their deputy leader, said that there would be no internal UK border in the Irish Sea. Now, we do not have one border; we have two borders. Then another colleague goes on to say that,
“there can be no arrangements agreed that compromise the integrity of the UK single market and place barriers, real or perceived, to the free movement of goods, services and capital between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom”.
But there will be. They then say:
“We will not accept any form of regulatory divergence which separates Northern Ireland economically or politically from the rest of the United Kingdom”.
They also said:
“But not in relation to following the rules of the single market or the customs union for Northern Ireland as a generality”.
But not only will agricultural goods be covered; all products will be covered.
Then, of course, the travel correspondent of the DUP, Ian Paisley, says,
“Northern Ireland has not been designated some purgatorial relationship of neither being in or outside the EU but will be treated completely the same as every other component part of the UK”.
No. I just do not know at this stage how the DUP can even look in the mirror in the morning. The red lines that it drew up were that there would be no interruption in the integrity of the United Kingdom. That red line has been broken by these proposals without any doubt whatever.
Diane Dodds MEP said,
“There will be no internal trade borders within the UK”.
Yes, there will.
I had hoped tonight to put forward proposals that I believed would provide an alternative to the backstop. We could make it an offence for UK territory to be used for the transport of goods to the European market that are not compliant. We could indemnify the European Union were it to be the case that it was found that any goods slipped through and entered the EU. I also believe that on to the Good Friday agreement a cross-border body should be created, an additional one by treaty, involving the European Union, the Republic and the United Kingdom where that body would have a role in monitoring and policing the appropriate arrangements on the island.
We also find that these proposals mean that Her Majesty’s Government will allow the EU Court of Justice to administer EU law in Northern Ireland. That was another red line. Therefore, this requires very careful consideration and I am horrified—shocked—that anybody describing themselves as unionist would be not simply accepting but advocating a border up the Irish Sea. They are advocating, because they have signed up to this and they are promoting that, so they are advocating a border up the Irish Sea. I do not know how any unionist can possibly stand in front of the electorate and say that. It is an outrage, and people need to think very carefully where we are going with all of this. I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, said: the decision has been made and we should implement it, but there are ways and means and I really fear that this is not the way or the means.
Lord Robathan (Con)
My Lords, so after three and a quarter years, here we are again discussing Brexit. Actually, there are one or two new things to be discussed, such as this proposal that we have just heard and that the noble Lord, Lord Empey, has been talking about, but basically, there is nothing much that is new. The old arguments have been trotted out, so I will not disappoint the House and will repeat one or two.
Those who voted for a referendum, which I did not, who voted to implement Article 50, who stood on manifestos in 2017 promising to implement the results—
“no deal is better than a bad deal”,
it said in the Conservative Party manifesto—who promised to accept the result at the very beginning shame themselves by their obstructionism. I particularly single out the Liberal Democrats, although it is sad that there are only three here to listen.
Lord Robathan
There are only three Liberal Democrats here to listen to me. These people have avoided listening to me, but they went on for years about how they were campaigning for “a real referendum” on Europe, under Nick Clegg. Paddy Ashdown boasted that he called for a referendum on Europe in 1989 or 1990. Let me quote the late Paddy Ashdown:
“I will forgive no one who does not accept the sovereign voice of the British people … whether it’s by one percent or 20 percent”.
That was on the day of the referendum. Now, the Liberal Democrats have decided, “We will ignore the British people, ignore what they said, because we know better”, notwithstanding 10 years of campaigning for a referendum.
Why have we been called back? While we are here for a total of seven or eight days, we at least are discussing Brexit. Down the other end, an empty House of Commons has been discussing the Domestic Abuse Bill—a very important measure.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
The noble Lord says that it is an important measure, but he seems to be critical of what the House of Commons was discussing. I think he ought to be very careful where he goes with this.
Lord Robathan
As I was saying, it is a very important measure but, as the noble Baroness knows, the Second Reading is unlikely to proceed to law because we are likely to have a general election. I am not saying that it is not important, but there are not many people down in the House of Commons saying that it is important. The Commons is paralysed. It is a zombie Parliament—a dead Parliament, as the Attorney-General has said. We need a general election.
I am going to look at the judgments that brought us back here. I am not going to talk much about the Supreme Court judgment, although a little, but more about the judgment of 11 September. The Supreme Court talked of precedents, but there is none that I can see, unless we refer to the dictatorial monarchs of the 17th century: the Supreme Court judgment indeed refers to 1611.
On 11 September, the Lord Chief Justice, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, together with the Master of the Rolls and the President of the Queen’s Bench Division said:
“It is not a matter for the courts”.
I am going to quote extensively from that judgment and from Lord Bingham, who was highly regarded and described as the outstanding lawyer of his generation. The judgment of 11 September said:
“The refusal of the courts to review political questions is well established”.
It quoted Lord Bingham saying:
“The more purely political (in a broad or narrow sense) a question is, the more appropriate it will be for political resolution and the less likely it is to be an appropriate matter for judicial decision”.
In another quote from another case, Lord Bingham said that,
“matters of potentially great importance are left to the judgment … of political leaders (whether and when to seek a dissolution, for instance) …Where constitutional arrangements retain scope for the exercise of political judgement they permit a flexible response to differing and unpredictable events in a way which the application of strict rules would preclude”.
The judgment went on:
“Almost all important decisions made by the Executive have a political hue to them”.
In another case—this was only four years ago—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, Lord Sumption and Lord Hodge said:
“The issue was non-justiciable because it was political”.
The judgment went on:
“The Prime Minister’s decision that Parliament should be prorogued at the time and for the duration chosen and the advice given to Her Majesty to do so in the present case were political”.
Surely, we all agree with that. It says in paragraph 64:
“The constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom have evolved to achieve a balance between the three branches of the state; and the relationship between the Executive and Parliament is governed in part by statute and in part by convention. Standing Orders of both Houses elaborate the procedural relationship between the Executive and Parliament. This is territory into which the courts should be slow indeed to intrude by recognising an expanded concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty”,
and it concludes that,
“the decision of the Prime Minister to advise Her Majesty the Queen to prorogue Parliament is not justiciable in Her Majesty’s courts”.
I do not think anybody would disagree that politics and Parliament are not just paralysed; I fear that we are now despised because of our failure to respect the referendum result. The Supreme Court, I regret to say, has trespassed into politics and that is a very dangerous route down which to go. We have on the one hand three distinguished judges—the Lord Chief Justice et cetera—backed up by Bingham, Sumption and others, who thought that it was dangerous. In what is a febrile, heated and angry atmosphere, many are wondering why—because nobody can understand it —11 distinguished lawyers in the Supreme Court can completely contradict these other three distinguished lawyers beforehand. Some are wondering whether the Supreme Court has become part of an establishment remainer plot. As it happens, I do not think so and believe absolutely in the rule of law but—
Lord Robathan
I hear the Liberal Democrats laughing. I hope that they are going to pursue their policy even further, because that will lead them to the same result they had in 2015.
The increasing interference of courts is taking us to a continental system. Nobody asked for it; nobody has voted for it. It has been exacerbated by the ECHR being incorporated into law and by the creation of the Supreme Court. I agree with the Lord Chief Justice and not with the Supreme Court. To this House of unelected, unaccountable, privileged Peers, I say again that our whole political system is discredited. We need to leave on 31 October to get the poison out of our political discourse.
