House of Commons
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Prayers
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Speaker's Statement
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Mr Speaker
I am sure that colleagues across the House will want to join me in welcoming, formally and with enthusiasm, our newly appointed Serjeant at Arms, Ugbana Oyet, who started in the service of the House in this role yesterday. He has been with us for some time and he has an exceptional track record. He is incredibly popular across the House and he is going to be a fantastic success as our Serjeant.
I have a short statement to make. I would like to draw Members’ attention to the fact that the book for entering the private Members’ Bill ballot is now open for Members to sign in the No Lobby. It will be open until the House rises today and when the House is sitting on Wednesday 23 October. The ballot itself will be drawn at 9 am on Thursday 24 October in Committee Room 10. An announcement setting out these and other arrangements, and the dates when ten-minute rule motions can be made and presentation Bills introduced, is published in the Order Paper.
Oral Answers to Questions
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
Anne Milton (Guildford) (Ind)
The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Andrea Leadsom)
I strongly believe that apprenticeships are a superb option for people to earn and learn. In my Department, we have 154 apprentices, 149 of whom are levy funded. I have taken on a new school leaver apprentice in my office every year since becoming an MP, which has been an excellent experience for them and for my team. Since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, we have made changes to ensure that businesses can spend up to 25% of it in their supply chain, and I am delighted that the number of people starting higher-level apprenticeships has increased by over 40% since the 2016-17 academic year.
Sir Desmond Swayne
Is the 80:20 rule an overhead that is unwelcome to employers who have to provide cover for employees who are learning?
Andrea Leadsom
My right hon. Friend makes a really important point, but he will appreciate that off-the-job training is vital for apprentices to develop the knowledge, skills and behaviours they need to succeed at work. The 20% off-the-job training rule is based on standards used by apprenticeship programmes regarded as world class, such as those in Switzerland and Germany, which we have made it our ambition to at least match.
Mr Campbell
Employers complain about the inflexibility of the apprenticeship levy. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that it becomes more flexible, leading to greater dynamism in our local economy?
Andrea Leadsom
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the apprenticeship levy is collected from Northern Ireland businesses, with Northern Ireland subsequently receiving a Barnett consequential of spending on apprenticeships in England, which is funded by the levy. Ensuring that apprenticeship policy in Northern Ireland is delivering for Northern Ireland businesses is just one of a number for reasons why it is so essential that devolved government in Northern Ireland is restored.
Anne Milton
In Guildford, 97% of businesses are small businesses. What progress have the Government made on ensuring that they can use the 25% transfer from levy employers to build the skilled workforce that we desperately need in this country?
Andrea Leadsom
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for her superb work as Minister of State for Skills over the past few years. Under her watch, the importance of technical education has been raised substantially. She will be aware that sectors in all parts of the economy are now creating apprenticeship programmes, from cyber-security to offshore wind, and more than 61% of starts are now on high-quality industry design standards.
Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)
How does the Secretary of State explain the fact that the Government’s own skill index, which measures the value added from apprenticeships and vocational training, is now 25% below 2012 levels?
Andrea Leadsom
The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that in the 2018-19 academic year, despite an overall fall, nearly 60,000 people started higher-level apprenticeships, up nearly 43% on the year before the levy was introduced. It is important that the Government continue to talk to business about how to make use of this, but we are very pleased with progress.
Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
A recent report by the Centre for Social Justice showed that in the UK, of those who start entry- level work, only 15%—15%—will ever progress beyond it in their whole life. That is an indictment of the UK under different Governments. Beyond apprenticeships, what plans does my right hon. Friend have to find ways to encourage businesses to do on-the-job training, so that those people can move on and increase their salaries?
Andrea Leadsom
My right hon. Friend is right to raise the much bigger challenge of how to get young people not only into an apprenticeship but past it, enabling their skills to develop. We are doing that in a number of different ways. The Government continue to speak with businesses and monitor the impact of the apprenticeship levy on the performance of young people. We are doing a lot to promote start-up businesses for young people through the British Business Bank, but we continue to need to seek ways to ensure that no young person is left behind.
Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)
People are living longer, which is a good thing, but they need care in old age. In Oldham, health and social care is a growing industry, but at the moment it attracts the lowest band of the apprenticeship levy. I saw this week that the Department of Health and Social Care was advertising jobs at just above the minimum wage. Will the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy work with the Department of Health and Social Care to raise the value of those jobs?
Andrea Leadsom
The hon. Gentleman raises a really important point. We want to see young people being attracted to apprenticeships right across the range, and he is right to raise the importance of getting good-quality people into the social care system. I would be delighted to speak with him and others who are interested in that area of future employment.
David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
Average FTSE 100 CEO pay more than quadrupled from £1 million in 1998 to £4.5 million in 2012. Since then, the median average has fallen by £1.04 million. We have recently implemented a number of reforms to make further improvements to executive pay transparency and accountability through vehicles such as the UK corporate governance code.
David Hanson
The Government’s Green Paper on corporate responsibility was published more than two years ago, and since that time we have seen corporate pay issues in Carillion and only last month in Thomas Cook. Last week, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee questioned the chief executive of Thomas Cook about corporate responsibility issues on pay. What precisely have the Government done to act on corporate pay since that Green Paper two years ago?
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. As I mentioned, CEO pay has fallen. There were reforms at the beginning of the year, to ensure that shareholders’ voices are heard more in the boardroom. There is a binding vote every three years on remuneration policy, and there is now an advisory vote every year. If it is not successful, pay has to be put before the next AGM. As he will know, the Investment Association now keeps a record, at the Government’s request, to ensure that we are tracking pay where there is shareholder dissent.
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the right way to control executive pay is to increase democratic control of capital, not by increasing the powers of the state but by dramatically improving the rights of shareholders?
Kelly Tolhurst
My hon. Friend is right, and that is what the Government’s reforms have done. As I outlined, shareholders have a vote every three years and an advisory vote every year. Through the reforms, we have also enabled employee directors, non-exec directors or employee councils to have representation on the board. Companies now have to explain their wider pay policy and how it affects the whole company.
Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)
The chief executive of Thomas Cook was paid more than £8 million during his time as chief executive of a company that has now collapsed, costing 9,000 jobs in this country, with 150,000 customers having to be brought home at a cost to the taxpayer. When he gave evidence to our Select Committee last week, he said he would reflect on whether he will pay back any of his bonus. What will the Government do to ensure that bonuses can be and have to be clawed back after catastrophic failures of businesses like that?
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank the hon. Lady for the work she is doing on the Select Committee. Thomas Cook did have clawback and malus arrangements in place for the recovery of directors’ bonus payments in specific circumstances, as required by the UK corporate governance code. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has asked the Insolvency Service to fast-track an investigation, and it will report back. As the hon. Lady outlined, the CEO did advise the Committee on 15 October that he would consider voluntarily surrendering some of his 2017 cash bonus, but it must be pointed out that no bonus was paid to the ex-CEO in 2018.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
The hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) highlighted the point that the biggest concern is not simply how much is paid to executives, but their being paid for failure, not for success. The current arrangements in British company law allow chief executives and other executives to be paid on the basis of share price and allow them to buy back shares, propping up the share price. This is a formula for payment for failure. Is the Department looking at that?
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank my right hon. Friend for raising this. Part of the reforms in January was to make organisations report back on the effect of share price growth on executive pay outcomes. We published some evidence before the summer from a review undertaken on share buy-backs, and there was no clear evidence to suggest that they did have a perverse outcome.
Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Nadhim Zahawi)
The independent Oakervee review will advise the Government on High Speed 2, including potential business benefits and how it should proceed. The hon. Lady will understand that I would not want to prejudice those findings.
Lucy Powell
I thank the Minister for that reply, but six regional heads of the CBI say that High Speed 2 should be built in full and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership recently published its excellent independent review saying the same, arguing that only HS2 can really rebalance our economy. Will the Secretary of State, as the business representative at the Cabinet table, advocate for business in the north?