Lord Haskel (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to get back to basics because next week I have a birthday: a birthday that places me firmly in the generation that looked to the idea of a European Union as a means of maintaining peace in Europe, the rule of law, free liberal democracy, mutual respect and collaboration through economic renewal and progress. Yes, we were idealists then. However, this view has gradually became dated and replaced by people saying, “Let’s go it alone and control our own borders—have freedom to make up our own rules and regulations, and to trade with anybody we wish”. We now know that this has divided the country. It has divided us into those who are determined to leave, whatever the cost, and those who are alarmed and concerned about the cost and disruption and seek to minimise it. I belong to the latter group. Why? It is because of the size, the cost, the enormity of the disruption and the time it will take to adapt. All these things cause me great alarm.
In spite of all the assurances of a smooth exit, I think the Government have become alarmed too. They are desperately trying to prepare for the disruption through a whole ornithology of studies. We all know about Yellowhammer and the emergency plans to deal with the disruption of supplies but there is also Snow Bunting, which deals with the preparations the police have to make in the event of social disruption. Then there is Kingfisher, a scheme to save companies from collapse, presumably with financial support; and Black Swan, a picture of worst-case scenarios. Yellowhammer has been published in all its worrying detail. Will the Minister publish the other reports, or are they just too worrisome to contemplate?
There is yet more to worry about, such as Operation Brock and the disruption to ferry and road traffic that can be caused by delay or non-compliance. Yesterday, we heard about the dangers to health in losing access to food safety alerts. We know about the threats of violence to our politicians, particularly women. We know that civil servants too are being targeted, with one party leader accusing them of not doing a neutral job. What is the name of the bird that will help to protect our politicians and our civil servants from these pressures, so that they can properly carry out their tasks?
We in Parliament also have a considerable task. On 5 September in the Commons at col. 394, the leader of the other place said that there were 580 statutory instruments which have to be approved by Parliament so that no agreement would “happen smoothly”. He indicated that some 200 were in progress. Can the Minister tell us how many instruments still have to be scrutinised or debated, and will he ensure that none of them will be debated or scrutinised after they come into force?
We were promised a whole range of new opportunities. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what these opportunities will be when we leave the EU, with or without an agreement. The Chancellor of the Exchequer could not tell the Conservative Party conference. All he could do was to ask people to identify EU regulations that we can improve or remove—a kind of Red Tape Challenge. Is this really the best that the Government can do? If it is, fairly soon even the Brexiteers and the Government’s own supporters will turn on them.
Now that all these difficulties, problems and costs are apparent, I ask the Minister: do we really want to inflict them on ourselves? Do we really want to have years of uncertainty in grappling with the consequences, known and unknown? Surely, now is the time that people deserve a chance to think again, as any sensible person would do. Indeed, when I compare this scenario with the one that I described all those years ago, it does not seem dated to me now. The opportunity to think again would be an excellent birthday present next week.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, the Prime Minister is right: we need to get Brexit done. The longer the delay, the more divided we will become—if that is even possible. Last week, bloodletting in the other place plumbed new depths of acrimony and abuse. It was shocking, but hardly surprising. After three years of deadlock, remainers and Brexiteers have become more and more entrenched in their positions, allowing anger and resentment to replace reasoned debate.
Meanwhile, the frustration of our voters at Parliament’s inability to honour its commitment to the referendum result grows by the day. We have reached such a point that many outside the Westminster bubble no longer care whether we leave with a deal, without a deal, or with just half a deal. Surely the European elections were warning enough. Yet we appear to have learnt absolutely nothing from the dramatic success of the Brexit Party. Our heads are deep in the sand. This is how revolutions—like the one that destroyed my Russian family—begin. It beggars belief that, three years and three months after the referendum, Brexit remains undelivered. At the time of the last extension, President Tusk urged us to use the time well. Can we honestly say that we have done so?
Baroness Meyer
Exactly. Brexit delayed is Brexit denied. Yet, with the latest deadline looming, Members of this House and the other place are scheming, yet again, to frustrate the wish of the majority of the British people and to undermine the Prime Minister’s determination to deliver Brexit—and, may I say, with a deal; that is what he trying to do. This plotting is as calculating as it is unworthy. It is, to quote Sir John Major, “political chicanery”. This is not a struggle between two types of democracy: parliamentary and plebiscite; it is a blending of the two. It was Parliament itself that agreed the referendum, undertook to implement it and, by a thumping majority, voted to trigger Article 50. Because it makes Brexit more difficult and revoke more likely, the Benn Act is, in reality, a distortion of parliamentary democracy, not its triumphant assertion.
As for negotiation, to rob the Prime Minister of the option to walk away from the negotiating table is self-defeating madness. It is like playing the Wimbledon finals with a hole in your racquet. We have to ask the question: what is behind this Westminster scheming to get another extension of Article 50?
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
Would the noble Baroness agree that it is in fact like trying to play the finals while threatening to walk off if you do not win the first round?
Baroness Meyer
I could not agree with that because, if the Prime Minister is to be able to negotiate, he needs to know that his Parliament and this country are behind him. It is the only way to negotiate—if you play poker and you show your trump card in advance, how can you negotiate?
What is behind this Westminster scheming to get another extension of Article 50? We are told that it is to avoid a no-deal Brexit, however that may be defined. In reality, no deal covers several outcomes, none of which can be described as “crashing out”. The plain truth is that we cannot predict with any certainty the economic outcome of Brexit—whichever form it takes—for this country or for the European Union, because this has never been done before. There have been scores, maybe hundreds, of predictions and analyses. For some, no deal is the deepest pit of hell, for others the promised land. Not for nothing did Thomas Carlyle call economics the “dismal science”. I experienced that personally when I worked in financial services. Today, our crystal balls are cloudier than ever.
Some will say that the delay should be used for a second referendum—I am beyond my time, I speak too slowly. This is often wrapped in the pious hypocrisy of a “people’s vote”. But can we do this again? Does anybody in their right mind want to go through that again? I need to finish, because my time is up.
There are other people trying to revoke Article 50. I never thought I would say it, but we must be grateful to the Liberal Democrats. Their leader has given the game away by saying that if we were to vote leave in a second referendum, she would refuse to implement it. At least she has had the decency to come clean and persuade her party to support revoke. We need to move on; we need to try to come together and support the Prime Minister, who is trying to get a deal.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, for once we have a debate that is timely, following as it does so quickly in the wake of the Prime Minister’s conference speech and indeed the publication of the documents delivered this afternoon to Brussels. Having said that, one really must ask whether the “take it or leave it” approach is a basis on which to secure the mutual trust that is essential if we are to achieve a harmonious relationship with our European neighbours.
I have quickly read the documents published today and, however they are dressed up, these proposals will place Northern Ireland in a different relationship with Europe to that of Britain, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, noted a moment ago. The reality is, if the UK is outside a European customs union area and the Irish Republic is inside that customs union, there will inevitably be a border between the north and south of Ireland. There are only two ways of avoiding this: first, if both the UK and the Irish Republic remain in a customs union—and that could of course still be possible even if the UK ceases being a member of the European Union—or, alternatively, by the reunification of Ireland. This is an option that, in our many Brexit debates, we have skirted around. Now, following the Johnson ultimatum, it cannot be avoided. It would be subject of course to the endorsement of the majority of electors in both the north and the south. The world of politics is full of unintended consequences, and one such example is that Brexit may lead to a united Ireland.
Those Members of this House or another place who still advocate or concur with a no-deal Brexit must face this reality: their course of action may well lead to the end of the United Kingdom in its present form. Such constitutional change could well accelerate Scotland’s departure from the union, which would then confront Wales with a fundamental decision on our future as well. Noble Lords might imagine that such a scenario would have its attractions for me, as an advocate of maximum Welsh autonomy. But let me make it quite clear: it does not. The maximum independence for our respective nations must be within a framework of the free movement of people, goods and money. Such a framework is provided by the European Union, providing free movement for its 28 member states. That is one reason, though not the only reason, why I so strongly support the UK remaining in the European Union.
The Prime Minister could have announced today that he was willing to compromise and interpret Brexit as being delivered within a framework that would permit the ongoing free movement of people, goods and money between the UK outside the EU and Ireland within the EU. That would implicitly mean free movement with the whole of the EU. Had that been so, I too would have been willing to compromise—as, indeed, Plaid Cymru did when we accepted the joint White Paper published by the Welsh Government in 2017 on that matter and along those lines. But Mr Johnson will not compromise, so those of us who wish to retain such links with our continent cannot retain confidence in this Government. That lack of confidence is reinforced by the determination of Mr Johnson to leave the EU without a deal if no agreement is achieved by 31 October. Crashing out in this way would be economically devastating for Wales, as many noble Lords have argued many times. I shall not repeat those arguments, although I note today with interest that Northern Ireland is being offered a new deal while Wales is not.
The Prime Minister once again today indicated that he will not ask for the 31 October cliff edge to be delayed in order to secure a deal. In taking such a stance, he is specifically refusing to respect the legislative revisions endorsed by this Chamber. If in two weeks’ time there is no agreement with the EU and no undertaking to extend the Article 50 date, then MPs must surely vote no confidence in Mr Johnson and his Government. I hope they do so and follow that with a resolution of the House indicating their support for another senior MP, be that Kenneth Clarke, Margaret Beckett or whoever, to head a cross-party Government to sort out this whole sorry saga. The Speaker could convey the name of that person to Her Majesty the Queen, even if the Prime Minister were unwilling to do so. That new Government should then move rapidly to reach a compromise deal with the European Union which involves rethinking our customs union relationship with our continent.
I realise that such a version of Brexit will not be acceptable to all Brexiteers; but neither is a no-deal Brexit acceptable to all leave voters, let alone all remainers. That is why there must be a confirmatory referendum in which the Brexit proposed by the cross-party Government is tested against the status quo. Such a binding referendum could then be held early in the new year, allowing Brexit to be finally resolved by March. That would enable an election to follow in May with the Brexit issue resolved and every party able to address the pressing social, environmental and economic problems facing these islands. I appeal to MPs of all parties to reject the Boris bluster and replace him with a Prime Minister who will respect the legislation on the Brexit timetable and allow us to find a consensus way forward.
Viscount Trenchard (Con)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, although I regret that what I have to say will not be to his liking.
I thank my noble friend Lord Callanan for introducing this debate. I am not a lawyer, but I am surprised that the learned justices of the Supreme Court ruled as they did last week. It seems to me that they have changed the constitution by their decision that the Prime Minister’s use of his prerogative powers in advising Her Majesty the Queen to prorogue Parliament was justiciable, contrary to the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls. Their justification seems to be based on their opinion that the effect of prorogation upon the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme. However, prorogation reduced the number of sitting days by only three days from what was anyway scheduled. Furthermore, both your Lordships’ House and another place had clearly passed the decision on Brexit to the people to decide by referendum, promising to carry out their decision. I believe that those responsible for the passage of the surrender Act, and indeed the Cooper-Boles Act, have had a much more extreme effect on our democracy.
I agree with the Government that it would be much better to leave the European Union with an agreed deal, providing a transition period to the end of next year. However, those who have tried and continue to try to take no deal off the table have done the country a gross disservice by seriously weakening our negotiating position. I wholly agree with the Prime Minister that it is time to get Brexit done and move on. We have already postponed our departure from the EU twice, at considerable cost to businesses and unnecessarily prolonging uncertainty. The surrender Act significantly reduces the incentive for the EU negotiators to show flexibility in revising the withdrawal agreement to one that might find support in another place. I commend the work of the Alternative Arrangements Commission, whose report published in July has, I believe, assisted the Government in putting forward the very reasonable proposals put to Mr Juncker today.
I was in Japan earlier this month and was able to discuss the current situation with several senior politicians, civil servants and businesspeople. They are, of course, concerned about the potential disruption to trade between the UK and Europe. However, the Japanese Government very much want the UK to use its regained freedom in trade policy to accede to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. They want us as a member not only because we are the one country most likely to spur the United States to reconsider its decision to withdraw; they want us there in our own right as a G7 economy committed to furthering a global trading system based on competition and free markets, where nation states are free to adopt regulatory regimes that suit their own needs and priorities based on mutual recognition and equivalence of outcomes, rather than state-led harmonised regulation, with excessive reliance on the precautionary principle, as increasingly adopted by the EU.
Six of the 11 members of the TPP are Commonwealth countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Singapore, and the Governments of those countries have all also shown support for UK accession. The negotiations with Japan on an FTA and on the TPP could be a single-pocket negotiation. While shackled to the EU’s customs union and single market, we would not be able to join the TPP or enter into any other FTAs. I welcome the new Government’s policy of seeking a trading relationship with the EU which is as frictionless as possible, given our absolute requirement to be free to develop our independent trade policy.
I give the example of a major Japanese pharmaceutical company whose CEO I have known well for nearly 40 years. When Brexit came along, he was initially upset and disappointed; it has cost his company some $8 million to strengthen his EU-based companies and obtain the necessary licences from the European Medicines Agency, requiring some duplication with the group’s UK companies. Now he is confident, deal or no deal, that he can research, develop, manufacture and distribute medicines in the UK and in the EU 27. Now he wants the upside of Brexit. His expectation is that the UK will move to a more innovation-friendly regulatory system, which means divergence from EMA rules. He is confident that if the UK will do this, it can remain the best place in the world for a life sciences company such as his to research and develop new therapies and medicines. However, noble Lords opposite and, indeed, some of my noble friends are determined to ensure that if Brexit takes place at all, it should be only a very soft one whereby we remain under the EU’s trade policy control and have no say in new laws that it brings in as it moves to further harmonise and expand its competences at the expense of its member states. Your Lordships’ House has even passed an amendment to the Trade Bill to require continued adherence to EMA rules and oversight after Brexit.
There is no point at all in being half in and half out of the EU. I strongly believe that the way to maximise prosperity for our country and all its people in future decades will be to get Brexit done on 31 October, as the Prime Minister promises to do.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, because he has tellingly spelled out to me why I feel so strongly on the issues before us. Of course, they are not simply about Brexit; they are about a committed bunch of people determined to change this country into a deregulated authoritarian state akin to something in south-east Asia, unencumbered by all feelings of responsibility, nationally or internationally, to hold them back. That is a ruthless economic model, and that is why a stand at this juncture is crucial.
A great deal has been said about Ireland in this debate. I have watched the affairs of Northern Ireland and touched on them to some extent in past ministerial experience with great interest. The Good Friday agreement was not the end of the story. It was not a settlement. It was an opportunity for Northern Ireland to rebuild itself as a different kind of society, free of violence. I take my hat off to the countless people in Northern Ireland who have worked for that. It is not just the people who hit the headlines; it is all the people at local and community level who have been steadily transforming the whole nature of Northern Ireland.
That is why the issues of Northern Ireland are crucial and central to our responsibilities. What has been very important in the change in Northern Ireland has been the sense of equivalence. Instead of having all the British traditions, the minority was supported by the concept of the European Charter, which spells out the rights that were so important to all the community. Of course, we decided not to endorse the charter for the future. That means that we have a double responsibility now to make sure that we get it right.
I have argued all my life that in many ways an unwritten constitution is stronger than the written constitution, because it represents what is acceptable to the broadest possible cross-section of political players in society, but also to society as a whole. I have begun to question my position on this, because it depends on the players respecting the consensus as it has emerged. At the moment, we are being encouraged to sweep that consensus to one side in favour of the narrow objectives of the present Administration.