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Lady mentions the CBI. Both the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and the Mayor of Birmingham, Andy Street, who sits on the panel conducting the review, have said it is important that we kick the tyres on value for money, but it is also important to make such representations to ensure that the committee gets a full view of the business benefits of HS2.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
May I urge the Minister to ignore the siren voice opposite? Most people in the north accept that HS2 is a catastrophic waste of money— a huge white elephant that is destroying the environment and the countryside and will chiefly benefit London, hence why it started out in London in the first place. May I therefore urge him to tell the Secretary of State for Transport to scrap HS2 and crack on with the thing that will really benefit the northern economy—Northern Powerhouse Rail or HS3—connecting the north, which is what we need to benefit the north’s economy.
Mr Speaker
I do wish the hon. Gentleman would overcome his natural shyness.
Nadhim Zahawi
I do not think there is any danger of that, Mr Speaker.
My hon. Friend raises an important point, which is why the Prime Minister has pledged to fund the Leeds to Manchester route and has accelerated those plans with a deal in the autumn of 2019, with billions of pounds going into Northern Powerhouse Rail, and has of course set up Transport for the North.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister may know that I am a fierce opponent of the £100 billion that is going to be wasted on HS2. Has he looked at research in France, where we see that high-speed trains actually suck more power and wealth into the metropolitan area of Paris, rather than the renewal of provincial towns? Will he have a look at the £100 billion, because that is how much it is going to cost, and will he spend it instead on investing in the workforce of this country?
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point, although his colleague, the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell), was shaking her head, so there is clearly division on the benefits of HS2. That is why we have an independent review to tell us which way we should proceed.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
One of the businesses in northern Lincolnshire that will be a crucial part of the supply chain for HS2 is British Steel in Scunthorpe. I urge the Minister, when he is in discussion with the Department for Transport, to consider the effect on the supply chain and the impact on local economies.
Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)
The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s campaign on this fracking issue. We are all concerned about the impact of recent seismic events in Lancashire. My hon Friend knows that the Government have been clear that they will support the exploration of our shale gas resources only in a safe and sustainable way. The Oil and Gas Authority is undertaking an analysis of the data from Cuadrilla’s operations and we will set out our future approach as soon as we have considered that report.
Lee Rowley
I thank my right hon. Friend for his comments. Will he confirm that he will consider not just the OGA review, but feedback from constituencies such as mine that do not believe that fracking is the way forward?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend is right: this is one of the top issues that come across my desk. I feel the local concern about it, and we will take that into consideration when we reach a final decision.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
The National Audit Office report confirms that the UK Government have not analysed the costs and benefits of fracking and do not know how much money they have actually spent supporting fracking. Governance and regulation risks remain, as well as decommissioning liabilities that need to be resolved. Is it not time that the UK Government followed the lead of the Scottish Government and decided not to support the development of unconventional oil and gas?
Kwasi Kwarteng
As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), we will consider the Oil and Gas Authority’s report and we will look at the evidence before we reach a final decision on the issue.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend think that it might be a good idea to leave those carbon-based fuels in the ground as a reserve for future generations in case of emergency?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend knows that we are committed to a net zero carbon target. We are doing very well on renewables, and our success in that is the best way to reach the target.
Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) (Lab)
Definitely not, Mr Speaker. No offence to the hon. Gentleman.
The decisions that we take over the next year will be critical in preventing climate change from becoming irreversible. The Committee on Climate Change has said that fracking on a significant scale is not compatible with UK climate targets. It increases local air pollution, generates huge volumes of chemical waste water, causes earthquakes and is just not necessary for the UK’s energy security. Yet the Secretary of State recently reiterated her support for fracking. Given the climate emergency, will the Government reconsider and commit now to banning fracking?
Kwasi Kwarteng
As I have said on three occasions now, we will consider the OGA report, and we will look at the evidence. We are very mindful of what local communities are saying and we will set out our future direction shortly.
Faisal Rashid (Warrington South) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
All workers in the UK have the right to join a union and to participate in union activities. That right is protected under trade union law, and 23% of UK employees are union members. That is higher than some European countries, including France and Germany, and it demonstrates that union rights to recruit and organise through individual members and officials are sufficient.
Faisal Rashid
This week shocking reports have emerged about dire workplace conditions at Amazon. Those exploited workers desperately need a union, but workers at Amazon have had their shift patterns interrupted just to prevent them from talking to union officials on the way to work. When will the Government put an end to those draconian anti-union practices, and will the Secretary of State launch an investigation into reports of workers’ rights being violated at Amazon?
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. It is the right of unions and employers to come to an agreement about representation in the workplace. The Central Arbitration Committee is available if that is refused. With regard to workers’ rights, the good work plan represents the biggest reform of workers’ rights in 20 years. We are determined to continue on that path, because workers’ rights are important to this Government.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
Kelly Tolhurst
It will come as no surprise that I completely disagree with the hon. and learned Lady. The Prime Minister has been clear: not only will we maintain workers’ rights, but we will enhance them. Even in my role as a Minister over the past 12 years, everything has been focused on ensuring we are ahead of the European Union. We are committed. We have never, ever, not once ever put forward a position where we have shown we will row back on workers’ rights.
Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)
Wow! What an answer. This is the situation for workers at Amazon: their bones are being broken; they are being knocked unconscious; and they are being taken away in ambulances. Where is the urgency to step in and stop what is happening to these workers? Are the Government going to demand an urgent inquiry, or do they wash their hands of these workers? At the heart of the issue at Amazon is a hostile environment for trade unions, which are often the only force that can resist exploitative practices. A Labour Government would legislate to enforce access rights for trade unions and a robust enforcement regime. Why are the Government sitting on their hands while the richest man in the world treats his workers so disgustingly on their watch?
Kelly Tolhurst
The hon. Lady makes allegations about a particular organisation. She is welcome to write to me further about those allegations, but I remind her that sufficient workplace laws are in place. We have the Health and Safety Executive, for example. If she has evidence of certain employers breaking the law, I would expect it to be passed on to the relevant agencies. As I outlined, our Prime Minister is committed to ensuring that we keep step with the European Union and go further. I believe the actions the Government have taken over recent months prove that.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Nadhim Zahawi)
I am pleased to say that Dartford has been shortlisted for the future high streets fund to renew its town centre. This will build on £4.3 million support already allocated from the South East local enterprise partnership growth fund.
Gareth Johnson
A number of businesses in my constituency face an uncertain future due to a nationally significant infrastructure project earmarked for the Swanscombe peninsula, where those businesses are located. Will the Minister commit to working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to do all he can to support the businesses that find themselves in that situation?
Nadhim Zahawi
I fully appreciate the concerns of local businesses with regard to the uncertainty over Swanscombe peninsula. My Department works very closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. I will gladly raise this with my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Northern Powerhouse and Local Growth, when I see him tomorrow.
Karen Lee (Lincoln) (Lab)
The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)
The hon. Lady will understand that the UK was forced to make these changes to comply with EU legislation. Since the new rates only came into effect on 1 October this year, it is too early to see what effect they have had. Once we have left the EU, we will have opportunities to amend the VAT treatment of low- carbon technologies to ensure that we can set the rates that we consider most appropriate.