I have therefore come to the conclusion that indeed we must have a second referendum, because we must be able to say to the people, “Is this what you want?” on anything we may have been able to negotiate, or, “Would you prefer to remain part of the European Union?”. I have many misgivings about going down that road, but if you have misgivings, you must decide in the end what is necessary, and I have decided in the end what is necessary.
My misgivings are that I think that referenda have been amply demonstrated to have absolutely no place whatever in a parliamentary representative democracy. In a parliamentary representative democracy, we the representatives of the people—particularly in the other House, of course—are here to do what we believe to be right and appropriate and then give account to people in a general election. If we say, “Oh, on this issue the people will decide”, and then tell the parliamentary representative democracy that its job is simply to implement what the people are saying, that is a denial of the whole concept of the responsibility and integrity that has gone into our parliamentary system in the past. We should be very careful not to go down the road of referenda ever again—but, having said that, I think that on this occasion there is no alternative.
I remain with this thought: whatever happens in this story, whatever the end of the road, a certain fundamental truth remains for Britain. It is the prototype of a nation dependent on its relationships to the world. How on earth does the vindictive wartime rhetoric that we are getting from the Government help us to build relationships with the world? How does it lead the country to understand its interdependence with the world and the fact that our future stability and prosperity in every sense depend on us being positive players together with people across the world, starting with our European neighbours, as a way of ensuring the well-being of our children?
I find this a tragedy. Everything is going into a negative, psychologically manifest, insecure approach, which is saying, “Oh, the world is a threat. Europe is a threat. There are opponents; we must defeat them”. That has no place in any sensible sense of responsibility to our children.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I am glad to have listened to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and I thought for one brief moment that I was going to actually agree with him on something, because he said he had growing reservations about our unwritten constitution—but then that took him off to saying there should be a second referendum. I do not quite follow that one.
I will talk about the judgment of the Supreme Court and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, which is remarkable on two counts. The first is that it was unanimous. All 11 judges on the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion, when we all know that the judiciary is totally divided on this issue. Does this not raise slight questions in people’s minds as to how they came to a unanimous conclusion when the previous court, the Divisional Court, had voted the other way? They overturned the verdict of the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and the Master of the Rolls. Was it not rather strange that they should reach a unanimous verdict when so many other very distinguished judges across the country had decided the other way?
Lord McNally
What is the noble Lord implying? He should not just put a question mark up. The clue as to why there is a difference is in the name “Supreme Court”. Why does the noble Lord think all 11 came to the same conclusion? By raising it, he is implying that there must have been some collusion or malfunction. Why ask the question without giving us an answer?
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Because I do not know what went on in the previous discussions of the Supreme Court; I was not there. All I am saying is that it is very strange that the conclusion the court came to was completely unanimous. This is very odd.
Lord Goldsmith
Perhaps I could help the noble Lord. The Supreme Court judges said they were all of the opinion that parliamentary sovereignty was what was at stake. As they made very clear, they were not taking a decision for or against Brexit. They were talking simply about the role of Parliament, and how wrong it therefore was for the Prime Minister to stop Parliament sitting. I do not see any difficulty at all in seeing why they all took that opinion. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord McNally. To suggest something improper about our Supreme Court, as the noble Lord was, is absolutely inconsistent with the rule of law and the role we should take.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, is putting words in my mouth. I did not say anything improper. I just said that, considering the judiciary is completely divided on this issue, it was remarkable that all 11 members of the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion. The issue at heart was whether the business of proroguing Parliament was judiciary. The previous court had said it was not judiciary and the Supreme Court said it was. What has actually happened—
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
No. I have given way to so many people, and we are always being told that we cannot go beyond six minutes.
As everybody will know, the judgment of the Supreme Court alluded to the fact that a number of judgments had been made that had political connotations. This is a step much further: the Supreme Court making a political decision. What has the judgment that we could not prorogue Parliament actually resulted in? We have sat for another eight days while we go over all the old ground. One of the reasons we are where we are now is that Parliament is incapable of reaching any conclusion on what it should actually do about leaving the EU. Have we advanced any further by the fact that we have sat for longer? No, we have not. Have the Government been held to account? Well, on the margin, I suppose. Has it really made any difference to anything? No, it has not—for the simple reason that nothing is actually going to happen until the EU Council meets on 17-18 October. After that, of course, it will be decided whether the proposals we have put forward are acceptable, whether there is a deal to be put to Parliament and so forth. It is after the Queen’s Speech that the Government will have to be held to account, and very little has been achieved by Parliament sitting over all these extra days.
The real problem is that if the Supreme Court says, “We’re going to get into the business of not just interpreting but actually making the law, and we’re going to make political decisions when we do that”, as sure as night follows day, Parliament will say, “If the judges are going to make these political decisions, they must be appointed by Parliament”. That is what will happen if we go on down this road. What will happen? A Select Committee in the House of Commons will interview candidates for the Supreme Court. It will ask them about their political views: which way they voted in the last election, what their views are on social matters such as—
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
No, I am not going to give way any more. I have given way endless times, and it does not seem to be taken into account when I am gone after.
That is what will happen. They will be asked about all these things, and we will move over to an American system whereby when there is a Conservative Administration a lot of conservative judges will be appointed, and when there is a Labour Administration a lot of socialists will be appointed. Is that what we want? No, it certainly is not. We do not admire the American system of having politicised judges and a politicised Supreme Court. It would be a very retrograde step.
I am not taking any notice of my noble friend on the Front Bench. I have had so many interventions that I will have to speak a little longer. We are between a rock and a hard place. If we have a written constitution, we will have to completely review the role of the Commons versus the Lords and the relative powers of the two Chambers. We will have to look at the Commons versus the Executive and the role of the Speaker. We will have to look at the judiciary as well. I was rather hoping that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, would reach the conclusion that we should move from an unwritten constitution to a written one. That is the only way that we will save the institutions of this country. Too many people are trying to push the boundaries of a system that has built up over the years and we are now moving into very dangerous territory indeed.
The Duke of Wellington (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I declare, as always, my European interests as detailed in the register. This is the first opportunity I have had to speak in this Chamber since I resigned the Conservative Whip on 4 September, and I feel I ought to explain why I did so.
When the Prime Minister advised the early prorogation of Parliament, I felt, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham,
“unhappy at the timing and length of the prorogation and its motivation”,
and,
“unpersuaded by the reasons given”.
A few days later, the Commons voted to allow the so-called Benn Bill—which requires the Prime Minister to request an extension in the absence of a deal—to be debated. I know I would have voted with the 21 Conservatives who supported the Motion and enabled it to pass. Those 21 had the Whip removed and were expelled from the parliamentary party. As a result, I felt that the only honourable course open to me was to resign the Whip in this House.
As we all know, the Prorogation was subsequently declared unlawful by 11 to zero by the Supreme Court. How unfortunate that it was a Conservative Prime Minister who should have acted in this way and broken a convention of this nature that had lasted for so long.
The ultras and certain newspapers regularly accuse those who do not wish to leave without a deal, or who try to prevent the country leaving without one, of not accepting the result of the referendum. This is simply not true, and I must repeat what I have said many times before. In the referendum I voted to remain. I much regret that by a small percentage the country voted to leave. In their 2017 general election manifestos both major parties committed to honour the result of the referendum. Since then, I have been of the opinion that, regrettably, we must now leave the European Union. However, it would not be in the national interest to leave without a deal, with all the serious consequences this would have for the economy, for small businesses, for farmers, for the supply of medicines, for security, for investment and for the union. The list goes on.