Karen Lee
By raising the VAT threshold for solar installations, the Government are disincentivising the transition to green energy, and this is just one example of the Government’s failure to act with the urgency that the climate crisis demands. Will the Minister undertake today to consider adopting Labour’s plans to fit solar panels to 1.75 million low-income homes, which would combat climate change while creating jobs and reducing energy bills for people in Lincoln and across the UK?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I did suggest that the VAT increase was part of EU legislation, and that is something we can amend, if we wish to do so, after we have left the EU. Solar is a UK success story. I will not take any lessons from the Labour party about the success of solar: 99% of our solar-generating capacity and over 1 million installations have been deployed since 2010, since the Government took office. This is something that we are proud of, and it will obviously be part of our energy mix as we seek to hit the target of zero carbon emissions in 2050.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Even given the VAT situation, solar and wind, together with battery storage on commercial buildings, are pretty much viable without public subsidy. Is not now the right time for a widespread deployment on every public building, including every school, hospital and prison?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend makes an excellent observation. We are supporting innovation in this area. We have the Modern Energy Partners programme, which cuts energy costs and carbon emissions across the public sector.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
Any VAT increase would be yet another hammer blow to solar. The Minister’s predecessors took solar power to the brink, blocked onshore wind, cut support for offshore wind and failed to capitalise on Scotland’s lead in marine and tidal power. Has he compared the detail in the Scottish Government’s new green deal with the lack of detail in the Queen’s Speech? When will his Government wake up to the climate emergency?
Kwasi Kwarteng
As I have said a number of times, the VAT increase was a consequence of EU membership, so on that basis I recommend that the hon. Gentleman support the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill this evening.
Drew Hendry
Last month’s energy auction revealed that offshore wind is a third cheaper than gas and half the price of the energy from Hinkley C nuclear plant, yet Tory dogma is holding climate change mitigation back. Does the Minister agree that VAT on solar is yet another barrier to much needed change, and will he ask the Chancellor to rule that out in the Budget?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I very much appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s prepared remarks, but he does not seem to be living in the real world. We have delivered on offshore wind, which he mentioned. The price has fallen by two thirds—that is a Government success and we are going to pursue that sort of success to meet the net zero carbon target.
Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Andrea Leadsom)
We want to make the UK the best place to work and grow a business. We have set the target of an additional 600,000 female entrepreneurs by 2030, and the British Business Bank has delivered over £198 million to women in start-up loans. With my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, we are implementing the initiatives of Alison Rose’s review, including focusing on female entrepreneurs’ access to finance, better enterprise education and launching the investing in women code.
Giles Watling
I thank my right hon. Friend for her answer. In my Clacton constituency, I am fortunate to have a group of very powerful businesswomen, with whom I had a very pleasant business lunch recently. In 2018, the BBC reported that women were half as likely to set up a business as men. I am pleased that the Government are doing all that my right hon. Friend said, but that must be in part due to a bias in education, so what more can be done to address this great loss of potential?
Andrea Leadsom
My hon. Friend is quite right. We need to go further in addressing education, and that is why one initiative in the Rose review specifically addressed the roll-out of enterprise education in schools and colleges to help in particular with the skills women need for business success at an earlier age. BEIS has also launched the Longitude Explorer prize, which is aimed specifically at 11 to 16-year-olds, to encourage innovative problem solving in our young entrepreneurs.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
Many of the women in business in my constituency are EU nationals, and they were extremely concerned at yesterday’s tabling of the draft Freedom of Establishment and Free Movement of Services (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, which would allow Ministers to remove their rights to own and manage companies or provide services. While we welcome the fact that the Committee was cancelled yesterday, what are the Government’s plans in this regard, because many EU nationals in business are very concerned?
Andrea Leadsom
I am sorry that the hon. Lady seeks to lean into the scaremongering. The statutory instrument has a very limited direct policy impact and will not impose additional restrictions on EU nationals or EU-based businesses or on the nationals and businesses of countries with associated agreements after we have left the EU. It is very important that we all take great care not to scaremonger and try to make people think that things are the case that are simply not the case.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Establishing a business is very difficult, particularly when business rates are so high and online businesses often do not pay their way. Is it not time, particularly for those establishing businesses, that we had a root-and-branch review of the business rates model, which affects so many businesses in St Albans?
Andrea Leadsom
I am very sympathetic to my hon. Friend’s point; I know she is a big champion of businesses in St Albans. In my Department, we are helping the British Business Bank to provide greater support to start-up businesses, providing huge support to the UK’s 1.2 million female-led SMEs, and doing everything we can to ensure that there are more incentives and opportunities for women to start businesses than ever before.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
If we are to encourage more women into business, it is essential that we tackle the gender pay gap at executive level. What has been done to address that issue?
Andrea Leadsom
The hon. Gentleman will know that the gender pay gap is now the smallest it has ever been and that the Government have required reporting of the gender pay gap. Such transparency can partially solve the problem, but we are not resting there: we are doing as much as possible to get more women to become entrepreneurs and to help women to acquire the skills they need to lead some of our fantastic UK businesses.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
Greg Hands (Chelsea and Fulham) (Con)
The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)
As a result of the Government’s support, the UK is a world leader in offshore wind and a leader in tackling climate change. The third contracts for difference auction in 2019 delivered 5.5 GW of new offshore wind capacity, and the price was £39 per megawatt-hour, which was two thirds less than just four years ago. Our sector deal also paves the way to increase exports fivefold to £2.6 billion a year by 2030.
James Cartlidge
In East Anglia, we want to be champions of clean growth and are very proud that off our coast we are generating 52% of this country’s offshore wind output, but we want to go much further. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that the national grid will be able to keep pace and that we will support technology such as battery storage that will enable us to make the most of our natural asset?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend can rest assured that the Government continue to upgrade and invest in the electricity system to ensure that it can deliver additional generation. Of course, battery storage technology and other forms of storage are at the centre of any strategy to reach the net zero carbon target.
Greg Hands
The offshore wind sector has been one of the Government’s biggest success stories, with the delivery of the world’s largest capacity. When I was at the Department for International Trade, we also made it a priority to be able to export that capability. Could the Minister tell us a bit about the work that BEIS is doing with the DIT to continue that work so that we also deliver real economic benefits for our country’s exporters?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend, who spent two years in the Department for International Trade and was an excellent Minister. He has driven a great deal of progress in this area. As he will know, increasing competitiveness and the capability of our supply chain are key to increasing our exporting power, and, through the offshore wind sector deal, the sector will invest up to £250 million for that purpose. I continue to work with my right hon. Friend’s former Department to identify opportunities, and I regularly meet my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, in his capacity as Minister for investment.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
Ørsted recently opened an east coast hub in my constituency. It is committed to providing local employment opportunities as part of its business, but sadly the extension of the non-EEA visa waiver to the offshore wind workers means that some companies can exploit underpaid and overworked foreign labour rather than developing local opportunities. Will the Government commit themselves to ending the waiver next year?
Kwasi Kwarteng
The Government will absolutely commit themselves to supporting new jobs in the sector. Because of allocation round 3, the contracts for difference auction, we are envisaging 400,000 new jobs in the immediate future, in the next few years. This is something at which the Government are actually succeeding and on which we are working.
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
It was welcome that the Hebridean renewable project won 240 MW in the contracts for difference allocation round, but we need 370 MW to 400 MW for an interconnector. I know that the Scottish island group has enough CfDs to build an interconnector for clean green energy. Is it only the UK that could design a system under which we secure CfDs but Ofgem then says that that is not enough to build an interconnector? Will the Minister ensure that, in these days of climate change, the clean green energy of the Saudi Arabia of renewables—the Hebrides, Shetland and Orkney—is taken advantage of?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s enthusiasm and passion for this technology, but it is wrong to suggest that the CfD auction was a failure, or that it somehow constituted a defeat. In fact, it was extremely successful. As I have said, the price was £39 per megawatt-hour, two thirds lower than the 2015 price of £115. Obviously we are looking at interconnectors, which will be part of the solution to the issue of net zero carbon.