I sincerely hope that the Prime Minister will be able to negotiate a deal in the next two weeks and get it agreed by the European Council and by Parliament. Should he be unable to do so, he must by law and in the national interest seek a further delay, frustrating and disappointing as that might be. We cannot and must not leave without a deal.
Once a delay has been secured, if that is necessary, it would surely be expedient to have a general election. If the current House of Commons is unable to support Mrs May’s deal—which I would have voted for, and I would vote for any new deal brought to this House—and as the Government no longer have a majority in the Commons, we must have a general election. Then it will probably be desirable for the next Parliament, however it is made up, to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. For centuries it has been more than a convention that a Government who do not have the confidence of the House of Commons resign and call an election. I should add here that I am still not persuaded of the merits of a second referendum.
Even if the Prime Minister secures a deal at the next European Council, I fear that an extension might still be necessary to enable the parliamentary procedures here and the ratification by the European Parliament in Strasbourg to take place. I am glad that Parliament is sitting this week and that we are having this debate today.
We should all hope that the Prime Minister, with his clear determination, is indeed able to negotiate a new deal. But should he fail, there is no doubt that we must seek an extension. I wish him well in the negotiations and I hope, with limited conviction, that he can achieve a new deal.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are now in the endgame of Brexit: less than four weeks to go, a choice between crashing out, staying in or some sort of ingenious or fantastical deal over the Irish border.
The Lords, we all accept, is a revising Chamber. We look at the detail of what the Government propose and whether it is workable. Some noble Lords have spoken of the referendum three years ago giving “instructions” from the British people to Parliament, but those instructions did not go into any detail. They did not tell us whether “the people” wanted to maintain co-operation between police forces and exchanges of data on crime and terrorism, and they did not tell us whether the UK should stay in the European space programme or the Joint European Torus on fusion research.
Boris Johnson spoke this morning of the JET Culham research campus as a British asset, but there is a reason it is called the Joint European Torus, and it is not clear yet whether we are planning to shoulder its full cost and staffing ourselves. It is in the Henley constituency and it has a European school. He was deliberately misleading his audience.
The Prime Minister, we know, is not a details man. He showed his eccentric and limited grasp of the details of trade policy in a speech in New York last week, which I happened to catch on television. In it he took as his prime examples of UK exports that would benefit from deregulated access to the US market four items: socks, cauliflower, haggis and lamb. The Minister must be familiar with the research behind this statement. Can he therefore tell us what proportion of UK exports is currently composed of cauliflowers, what scale of expansion in domestic cauliflower production is envisaged, and how easy it will be to supply cauliflowers to California while they are still fresh? I had understood that the UK was at present a net importer of cauliflowers and that it produces them for only one month a year. However, the Prime Minister must understand the sector much better than I do, since he placed more emphasis on that than on high technology, the creative industries or services.
In his update last week, the Prime Minister accused Parliament of living in a fantasy world. I see Mr Johnson and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, as living in an alternative universe. They and their allies told us three years ago that negotiations with the EU would be quick and easy. They also said that the eurozone was about to collapse, that staying within the EU would leave us “shackled to a corpse”, and that the EU was a “superstate” over which we had no influence.
Now Dominic Cummings says that leaving without a deal will be “a walk in the park”. Mr Johnson says, “Let’s get it finished”, as though there will be nothing more to negotiate after 31 October and no more financial contributions to shared European programmes. Several speeches in this debate have clarified that Britain’s future relationship with the EU remains to be negotiated, in principle and in detail. At best, we will find ourselves a second and poorer Switzerland; at worst, an offshore island like the Irish Free State 50 years ago.
I listened to the Prime Minister’s conference speech this morning. He has a wonderful sense of comic timing—he would have had a successful career as a stand-up comedian. However, he wears his principles lightly and he happily propounds contradictory statements one after another. His best comic line was entirely nonsensical, and I think that I ought to quote it:
“When the chlorinated chickens waddle from the hencoop where they are hiding, that is the vision of the country that we will put to the people”.
I am sure that that is entirely clear to all noble Lords present. For me, the worst contradiction was between his declaration—“I love Europe”—and his use of the language of war to describe our relations with the continent.
After the referendum in 2016, Boris Johnson wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph that claimed that Britain would remain in the EU single market after Brexit. Reportedly, that was one reason that Michael Gove decided that, as he then declared,
“I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead”.
Gove was right then, as was Johnson, but both changed their minds.
We have heard some of the wilder interpretations of our difficulties with Brexit in this debate, which remind me of the overlap between Brexit believers, climate change deniers and other conspiracy theorists. The noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord James—I do not see the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in his place at the moment—clearly see the EU as an evil empire, although the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, prefers to define it as the Soviet Union rather than the usual depiction of it as the German Empire. The noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, ascribes the lack of progress with Brexit to “scheming and plotting”—by, I assume, malign forces in Parliament and elsewhere. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, even suspects a deep judicial plot.
As several noble Lords have said, we are also straining Britain’s constitutional settlement. On the “Today” programme this morning, the Conservative Party chairman, James Cleverly, said:
“There is little point in electing representatives unless we listen to them”.
I cheered up immensely. However, he was actually referring to the DUP and not the UK Parliament. As far as the UK Parliament is concerned, the Prime Minister is whipping up the populist theme of the people against—I assume, an allegedly corrupt—Parliament. That is very dangerous for British democracy. Democracies can die if political leaders cease to defend their principles. Democracy is not just about voting but about the rule of law, respect for an ordered political process, freedom of speech, the toleration of dissent, and limits on and careful legislative scrutiny of executive power.
When the Attorney-General declares, “This is a dead Parliament”; when the Daily Mail declares that the Supreme Court’s recent judgment saw democracy begin to die, as it did the other day; and when the Prime Minister describes an Act of Parliament as the “surrender Act”, we are drifting on to very dangerous ground.
The Minister may remember the Queen’s Speech of two years ago, which set out an ambitious legislative agenda to prepare for an orderly Brexit. Of the list of Bills then produced, the taxation Bill passed, as did the Nuclear Safeguards Bill and the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill. The Trade Bill has gone through both Houses and is waiting for ping-pong. The immigration, Fisheries and Agriculture Bills are still waiting for Commons Report stage. As Jacob Rees-Mogg admitted in the Commons last week, fear of amendment has led to government delay.
This means that—although the Minister may try to assure us that the necessary legislative framework will be in place for the UK to leave on 31 October—that can happen only if the Government are given Henry VIII powers to put through a very large number of statutory instruments to allow them to push a massive legislative programme through in two weeks; otherwise, we will not be ready and will need to extend.
This week, the Mail on Sunday headlined allegations from “a senior Number 10 source”—in other words, close to the Prime Minister—that:
“The Government is working on extensive investigations into Dominic Grieve, Oliver Letwin and Hilary Benn and their involvement with foreign powers and the funding of their activities. … The drafting of … legislation in collusion with foreign powers must be fully investigated”.
Later in the article, Philip Hammond’s name was added to this list of potential traitors. Number 10 thinks that three recent Conservative Cabinet Ministers have now gone over to the enemy.
The hostile foreign power with which the Prime Minister’s Office alleged that they were colluding was not Russia or China but France, an ally of the UK for more than 100 years. The Prime Minister’s frequent references to “our friends in Europe” presumably includes the French. But refighting the Second World War, for this pocket Churchill, makes him contradict the whole idea of friendship with our neighbours across the channel, through references to “surrender”, “traitors”, “betrayal”, even “the Dunkirk spirit” as the war is endlessly replayed.