Mr Speaker
Anyone would think that the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) was conducting a symphony orchestra rather than chairing an august Select Committee of the House, but the eccentricity of the hon. Gentleman merely adds to his lovability.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
There is huge potential for low-cost, low-carbon electricity generation from floating wind in the Celtic sea. Will my right hon. Friend accept an invitation to pay a visit on 19 November and find out about this exciting opportunity?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My desire and propensity to visit all these installations know no bounds, and I should be very happy—diary permitting, obviously—to take up my hon. Friend’s offer.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
Does the Minister agree that hydrogen should be made from renewables via electrolysis in the medium and long term?
Kwasi Kwarteng
The hon. Lady is right to point to the advantages of hydrogen, but, as she will understand, the issue with electrolysis is that it is currently very expensive, so the green hydrogen to which she has referred is something that we are continuing to develop.
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)
A number of hydro projects are currently in receipt of support through the feed-in tariff and renewables obligation schemes. As my hon. Friend will know, from 2020 small-scale hydroelectric projects will also be eligible for the smart export guarantee, which allows people to resell excess capacity to the grid.
Mr Wragg
My right hon. Friend will be aware of the failure of Solarplicity during the summer. Many renewable energy companies, including Stockport Hydro in my constituency, are significantly out of pocket. Will my right hon. Friend meet me to discuss the problem, and will he urge Ofgem to step in and cover the debts that are owed to Solarplicity?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I should be delighted to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the issue. Obviously, I cannot commit Ofgem to bailing out companies or paying debts—that is not its function, as my hon. Friend should know—but I should be happy to meet him at any time that is convenient.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
I welcome the support given to hydroelectricity generation at this time. Exciting new projects in marine energy need the same support. We would not have a successful offshore wind industry had not support been given to that for decades. Will the Minister follow the work of his predecessor on this and work with the Welsh Government to ensure that this happens around the UK coastline?
Kwasi Kwarteng
Absolutely. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point: the success with offshore wind did not come out of a clear blue sky. It evolved and depended on huge amounts of investment and development over many decades. So I am very happy to engage with the hon. Gentleman and the Welsh Government on this.
Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
The Government are wholly committed to women’s participation in the workforce, including by supporting new mothers to return to, and thrive in, work. That is why we recently consulted on a broad range of proposals to help families to balance their work and home commitments. We have also announced our intention to extend redundancy protection to new mothers returning to work.
Eddie Hughes
I thank the Minister for that answer. What support are the Government giving to new mothers who, sadly, have experienced stillbirth?
Kelly Tolhurst
First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and Members across the House who participated in Baby Loss Awareness Week and the emotional debate in the House. The Government have committed to introducing parental bereavement leave and pay, which will apply to parents who lose a child under the age of 18, including parents with stillbirth. We plan to lay the regulations to implement the policy in January, ready to come into force on 6 April. That will support new mothers facing these tragic and difficult circumstances.
Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
Discrimination against new mothers and pregnant women is still widespread in our country. When are the Government going to take it seriously?
Kelly Tolhurst
I point out that discrimination in the workplace is illegal; it is unlawful. I have just outlined that we have announced our intention to extend redundancy protection for those mothers who return to work.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Nadhim Zahawi)
We have just announced up to £l billion of new funding to advance the next generation of cutting-edge automotive technologies. I am sure the House would want to know how that funding is being used. Part of it is being used by the supply chain for large-scale production of electric vehicles so that we scale up the production in the UK, and of course part of it will be used for vehicle research and development.
Mark Pawsey
I do not know whether you have had the opportunity to make a journey in one of the new electric London taxis, Mr Speaker, which are manufactured in my Rugby constituency by the London Electric Vehicle Company and which often provide people with their first experience of an electric vehicle. The company has just recorded its best ever sales month, with 352 taxis sold, and the fleet is improving the carbon footprint in our cities by preventing 6,800 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. What further can we do to improve the switch to electric?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am very pleased to hear that the London Electric Vehicle Company had record sales in September. I spoke to the CEO recently and was very impressed with their capability. I understand their sales have grown month on month since April. They have capacity to produce 20,000 vehicles a year and his message to this House when I spoke to him was, “Let’s get Brexit done.”
Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)
Some London boroughs have hundreds of electric vehicle charging points while whole towns in the north have none, but given the lack of public transport options in places such as St Helens, would it not be economically and environmentally better to invest in places such as mine to get people out of their cars?
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise this issue. Our grant scheme and the £400 million charging infrastructure investment fund will see thousands more electric vehicle charging points installed across the whole UK.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
To accelerate take-up, first, we need to have more people having an electric vehicle in their consideration set, so alongside communications to consumers can the Minister look at the pivotal role played by dealers in getting more people to take a test drive?
Nadhim Zahawi
My right hon. Friend raises an important point. Different touch points with consumers are important. For example, when people go for a replacement tax on their car, they should be immediately alerted to the fact that, instead of paying that tax, they could pay for a new electric vehicle.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
Electric vehicles represent a fantastic opportunity to combat climate change and boost manufacturing jobs. That is why Labour is committed to investing £2.3 billion in three new battery gigafactories, £3 billion in support for manufacturing new car models, and £3.6 billion in our electricity grid and charging infrastructure, and we will also provide targeted interest-free loans for new electric cars for up to 500,000 people a year. We will do all that while retaining membership of the world’s largest customs union. Apart from a few ad hoc pots of money, the Government are proposing green licence plates. When it comes to climate change and manufacturing, is it not true that the Government are all hot air and no action?
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Lady just reeled off a list, so I will reel off my own list of good news, starting with the fact that Government announced £1 billion to increase the capacity for electric car development. On 10 October, Nissan launched the new Juke model after investing £100 million in Sunderland. On 26 September, Jaguar Land Rover announced its latest investment in the Gaydon facility, close to my constituency. On 18 September, INEOS Automotive announced that its headquarters and assembly plant for its SUV will be based in Bridgend. BMW’s new MINI Electric launched in July. JLR has made a massive investment in electric engines at Castle Bromwich. On 20 March, Toyota announced a collaboration with Suzuki to make an electric version of its Corolla model. That is all real investment, not “hot air”. The Labour party would crash the economy, raise taxes and have nothing—nowt—to spend on the green economy.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Andrea Leadsom)
After two years as a sole trader at this Dispatch Box as Leader of the House, it is a huge pleasure to be here today with such a superb ministerial team. In addition to my Department’s vital work to help businesses to prepare for Brexit, we have set out three key priority areas for BEIS. First, we aim to lead the world in tackling climate change. From the Prime Minister chairing a new Cabinet Committee to our hosting of COP26 in Glasgow next year, our pathway to net zero is well under way. Secondly, we will seek to solve the grand challenges facing our society, from new support for our life sciences sector to developing fusion power to setting out how amazing UK innovations can solve the challenges of low productivity. Thirdly, we aim quite simply to make the UK the best place in the world to work and to grow a business.
Julian Sturdy
Will the Secretary of State reassure me that her Department is fully assessing the potential of UK peatlands and peatland restoration in regions such as North Yorkshire, where my constituency lies, in getting us to net zero? Peatlands are a carbon sink that absorb more emissions than the world’s oceans each year.
Andrea Leadsom
My hon. Friend is right that peatlands have a vital role to play in delivering net zero. In addition to £10 million to help to restore more than 6,000 hectares of peatland over a three-year period, we are working with Natural England on a number of pilot projects, including one in North Yorkshire, to test our approach for moving all peatlands in England on to a path of recovery and restoration.
Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State to her place for our first BEIS orals together. I know that we will have many a productive exchange.
Nine thousand UK jobs lost and 150,000 holidaymakers repatriated at an estimated cost to the taxpayer £100 million, yet the former chairman of Thomas Cook confirmed that Government financial support would have allowed him to save the company. A report from Unite the Union and Syndex also showed that £188 million in bridging loans would have prevented Thomas Cook’s collapse. With reports that banks and investors were still willing, even on the day of the collapse, to support a deal provided that the Government stepped in, will the Business Secretary explain why she failed to meet with the company in the final days and clarify her rationale for not offering support?