We know that the Prime Minister likes to compare himself to Churchill. The press increasingly compares him to Trump: constantly campaigning rather than governing, dividing the country while talking of uniting it. Watching the Prime Minister’s update to the Commons last Wednesday, I thought more of the comparison with Viktor Orban, the authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, who has coined the phrase “illiberal democracy”, by which he means democracy in name only, without the rule of law and without independent media. Like Boris Johnson, he started off as a social liberal. I even shared a platform with him at a conference in 1997 when he was seen to be one of the rising liberal modernisers in eastern Europe. But then he discovered that appealing to nationalist resentments, attacking the European Union, sneering at intellectuals and demonising immigrants whipped up public emotions and consolidated his hold on power.
On the Conservative Benches behind the Prime Minister last Wednesday, Brexiter MPs were attacking the “liberal establishment” as the core of the alleged parliamentary plot to thwart the will of the people. The liberal establishment, as I understand it, includes the mainstream media—except the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, but including above all, the BBC, of course—as well as experts of all kinds, the universities and the academic class, the churches, the judges and the Civil Service. That covers most of us present in this Chamber; it includes people who think, who have respect for evidence and who believe in reasoned debate. The populist right, which has taken over the Conservative Party, defines itself against this as the illiberal anti-establishment, speaking for the people against the elite. Noble Lords need only look at Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson himself to see how ludicrous their claim to represent the people against the elite is.
I can think of two earlier instances of the Tory party losing its mind. The first was in 1687-88, when Tories supported the King against Parliament and patriots such as General John Churchill appealed to a foreign power—the Dutch—to invade Britain in what we now remember as the Glorious Revolution. The Tories at that point were supported, politically and financially, by the authoritarian French. The second instance was in 1913-14 over Ireland, when Tory politicians fanned the flames in Ulster, coming close to promoting civil war against the elected Government in Westminster. We were saved from that threat of civil conflict by the disastrous outbreak of the First World War. We have to hope that this third bout of madness will not lead to another such political, economic and constitutional disaster. We appeal to those reasonable Conservatives—followers of the one-nation tradition, from Disraeli to Macmillan to Cameron—to help us return British politics from right-wing populism to reasoned debate.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Whitty confessed that he is going to weep on 31 October if we leave then. For myself, I have booked to see “Dracula”, the ballet, that night, which somehow seemed rather appropriate.
I am afraid I have to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton—and it is not just because I am wearing the Lady Hale tribute brooch. He asked what we have achieved by sitting for the extra days. The first thing is that we are able to be here today to discuss the proposals, which are incredibly important to this country, that were published at 3 o’clock this afternoon. The second outcome of that hearing is that it shows that there is a limit to a Prime Minister’s authority—which is particularly important at the moment, when Cabinet fails to restrain a Prime Minister, knowing nothing either of that application for Prorogation or indeed of the publication of today’s proposals.
I will say one other thing to the noble Lord. When people do not like the outcome of a court case and start challenging the judges, it is a serious and dangerous matter, especially for a parliamentarian. It is we, above everyone else, who should reflect on and respect the separation of powers.
The Minister has some major questions to answer this evening. I urge him not to bluster or blag, because we are at too serious a time. First, to repeat the central question posed by my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith, we need to know whether the Government abide by the law—not just in general, but a specific law, the Benn Act. No ifs, no buts, no fingers crossed, he said, no early “please reject our request” or parallel letters. The Benn Act, as we have heard, does not reject no deal but simply says, much as the withdrawal Act requires a deal to be agreed by the Commons, that no deal must be approved by the Commons, or else, if there is no agreed deal, an extension must be sought. As the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, said, that is in the national interest, as well as in accordance with the law.
Can we avoid any nonsense about there being defects in the Act? It was passed through both Houses, which is when Ministers should have engaged to resolve any shortcomings, if they thought there were any, because it was quite obvious at the time that it was going to become the law of the land.
We should heed the wise advice of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, that, even if these new proposals are the basis for an agreement, it will not be possible by 19 or indeed 31 October. To take the Prime Minister at his words, today’s proposals are the “broad landing zone” in which a deal can begin to take shape. They are probably the basis of a deal, but not by 31 October. Anyway, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, suggested, that particular date is hardly sacrosanct, other than in the Prime Minister’s rhetoric. As the noble Baroness, Lady Altman, said, even Brexiteers never dreamed it was going to be 31 October on a no-deal basis.
So we must be clear that we will need the extension allowed for in the law of the land, as Parliament has decided, if it is not possible to have a deal by the end of this month. Will the Government clearly state that they will obey the Benn Act?
Secondly, to help the Commons decide whether to accept no deal, to help Parliament debate the issue, and to help the public understand its implications, the Minister needs to spell out the remaining costs and risks, after all possible mitigation, of a no-deal exit. What do the Government estimate it will cost UK plc, and particularly the UK citizens most immediately affected, either those living elsewhere in the EU or in Gibraltar? Given that either the EU Council or the European Parliament might not agree to these proposals, we have to continue to ensure that we do not leave without a deal. And we need to see the updated Yellowhammer assessment and the Black Swan papers mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, and by my noble friend Lord Haskel. As my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith said, we need full, honest and frank advice about the consequences of no deal.
Thirdly, and crucially, on the “most sensitive land border in Europe”, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Birt, will the Minister explain how the new proposals respect the December 2017 commitment—a commitment made, as my noble friend Lord Liddle reminded us, while Mr Johnson was in the Cabinet, and therefore party to the commitment? It was, as we know, to “no physical infrastructure or related checks or controls” within Ireland—but we now read that Mr Johnson is proposing that there will be checks. Indeed, in some ways it will be an effective double hard border, with checks on both sides of the frontier—albeit a few miles away, presumably to honour his commitment—for any goods travelling between the north and the south.
The paper that we have seen today allows for regulatory alliance between the north and the south of Ireland to avoid a hard border, but that means there will be regulatory divergence between Northern Ireland and Great Britain—“a border up the Irish Sea”, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Empey. It also means that there will be a customs border in regard to tariffs across the Northern Ireland/Irish frontier. There will have to be customs declarations and collections. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said that that would be done easily on computers in the exporting factories. That might work for large regular exporters or importers, but not for one-off or irregular traders, nor indeed those having to complete complicated rules-of-origin declarations on what they produce. So the paper, as we have looked at it today—in haste, it is true—appears neither credible nor workable, and nor does it respect the undertaking to all-Ireland economic activity of no new checks and no Northern Ireland/Great Britain border.
Furthermore, there remains the question that the Minister failed to answer when I posed it last Wednesday: what about free movement of people after we leave the single market? Once we have different immigration rules, I assume that the idea is not to allow those who will not have enough points—we have heard that we are going to have a points system—simply to bypass our border checks by flying in to Dublin and then driving across to Belfast or perhaps Holyhead, or indeed direct from Dublin to Swansea. So would there be border checks between Northern and southern Ireland, maybe on trains, at the airports or on the Cork ferry, to enforce the different rules either side of the border?
Perhaps the Government are considering something completely different: compulsory ID, so that effectively checks are in-country rather than at the borders. These are vital questions to which we need answers. We need to know how these rather vague concepts will work, and that should be spelled out to the House. I have to say that, if we trusted the Government rather more, these might be requests for information rather than demands—but that trust has rather gone.
As the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said, the country is more divided than he has ever seen it; yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said, there has been no attempt at reconciliation. Instead, the Prime Minister unlawfully prorogued Parliament for five weeks to stop us asking questions; he calls an Act of Parliament, which simply demands Commons approval for no deal or else more negotiating time, a “surrender Act”; and the Attorney-General labels Parliament,
“as dead as dead can be”,—[Official Report, Commons; 25/9/19; col. 666.]
with no moral right to sit. Who is this tribune of the people, from the party that introduced the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, to decide that he should decide when we have an election and undo the very Act that he sought, and helped, to pass?