Andrea Leadsom
First, I would like to reciprocate by saying that I am delighted to be working with the hon. Lady. I look forward to many exchanges across the Dispatch Box.
The hon. Lady will appreciate that my Department and I were very closely involved in the run-up to Thomas Cook’s insolvency. It is a Department for Transport lead and, as all hon. Members will appreciate, too many cooks can spoil the broth, so I liaised closely with the Secretary of State for Transport who took the lead on this, but BEIS officials were very closely involved.
At the weekend I wrote to the insolvency practitioner about clawback and malus, to ATOL about looking after the insurance for those who booked holidays, and to the banking associations about ensuring that proper restraint is shown to those who sadly lost their jobs in that run-up.
Why did we not bail out Thomas Cook? Simply because it was clear that the £200 million it was asking for was just a drop in the ocean. There was no way the company could realistically be restored, despite the Government seriously considering the prospects for doing so and for making it an ongoing concern.
Rebecca Long Bailey
It is interesting that the German Government saw fit to intervene. Not only did our Government refuse, they also failed to take the basic action needed to ensure good corporate behaviour. Today, reports demonstrate a clear conflict of interest for auditing firms that, while signing off on Thomas Cook’s finances, separately advised directors on securing bumper bonuses.
BHS, Carillion and the banks all had similar auditing conflicts. Sir John Kingman officially advised the Government nearly a year ago to create a more robust statutory regulator, but to no avail. Will the Secretary of State confirm if and when she will bring forward reforms to the Financial Reporting Council and the wider auditing sector, as proposed by the Kingman review, Professor Prem Sikka and the Competition and Markets Authority?
Andrea Leadsom
First, may I gently say to the hon. Lady that the situation in Germany was extremely different? It was a separate business in Germany. If there had been an opportunity to save Thomas Cook, we would have done so. We looked very carefully at the prospects—[Interruption.] The hon. Lady is just demonstrating a lack of understanding of how UK business works, and I am very sorry to hear that. She really needs to look at the facts here, and not just at trying to make a point. This was a very serious issue, and it was something the Government took very seriously.
We have done everything possible to protect those who sadly lost their jobs. I am delighted, but the hon. Lady did not even mention, that Hays Travel has taken over many Thomas Cook shops, which is fantastic news for many of those employees. She has also not paid any regard to the fact that the Government were able to establish a repatriation on the biggest scale ever in peacetime to bring more than 140,000 people back to the United Kingdom.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
Good-quality flexible working is important to all employees and is central to good work. Workers’ rights matter. Over 97% of employers offer some form of flexible working, and our recent consultation looked at how further to increase the prevalence of flexible working by advertising jobs as flexible and by requiring large employers to publish their policy.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)
This subject has come up, and we need to look at how companies and exporters tackle serious carbon emissions. What they are doing in the Amazon is not acceptable. We need to engage with that and have a dialogue.
Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)
The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Chris Skidmore)
The Government support growing our national space capabilities, especially by establishing the new national space council, which will be chaired by the Prime Minister. We are supporting Orbex to develop an exciting new launch vehicle technology with a grant of £5.5 million as part of our industrial strategy. We are keen to work with it as part of the wider national space framework we are establishing.[Official Report, 31 October 2019, Vol. 667, c. 3MC.]
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank the hon. Lady for her question and I am more than happy to meet her to discuss her constituency in further detail if she would require. There is no programme of closures and the Post Office is working extremely hard, where post offices do shut for any, sometimes unpredictable, reason, to find replacements. We do have outreach services that are available when there is a lack of service, but I am happy to speak with her further about that.
Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Ind)
I welcome the Secretary of State to the Dispatch Box and hope that she will have distinguished tenure at this important time. She will know that the recommendations of the independent review of the Financial Reporting Council, conducted by Sir John Kingman, were widely endorsed and are urgently required. I was concerned that the statutory implementation of those recommendations was not included in the Queen’s Speech. Can she assure me that she is not going to miss a golden opportunity to make these reforms and give a big boost to our standing in the world?
Andrea Leadsom
First, let me pay tribute to my right hon. Friend, my predecessor, who did a fantastic job in this Department. I am delighted to stand by the position that he took as Secretary of State: it is the Government’s plan to legislate for a new regulator with stronger powers, replacing the FRC, as soon as parliamentary time allows. We are planning to progress this work in the first quarter of next year, once we have received Sir Donald Brydon’s review of the quality and effectiveness of audit.
Karen Lee (Lincoln) (Lab)
Kelly Tolhurst
I am not sure whether the hon. Lady is aware that we undertook one of the biggest recalls that has happened this year: the recall of Whirlpool tumble dryers. She will know that I have updated the House on the progress we have made on that. Since 12 June, when I announced the recall, we have had more than 90,000 contacts, with people getting in touch about recall. So we are continuing to improve and work on recall.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
Heatric is a business in my constituency that is leading in clean energy, for example, carbon capture and storage, but it can do more. What more can the Department do to support businesses such as Heatric?
Chris Skidmore
Carbon capture, usage and storage is essential to meet our mission for net zero by 2050. We have committed £25 million so far to supporting new companies to progress CCUS, with an additional £100 million as part of the £505 million energy innovation programme. I know that my hon. Friend has taken Heatric to the Department, and officials are keen to ensure that they can continue to work with the company.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Nadhim Zahawi)
I think the hon. Gentleman would know that we already have agreements in place so that planes can continue flying. If he votes for the deal today, we will be in a much better place to leave in an orderly way.
Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)
More than half a dozen post offices in East Renfrewshire have closed over the past couple of years and not one has been able to be replaced, because it was not a viable business proposition for retailers. Does the Minister think that increased fees under the banking framework agreement will be enough to build the sustainability of the post office network?
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. I am happy to discuss particular issues in his constituency. I believe that the new banking framework and the increase in remuneration that postmasters will be receiving as part of that framework will make a significant impact for postmasters. But he is right to say that we must not stop there. I am working hard, with the Post Office and the National Federation of SubPostmasters, to make sure that we have a post office network that is fit, relevant and viable.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Kwasi Kwarteng
The hon. Gentleman is right: carbon capture, usage and storage is going to be crucial to our meeting our net zero carbon target. We are committed to supporting its deployment in the 2020s. The Government are already funding programmes in this policy area worth more than £500 million, and we will have a useful dialogue with colleagues in the Treasury to encourage the development of the technology.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
Many businesses in my constituency depend on a constant flow of engineers entering the work- force. Will my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State tell the House how her Department is ensuring that enough young people take up engineering? What is she doing with other Departments to embed it in the curriculum?
Chris Skidmore
May I start by thanking my hon. Friend for his work as the Government’s engineering envoy and for the work he has taken forward as part of our Engineering: Take a Closer Look legacy campaign? We have so far invested £406 million in maths, digital and technical education to help to focus on the shortage of science, technology, engineering and maths skills, but we must ensure that the “E” in STEM is equally vital, so we will be taking forward work to put engineering at the centre of our STEM strategy.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Lady and I are set to meet on 29 October, and I am meeting the all-party group on steel the day before. I will do everything I can to work with Tata to see whether we can find a future for the steelworks.
David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. In my constituency, we have two EDF nuclear power stations. Part of the EDF group is RTE, which is currently working with the British company Aquind to deliver cross-EU-border energy infrastructure. The EU Commission has just removed UK companies from its list of projects of common interests, which affects their regulation. Will my right hon. Friend urge Ofgem to step up and protect British companies by granting regulation as soon as possible in accordance with British law?
Kwasi Kwarteng
Absolutely. We had an official present in the room at that PCI meeting on 4 October. This issue has been raised with me and is a matter of concern.
Emma Dent Coad (Kensington) (Lab)
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but I have to disappoint her because my answer to it is no.