I am afraid it was only this evening that I learned from the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, that the full Cabinet had not even seen or endorsed today’s letter to the European Union. So where has Cabinet government gone now? Meanwhile, hearing the Prime Minister today, and watching him on television, comparing Parliament to a failing school and a reality TV show—the Parliament to which he is accountable and to which he owes his position—made me doubt his attachment to our proud history of parliamentary democracy.
The Prime Minister, who should have the country’s interests at heart, delayed revealing his Brexit plan until just after his party conference—putting internal party management above the right of Parliament to scrutinise, above the need to debate and consider a fundamental issue, vital to the country’s future: the terms on which we leave the European Union and our future trading and security relationship with the EU 27. That is a shameful disregard for the national interest.
It was exactly 34 years ago yesterday that my noble friend Lord Kinnock was brave enough to take on his party and say:
“You can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services and with their homes”.
It is time for the party opposite to look beyond the ERG, the single-issue Brexiteers and those whose own jobs and services and homes are not threatened by a no-deal exit, and to put the nation first. But for this evening, we simply need clear answers to some straightforward questions that my noble and learned friend, I and other noble Lords have posed. The House deserves nothing less.
Lord Callanan
My Lords, once again this has been an extremely wide-ranging debate and it has given us the opportunity to take account of the significant recent developments in the EU exit process. That is very much in keeping with this House’s overall record of providing considered and insightful contributions throughout the process of the UK leaving the EU. Of course, I have listened to the debate carefully and I recognise that many noble Lords have alternative views, to put it mildly, on what this Government should be doing. Nevertheless, our commitment to delivering on the outcome of the 2016 referendum and the instruction of 17.4 million UK citizens has not waivered. I agree once again with my noble friend Lady Meyer when she says that it is time to move on and get Brexit done.
Let me do my best to address as many of the key points arising from the debate as I can in my closing remarks. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, asked about the continuing negotiations and the proposals that we have shared today. The Government are clear that our focus remains on getting a deal at the October European Council and leaving on 31 October. Let me reiterate to noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, that substantial discussions around possible approaches to securing a deal are ongoing and that, in our view, we have made good progress in these discussions. We will continue to work closely with the EU to achieve a deal so that we can leave on 31 October under an agreed framework. Let me say to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, that I have no doubt that my noble friend the Chief Whip and his colleagues in the usual channels want to agree a way forward, to give us sufficient time to debate any legislation that has been agreed by the House of Commons. I say to the noble Baroness that for her, as a Liberal Democrat, to start her speech by saying she wants to speak about democracy was one of the many ironies of this debate. That was a bit rich, given that the Liberal Democrats want to overturn the biggest democratic exercise we have ever had in this country.
As I noted earlier, we have shared with the EU the proposals that were made public shortly before the debate began. We have begun to engage with the EU on those proposals and, so far, the reaction seems to be fairly positive. I know that noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, asked me whether this is a take it or leave it proposal. Clearly, we hope that Brussels will work with us over the next 10 days. If they do, then we will leave with a new deal. If they do not want to talk on the basis of these proposals then, as I have said, we are prepared to leave without a deal.
The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to doublespeak in politics, which helpfully reminded me of my favourite moment in the whole of the European Parliament election campaign, when he told us that Labour respects the result of the referendum—and then immediately spent the rest of the campaign campaigning against it. If that was not doublespeak, I do not know what was.
The noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Campbell, asked for further information on the proposals. We will have an opportunity to discuss these tomorrow but let me give a further brief summation for noble Lords. Many noble Lords asked how they are reconciled with Section 10(2)(b) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. I assure the House that our proposals do not breach that section because they avoid checks, controls and physical infrastructure at the border.
I know that noble Lords have questions about what the proposals mean for that infrastructure. Under no circumstances would we put in place infrastructure, checks or controls at the border. We are proposing that all the customs processes needed to ensure compliance with UK and EU customs regimes should take place on a decentralised basis, with paperwork being conducted electronically as goods move between the two countries, and with the very small number of physical checks needed being conducted at traders’ premises or at other points in the supply chain. We hope that these proposals will now provide the basis for rapid negotiations towards a solution, together with the finalisation of necessary changes—
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
Can the noble Lord explain what would happen if I, as a consumer, buy something and then travel to the other part of Ireland? Who will check the goods that I bought in one place and then took across the border?
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem
My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving way. I have now had the opportunity to look at the document entitled “Explanatory Note”. On page 6, in paragraph b, it says that:
“Physical checks—which would continue to be required only on a very small proportion of movements based on risk-assessment—could then take place at traders’ premises or other designated locations which could be located anywhere in Ireland or Northern Ireland”.
If these checks are to take place in Ireland, surely that will require the co-operation of the Irish Government.
Lord Callanan
Of course it will require the co-operation of the Irish Government. We want to discuss with them and the EU how we can address the unique situation of the circumstances in Ireland to bring about our exit from the European Union without imposing border infrastructure. That is what we want to achieve. We recognise that it is a unique and unusual circumstance. Indeed, we expect that the Irish Government will also wish to ensure that there is no infrastructure on their side either.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Since the Leader of the House is here, we repeat strongly the request to have sufficient time for this tomorrow, rather than having a Statement with 20 minutes for questions. This is clearly important, and we will need much more time.
Lord Callanan
The Chief Whip is not here, but the Leader of the House has heard the noble Lord’s comments. I am sure the usual channels will want to discuss how much time is available.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I thank the Minister for giving way. Is not the document presented to the Commission today thoroughly disingenuous? It refers to an open border. That is of course the position in Ireland today. If there were an open border, there would be no need for customs controls or checks of any kind, yet the Minister has just referred to the need to have those.
Lord Callanan
The situation is changing; that is why we need to agree new arrangements. We are leaving the European Union, the customs union and the single market, so clearly the arrangements will not be able to stay exactly as they are at the moment when we are part of those institutions. These proposals will allow us to move forward and focus on the positive future relationship that I believe is in all of our interests.
I have enormous respect for the noble Lord, Lord Empey, as he knows; he always makes insightful contributions in this House. He raised some important questions that I want to answer. We recognise that, for reasons of geography and economics, some things such as agri-food are increasingly managed on a common basis across the island of Ireland. Regulatory checks already take place on some goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. While the proposals would see an increase in some of these, there would be no need for traders to submit customs declarations and we would go ahead only with the consent of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly. In light of this progress, we must take the route suggested by my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford and choose to continue to work together in a positive spirit. In that way, we will ensure the best possible outcome for the UK, so that we deliver on the instructions given to us by the British people.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, asked about the Benn Act. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and my noble friend Lord Trenchard referred to it as the “surrender Act”.
Lord Callanan
That is the political game as we all attach different names to it. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, also speculated on the use of the Civil Contingencies Act in relation to the extension. I assure the noble and learned Lord that there are no plans to use the Civil Contingencies Act in a no-deal scenario. I point noble Lords to the words of the Prime Minister on contingency powers. He said that,
“what we want to do is get a deal and there is no purpose in discussing the hypothetical scenario”,
around the Benn Act. Let me be clear and reiterate to all noble Lords, as I have said a number of times on this subject: we will of course obey the law.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
Let me pick up this point. He said that of course we will obey the law. If the House of Commons has not agreed to a deal nor approved no deal by 19 October, does he accept that the law—which he says he will obey—means that the Prime Minister must seek an extension?
Lord Callanan
I am not going to get into providing interpretations of an Act that was not government legislation, which we advised against and which we said, in our view, had considerable deficiencies. These are matters for lawyers. It is ultimately for the courts to determine what the Act says and requires, so I will go no further, no matter how many times people intervene on me, than saying that we are going to abide by the law.
Lord Cormack
The fact is it is an Act of Parliament. I have a Question on the Order Paper tomorrow. Can my noble friend assure me that he will give me a clear, unequivocal Answer to that Question? Parliament has the right to know what the Government are going to do in the circumstances to which I referred in my speech and to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, just referred.
Lord Callanan
My noble friend knows what the Government will do in the circumstances. We will obey the law, and we will obey the Benn Act, which is the law.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
Some reference was made to it being a Private Member’s Bill. Some of us will remember Sydney Silverman’s Bill to get rid of the death penalty or the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, on abortion. They were Private Members’ Bills. Is the Minister saying that the origin of a Bill means that the Government may not have to agree with it? It is an Act of Parliament. Surely the Benn Act, just like any other Act, must be obeyed by the Government.
Lord Callanan
We will obey the law, as I have said on a number of occasions. The Benn Act is the law; we will obey the law.
Lord Butler of Brockwell
I just ask a simple question. In those circumstances, will the Government write a letter seeking an extension?
Lord Callanan
I am not going to take any more interventions on this. I do not wish to go any further. Noble Lords will draw the political conclusions they wish to from the answers that I have given, but that is the Government’s position and I am not going any further than the answer that I have given.
No-deal preparations were raised by many noble Lords, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, my noble friend Lord Lilley and the noble Lord, Lord Monks. Noble Lords will understand that the Government’s position is that, if it is not possible to reach a deal, we will have to leave on 31 October with no deal. We are committed to preparing for that outcome. As I said at the opening of this debate, we are ramping up the preparations. All necessary funding will be made available, and we will make all the necessary preparations to ensure stability for citizens, consumers, businesses and the economy.
A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, will be pleased to know that the Government continue to work closely with the devolved Administrations. With regard to the question from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, we are committed to managing the policing implications of Brexit in the UK through a collective approach, notwithstanding that policing is, of course, a devolved matter in Scotland. I have participated in many meetings with the devolved Governments of Scotland and Wales, and with the Northern Ireland Civil Service, where precisely these matters have been discussed.
Noble Lords, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the noble Lord, Lord Monks, asked about Operation Yellowhammer. Departments have identified a range of measures to mitigate the potential impacts of a challenging no-deal exit, some of which involve the use of existing regulations and powers. Such activities are not uncommon in challenging situations, but, as I said, the Government have no intention of using the Civil Contingencies Act for Operation Yellowhammer. To answer the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Monks, extensive work to prepare for all scenarios has been under way for more than two years on food supply chains. The Government have well-established ways of working with the food industry on food supply chain issues and we are using these to support preparations for leaving the EU.
Noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, raised the vital issue of citizens’ rights. I reiterate to the House this Government’s unwavering commitment to protecting the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK nationals living in the EU. EU citizens make an invaluable cultural and economic impact on the UK and we thank them for their patience and contribution to our society. Our focus now is on securing reciprocal assurances from our European counterparts—guarantees that supplement existing member state commitments and the steps we have already taken to protect the rights of UK nationals.
As part of securing reciprocity, I can assure the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, that we have legislated for the EU settlement scheme through the Immigration Act 1971. Indeed, as of August 2019, 117,300 Portuguese citizens have applied for the scheme, which will protect their rights in all scenarios—approximately half of the Portuguese citizens living in the UK. To reassure the noble Viscount, my right honourable friend the Brexit Secretary spoke with the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs last month to highlight the steps we are taking to protect EU citizens and called for reciprocal protections for UK nationals in Portugal. This builds on the rights we have already secured. In June I also signed a voting rights treaty with Portugal in Lisbon that means that UK nationals living in Portugal and Portuguese citizens living in the UK can continue to participate in local elections.
The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, asked about family reunification for refugees. I can tell him that refugees from the EU would be entitled to apply via the settlement scheme and have family rights as part of that in line with other EU citizens. The status of non-EU refugees does not change as a result of Brexit.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, whom I welcome to his new post as chair of the EU Committee, asked about the impact on the EU Committee’s scrutiny process of the Government’s policy of attending EU meetings only where the UK still has significant interest. This policy has already been effective in unshackling officials from meetings that are no longer relevant to the UK to focus on our national priorities. As I made clear in my recent letter to him, the Government will continue to meet their commitments to facilitate the scrutiny process, including preparing EMs and updating the committee on the progress of files under scrutiny. We have also committed to sharing information on which meetings the UK will attend. Of course, I would be very happy to meet with him to discuss this further.
Baroness Smith of Newnham
The Minister just suggested that current legislation would not have an impact on the United Kingdom, but if Northern Ireland were to remain in the single market could legislation that is going through not impact on Northern Ireland if the Government get their way? In that case, is it not still an important position for Ministers to attend?
Lord Callanan
If there are significant matters—of course we are still currently a member of the EU—then we are attending meetings, but not all EU meetings are to do with legislation. A lot of them are to discuss things that might happen, some of which could possibly impact on Northern Ireland, so we review which meetings we are attending on a weekly basis. I would of course be happy to meet the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, to discuss this further.
In concluding this debate, I remind your Lordships that it has been three years since the British people voted in the referendum to instruct the Government to leave the European Union. A number of noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Birt, Lord McNally, Lord Taverne, Lord Heseltine and Lord Livermore—spoke of having a second people’s vote. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland, even questioned the continued validity of the 2016 referendum. I remind noble Lords again of the Government’s position that more British people voted in the 2016 referendum than for any other course of action in British electoral history. The message from voters in that referendum and the subsequent general election was clear; we cannot continue to second-guess such a clear instruction and we will never support another referendum.
Baroness Altmann
I put on the record that the Minister is not quite right. More people voted in the 1992 general election than in the EU referendum.
Lord Callanan
I will check the figures; I am not sure that the noble Baroness is correct on that.
I have laid out the ways in which the Government are working to deliver on that instruction and the way in which we are prepared for multiple outcomes. Today we have presented to Parliament and to the public our new proposals on Northern Ireland and Ireland. As I said earlier, I hope that these proposals can provide the basis of a rapid negotiation towards a deal, which is what we want. This will then allow us to focus on a positive future relationship that is in all our best interests.
This Government are looking to the future beyond our withdrawal from the European Union. We are looking ahead to work on the NHS, violent crime and cutting the cost of living. As the Prime Minister said in his Statement in the other place last week, and as he repeated in his speech this morning, what the British public want from the Government is for us to respect the outcome of the referendum in which they gave a clear instruction to deliver a withdrawal from the European Union and for the Government to move on and move forward.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich
Before the Minister sits down, may I thank him for the clarification he has given? He has not simply said that the Government will obey the law, which we have heard before. He said two other things that were perhaps of significance: first, that the Government would obey the Benn Act, and, secondly, if I heard him right, that they would not use the Civil Contingencies Act to amend or repeal the Benn Act. Can he confirm that no regulation-making power, whether in the Civil Contingencies Act, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 or any other Act of Parliament, will be used to amend or repeal the clear provisions of the Benn Act?
Lord Callanan
I am afraid that this is becoming a bit tiresome. I do not want to go any further than what I said in my speech. We are going to obey the law. The Benn Act is part of the law and we will obey it.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
Before my noble friend sits down, I think I made a speech earlier on. I just wonder whether he has any comment on it.
Lord Callanan
There were 51 noble Lords who spoke in the debate. I made an extensive set of notes and endeavoured to respond to as many of the points as possible. I will look again at my notes on the speech from the noble and learned Lord and reply to him in writing. I apologise for missing him out.