Kirstene Hair (Angus) (Con)
I was delighted to hear that Seagreen wind farm off the coast of Angus was successful in its bid in the UK Government contract for difference auction. It will be the most powerful wind farm throughout the United Kingdom and will have the ability to power up to 40% of Scottish homes. Would the Minister like to come to Angus and see the impact it is already having on our local economy? The local port has already secured the contract for the operations and maintenance base.
Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)
Sedgefield is home to the largest business park in the north-east of England, with 500 companies and 10,000 to 12,000 jobs. More than 50% of the jobs and businesses there rely in some way on trade with the EU. If the Secretary of State has her way and there is no more frictionless trade with the EU, no more customs union and no access to the single market as there is now, does she not have a responsibility to publish an economic assessment on the effects that will have on my constituents’ jobs?
Andrea Leadsom
I am delighted that Hitachi in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency is doing so well and that the high value manufacturing catapult that has an operation in his constituency is also doing well—both supported by the Government. We are seeking to get the withdrawal agreement Bill through this House, so that we can move forward with a good free trade deal that works for the United Kingdom, the EU and the many people in his constituency who are employed in manufacturing, which is something in which the UK excels.
British Children: Syria
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con) (Urgent Question)
To ask the Secretary of State if he will make a statement on the Government’s policy on 60 British children trapped in north-east Syria.
The Minister for the Middle East and North Africa (Dr Andrew Murrison)
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. This is, of course, a dreadful situation. Innocent minors trapped in north-east Syria are, without doubt, vulnerable. All these cases must be approached with care and compassion. We are aware that British nationals, including children, are living in displaced persons’ camps in Syria, but, owing to the circumstances on the ground, we are not in a position to make an accurate estimate of the number.
The safety and security of British nationals abroad is a priority for the Foreign Office, although UK travel advice has consistently advised against all travel to Syria since 2011. Although the UK has no consular presence in Syria from which to provide assistance, we will do all we can for unaccompanied minors and orphans.
The Foreign Secretary made it clear to the House last week that the Government will try to help any British unaccompanied minors and orphans in Syria. We work with all concerned in Syria and at home to facilitate the return of unaccompanied or orphan children where feasible. Each case is considered on an individual basis.
The situation in north-east Syria is fragile, but we will continue to work with international partners to secure stability in the region, to ensure that the considerable gains made against Daesh are not undermined, and to bring humanity and compassion to a deeply troubled and traumatised region.
Mr Davis
I thank the Minister for his compassionate tone and for what he had to say. Last Tuesday, the Foreign Secretary made the commitment to look at whether orphans and unaccompanied minors in north-east Syria could be repatriated to Britain. I welcome that commitment, but I am afraid that it does not go far enough. Save the Children has now confirmed that, of the 60 children in the region, only three are orphans. The children who have not been orphaned still deserve the United Kingdom’s protection. These children are at the heart of an unfolding geopolitical disaster in Syria. Many of them under the age of five have been born of parents who made a grotesquely misguided and irresponsible decision to go to Syria. The children are there through absolutely no fault of their own. They should not be punished for their parents’ mistakes. They have lived through some of the most brutal and inhumane fighting in modern times. Some have witnessed beheadings and other appalling acts of brutality, and others are suffering from terrible physical and psychological damage.
Some of our international allies have already used the five-day ceasefire to fulfil their duties and repatriate their own children. If we do not do the same, British children would be left at the whim of a brutal dictator, of a terrorist organisation or of roving bands of militia. If we do nothing, we will be abandoning our moral obligations and risking those vulnerable children growing up in a war-torn area and perhaps turning into terrorists themselves. The time to act, Minister, is now.
Mr Speaker
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the urgent question and on making his case within time. He is in danger of being an exception.
Dr Murrison
I thank my right hon. Friend for his points. He is right to say that the UK Government’s approach to this is, I hope, informed by compassion and care for individual cases. Our priority clearly has to be unaccompanied children and orphans, and that is where our attention currently is.
My right hon. Friend has given me a figure—I have to say that I do not recognise that figure—although, of course, we are talking to all the agencies and to those with an influence on the ground, to better understand the situation, and, of course, we will do all we can. The situation is fast-moving, and getting access to camps and people is extremely difficult. The ceasefire that he has spoken of is due to expire tonight, but we hope that it will be sustained. Under those circumstances, of course, all things become possible.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question, and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for securing it. His contribution was powerful and it was right. I entirely share his concerns about the dozens of innocent children—many just infants—who are legally British citizens and who find themselves, through no fault of their own, caught up in the latest upsurge in violence around the Daesh detention camps in northern Syria, triggered by the unilateral withdrawal of US troops and the subsequent invasion of the region by Turkey and its mercenary militias. The reckless and treacherous actions of the Trump Administration were always going to have human consequences, including the increased endangerment of the innocent British children living in the detention camps, nearly all of whom have already experienced—as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden says—huge physical and psychological traumas in their lives because of what they have seen and the conditions in which they have grown up.
It is all very well for some to say that the sins of the father, and in many cases the mother, should be visited on the children, but that is not who we are as a country or a people. Instead, we have a moral and a civic duty to ensure that these British children are brought back to the UK to receive the shelter, care and counselling they need, even if that necessitates bringing back their mothers to face justice in our courts for the crimes they may have committed. If the Minister of State agrees with that, as I hope that he does, I must ask another difficult question, and one with which we need to wrestle.
If we were having this discussion two months ago, we would have been talking about negotiating the repatriation of these children with our Kurdish and American allies. Now, as a result of Donald Trump’s actions, that negotiation will need to involve Assad’s regime, Russia and what are now their Kurdish allies. So I ask the Minister of State, unpalatable as it may be, does the Foreign Office believe that to achieve the repatriation of these children, it will be necessary to restore formal diplomatic relations with the Assad regime, and will that be on a permanent or a temporary basis?
Dr Murrison
I completely distance myself from the phrase “sins of the father”. There is no question about this. These are innocent minors; they are vulnerable people and we must do what we can for them. It is entirely wrong to associate them with what their parents may have done. Indeed, we need to ensure—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) made very clear in his question—that the cycle does not continue. That is fully understood.
The shadow Secretary of State touched on the legal position of minors who are living in camps with their parents. That brings us to a very difficult area indeed. I am sure that she would not want to trespass too far in that regard, nor would she want to remove children from their parents.
We have been clear about our attitude towards the Assad regime. As the right hon. Lady will be very well aware, the reality is that the Assad regime appears to have permeated most corners of the country now, and we have to think about what that means if we are to pursue our humanitarian goals. I think that most western countries—the telephone conversation I had with the global coalition against Daesh yesterday would certainly indicate this—are trying to work out what we now do when it comes to operating in the new reality, which sadly has been made a great deal worse by the events of the past few days.
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
May I just pin the Minister down on two key points? First, do the Government accept in principle that these children should be repatriated and are a British responsibility? Secondly, do they accept that, subject to not putting British officials in harm’s way, such repatriation could and should take place, possibly with the help of UNICEF?
Dr Murrison
I thank my right hon. Friend. Certainly we would want to work with agencies. If he will forgive me, I am not going to specify which agencies. He will know, as he has been Secretary of State in the relevant Department, why we do not want to specify which particular partners we are working with in this instance. On the protection of our own people, we are not going to put civil servants at risk in this. That would be unreasonable. We have a duty of care towards them.
In terms of repatriation in principle, I think my right hon. Friend is tempting me to make commitments in a piece that is fast-moving. I would refer to the point I made in response to the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) about the legality of this and the separation of family members. It would be wrong in principle to separate family members, but, as I said in my opening remarks, we consider each case on its merits. These are all individual cases, and it would be very wrong to give a blanket assessment of the position that the Government would take.
Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)
I thank the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for securing this incredibly important urgent question. I also pay tribute to the aid agencies working in some extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
One of the most chilling briefings I have ever received came in at the weekend, when I read that children—small children—have died on their way to and in the camps from hypothermia, pneumonia, dehydration or complications from malnutrition and illness. Winter and war are closing in on these children at the moment. The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) raised a very good point. Does the UK take responsibility for British children? Can the Minister answer that in terms of the principle?
What discussions has the Minister had with the states that have been able to evacuate children already, and why has the UK not done so? What lessons has he learned? When I raised this with the Foreign Secretary previously, he talked about security considerations. Will the Minister disregard security considerations around children who are about five or six years old, and will he set out the plans to bring these children home?
Dr Murrison
I thank the hon. Gentleman, who puts his points in his usual effective and forceful way. It is right to point out that the UK has been right at the forefront of applying international development funding to the dire situation in north-east Syria. We are right at the top of the league table, and it is important to say that. Particularly as winter approaches, it is of vital importance that the British public know that their money is being spent to alleviate as far as they possibly can this dire humanitarian situation.
I am not going to be drawn on other countries, because it is invidious to make comparisons. It is very easy just to pluck out a couple of countries from the air and say that we are not doing as well as X or Y. Let me be clear: we are doing what we can, given the difficult circumstances on the ground, and of course within the rule of law, for vulnerable children in north-east Syria. This is a piece that is rapidly developing and rapidly changing, and of course we keep all things under review. I hope that is helpful to the hon. Gentleman.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
I declare my interest both as an expert witness in the defence of John Letts and Sally Lane in respect of the non-provision of consular services in the region—evidence that was unchallenged by the prosecution—and in respect of a visit to the region with three parliamentary colleagues with the all-party parliamentary group on Rojava five weeks ago. In al-Hawl camp, we were told that there were 16 British families there. I have to say to my right hon. Friend that every single day we delay in bringing these children home is an extra day of trauma that we are going to have to address at great expense in the United Kingdom. We must take up our responsibilities both to the children and to ourselves in order to protect our future security.
Dr Murrison
Yes, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s first-hand experience in Syria and the efforts he has made to better understand what is going on. The situation in north-east Syria is difficult and unpredictable. We have a ceasefire at the moment, and I hope it endures. If that ceasefire does hold tonight into tomorrow and into the future, the situation becomes much more permissive in terms of trying to deliver assistance where it is necessary and also in dealing with the cases that he has referred to, particularly the orphaned children—the unaccompanied minors—who are deeply vulnerable. I entirely agree with him that with every day that goes past means these children potentially getting even more deeply disadvantaged. I want this resolved. At the moment, we are working with agencies to do what we can. In the event that the ceasefire holds, I think that things will hopefully move a lot more rapidly and we will be able to do more.
Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
But surely now, with a ceasefire and a lull in the fighting, is the perfect time to facilitate repatriation—to get them out. Will the Minister tell us what numbers he is talking about? We do not want the wool pulled over our eyes yet again. I understand that only three of the children are orphans out of the 60 who are from British families. What numbers are we talking about precisely? We do not want just three children taken out; we want all 60 taken out, and their mothers.
Dr Murrison
I thank the right hon. Lady, who has taken a very long-term interest in this. I would diverge from the pretext of her question, which is that we have not been doing anything; I can tell her, though I am not going to be drawn on the detail, that actually we have, over the past four days. The ceasefire finishes tonight. I hope that it endures, in which case things become a lot more permissive—a lot easier. We hope that that will be the case. I am sorry to disappoint her, but I am not going to be drawn on precise numbers. I do not recognise the figure that was given earlier on. I do respect the authority that has produced it, but I cannot confirm a number anywhere in that region. I also, I am afraid, do not want to be drawn in this forum on the three precise cases that she referred to. She will understand that we are actively trying to do what we can for them, and I do not want to say something at the Dispatch Box that might prejudice what we do in-country. However, I am perfectly happy to have a conversation with her in private.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Ind)
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for this urgent question. I very much sympathise with my right hon. Friend the Minister in dealing with it, because he, with the Foreign Secretary, has a responsibility in this House to work out the practicalities of the respective duties of care of those he would send to rescue those who are trapped in this situation abroad with their needs and everything else. However, sometimes the sheer practicality of difficulties can mask a failure in government to make the decisions they need to make. This is particularly about the mothers of the children. It has seemed to me over a period of time that we have to recognise an international responsibility to take back even those who have been indoctrinated and radicalised in order to protect the children, and that we should have the resources to be able to deal with them, as well as to protect the children, who are the only innocents, by and large, in this situation. Can he reassure me that there is in government now a clear decision being made with the Home Office to bring people back, as they should be cared for here?
Dr Murrison
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He will know that we are currently trying to better understand the situation in al-Hawl, in particular, to try to identify those who have British nationality, their position and their wishes, and, in particular, trying to enumerate those who might be considered to be vulnerable in this piece. As I said earlier, we are approaching this on a case-by-case basis. That is genuinely the case. It is not easy, because our access is obviously imperfect. I hope very much that the ceasefire holds, and then we will be able to do more than we had perhaps been able to do up to this point.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
The Minister has alluded several times to the five-day window expiring tonight. Can he outline, even in general terms, what steps he expects to take this afternoon and this evening before that expiry?
Dr Murrison
As I said, we have been working over the past several days, and indeed for some considerable time, to better understand the situation in al-Hawl camp, in particular, to satisfy ourselves that we know who is there and who we might have responsibility for in some way or another, moral or legal, to work up a plan on how to deal with that. That is irrespective of the ceasefire, but the ceasefire is important because it makes things a lot easier when we are trying to get in place a plan to assist those we think we have a duty towards.
Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)
I understand very well the ethical, legal and practical difficulties of repatriating children, especially those who are not orphans. Many of the partners we work with would not want to take a child from their parents, even in these circumstances. Surely our hand would be strengthened in being able to do the right thing if taking a child to a war zone and all the horrors that accompany it were seen as a form of child abuse. Will the Minister please ask Government lawyers to look at this to see whether we can strengthen our hand in taking children back who are not orphans, and also that we have more in our arsenal to enable us to prosecute those who have taken children overseas?
Dr Murrison
My right hon. Friend is fully familiar with all this territory. Of course, some of the children will have been born in Syria, which I think illustrates the complexity that I referred to earlier and the reason that we need to take an individual approach to each and every case. In general, of course it is absolutely right that a child should not be separated from its mother in particular. That is a strong principle that we should adhere to, but as I say, this situation is rapidly evolving and we have to consider each case individually.
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
The Minister has acknowledged that there is absolutely no time to lose. The current ceasefire presents a window of opportunity to move on these repatriations, but does the Minister accept that access to the two camps where the majority of UK national children are living was possible, as was repatriation, before the ceasefire and is likely to be possible for a little while afterwards? I acknowledge that he is not prepared to be drawn on the performance of other countries, but all the indications are that a number of other countries are able to get their nationals out quicker than we are managing to do. Why is that?
Dr Murrison
I am not sure I would agree entirely with what I read in The Guardian newspaper, and I would certainly disagree with the characterisation that the hon. Gentleman has portrayed. I have no evidence to suggest that the UK is in any way being dilatory in trying to return vulnerable children to the United Kingdom. That is absolutely not the case. We will continue to do what we can, and we have been very active up to this point in trying to work out the next steps. All I can do is to reassure him on that point.
Sir Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks) (Con)
While we should certainly care about the children, we should also continue to worry about some of the parents who still constitute an extreme threat to us here in the United Kingdom and from whom our armed forces have spent five years trying to protect us. Can my right hon. Friend say what work is being done in the coalition to ensure that some of those parents are not inadvertently released?
Dr Murrison
I regret that the Turkish incursion has really not helped this position, in that it is likely that some of the places in which the foreign fighters have been held will become a little more porous as a result. The early suggestion that this would mean that the doors were opened and that they would simply be released has probably been overdone—that is not our sense at the moment—but it certainly does pose a very real risk. My right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have been absolutely right in saying that public safety must be ensured, and we would want to see those who may have committed offences brought to justice. Our view is that such cases should be tried close to the alleged crimes, and that remains our position.
Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (LD)
I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on asking this urgent question and agree with every single word he has said. Can I ask the Minister what would happen in the event that we are able to repatriate these children? As has already been said, they have witnessed, seen and experienced things that no adult, never mind any child, should have to experience, and they are likely to be suffering from quite severe psychological and physical conditions. What package of support will be put in place for them in the event that we actually bring them home? They are going to need all the help they can get.
Dr Murrison
I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised that point. He is absolutely right to say that safeguarding will be vital when these children return to the UK. He is a constituency MP, as I am, and he will understand that local social services are principally responsible for the care of vulnerable children. That will remain the case in this case. We would be working with the statutory agencies to ensure that children who are repatriated to this country and who may be traumatised in ways that most of us can barely imagine are given every care that they require. I suspect that the process will be ongoing and very lengthy.
Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)
Can the Minister clarify whether there is a legal distinction between children born in the so-called caliphate and those who have been taken there? For the avoidance of doubt, will he also clarify that the Government are talking solely about unaccompanied and orphaned children? If we are introducing an element where a parent is involved, that will open up a whole range of other possibilities and challenges.
Dr Murrison
My right hon. Friend is right to touch on the legality, which is complicated. We are clear that there are British nationals in camps in Syria who have the rights that he would expect any British national to have. If they are born to British parents, they would naturally be expected to have British nationality, just like any other child born in any other country. To deal with the distinction between unaccompanied children and others, which other Members have mentioned, our principal concern and priority must be unaccompanied and orphaned children. They are the most vulnerable, and that is where our attention chiefly is at this moment. However, I would say to my right hon. Friend, who has some experience in these matters, that this is a bigger piece of work that I hope will be made considerably easier in the event that we have a sustained ceasefire when the current ceasefire ends this evening.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Rather than dealing with children on a case-by-case basis and risking some of the parents being released and causing further mayhem, is not the solution to repatriate all UK citizens and, if any are guilty or suspected of committing offences, to put them on trial?
Dr Murrison
From my conversations with my international interlocutors yesterday, that does not appear to be the approach being taken by most countries. The Government clearly have a duty to protect the public—the hon. Gentleman’s constituents and mine—and that is at the forefront of our mind. In dealing with foreign terrorist fighters, our firm view is that any alleged crimes should be tried close to the scene of those alleged crimes. Justice is best served in that way, and that is what we are attempting to achieve. The hon. Gentleman has to accept that repatriating foreign terrorist fighters makes it more difficult to mount successful prosecutions and thus protect the public.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that these British children are vulnerable and innocent minors, but that is the case whether they are orphaned or not, so can he explain clearly what Department for International Development-funded partners are doing to ensure that we have identified all British children who are caught up in this appalling situation and confirm that it is the Government’s objective to ensure that they have identified them? We have an obligation to them all, and our duty to them really should be clear.
Dr Murrison
We want to assist all vulnerable children; I hope I have made that very clear. The reason I said that I did not recognise a figure of 50 or 60 was not that I was trying to obfuscate from the Dispatch Box; it was because we genuinely do not know. It is are difficult to determine who they are and how many there are. This piece of work is ongoing, and I hope that a more benign situation in north-east Syria will assist in that process so that we will indeed be able to provide something like an individual service to those who are in the camps, particularly those who are most vulnerable and their family members. That is what we will seek to achieve, but my right hon. Friend’s point is well made.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (LD)
The Minister has made a great deal of his hope that the ceasefire will hold, but of course it may not. How does the Foreign Office plan to respond to the end of the ceasefire in its processes for repatriating British children?
Dr Murrison
That process is not dependent on the end of the ceasefire. My point was that it is made a great deal easier in the event that the security situation on the ground is more benign and more permissive, but our work on repatriating the priority cases in particular, who have to be orphans and unaccompanied minors, will continue nevertheless.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
The Minister has set out a number of the practical challenges involved in acting in this area. Can he confirm the reports that many of us have heard that a number of other countries, including some of our allies, are already in the process of repatriating children from this area of Syria? Can he also confirm whether those countries are adopting an approach similar to the one that he seems to be adopting today, of drawing a distinction between unaccompanied children and orphans and the wider body of children who may be there?
Dr Murrison
I believe that that is the case. I do not discern a dramatic difference from the approach taken by countries with which we could reasonably be compared—that is to say, the countries that we have habitually speak to in this matter. I think there is a commonality of understanding that we need to ensure that those who are most vulnerable are prioritised. That is what we are doing. My right hon. Friend refers to a process being under way. I can assure him that the UK process is under way, and it seems to be in parallel with most countries.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
I trust the Minister’s integrity and honesty, and while he has been vague about the actions that are being taken, I accept his assurance that action is being taken. But the House still requires an assurance not only that the orphans who have been identified will be repatriated, but that we will look at the children who are with their mothers, because they cannot fail to have been traumatised. I suggest that the Minister look at the work of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, which has been asked by the UN and Washington to put together a system for bringing foreign fighters to justice.
Dr Murrison
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s comments. Her tone, as ever, is spot on. I agree with her; we need to apply compassion to all in this situation. We also, of course, need to bring justice to those who must be brought before the courts. I am interested in the work that she cited and will certainly take a close look at it.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I completely concur with my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and the Minister that these children are the innocent victims of their parents’ actions, and we owe them a duty of care. Since the law was changed in 2013, more than 150 children have been taken into the care system in the UK for fear of the risk of radicalisation by their parents. If the parents of these children were in the UK, those children would hopefully now be safely in the care of extended family members, expert foster carers or even adopted parents. Does the Minister agree that, if we can rescue these children safely, we should work to find them safe homes in the UK, whatever the status of their parents?
Dr Murrison
That is a reasonable analogy to draw, because we are dealing with UK law, and these children ultimately will be returned to the UK. In my view, we need to use the same standards, norms and principles with these children as we would apply in the UK. I note my hon. Friend’s point. He will understand that the piece of work under way is trying to identify precisely where these families are, who they are and what can be done. I do not think the numbers are vast. [Interruption.] He is right to say from a sedentary position that that does not matter. These are individual cases, but the press reporting 70,000 in al-Hol camp, for example, gives the impression that there are thousands and thousands of people in the frame for this. I can say without betraying any confidences that that would be a grave exaggeration. We are talking about a relatively small number of people. This should be a containable piece of work, and it is, I assure him, under way.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
The Minister will be aware that there are different interpretations, particularly from those on the ground, of the Ankara-Washington ceasefire. Is that hampering the Government’s and agencies’ attempts to repatriate children? Does he agree that the UK Government need to increase the number of children being resettled here in the UK?
Dr Murrison
I think the hon. Gentleman raised a similar point before on the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, which I am very proud of—20,000 people by 2020 is a big commitment, particularly when it is taken along with our financial commitment to tackling the dreadful humanitarian crisis in Syria. He mentions the ceasefire. I assure him that we have used every opportunity to do what we can in relation to vulnerable people in north-east Syria during this period and will continue to do so, assisted, I hope, by the continuation of the ceasefire, and we have to hope for the best this evening.
Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (LD)
When we look at the bigger picture, we see that the position of these British children and our national security have been adversely impacted by the invasion of north-east Syria by a NATO country following the exit of north-east Syria by a NATO country. Does the Minister agree that it behoves all political generations to review how supranational organisations work, so that they continue to work in Britain’s national interest?
Dr Murrison
I think the hon. Gentleman alludes to Turkey’s behaviour as a member of NATO. All I can say is that I am very disappointed by Turkey’s behaviour, as a trusted NATO friend and ally. I very much hope that it will desist from further incursion into Syria and de-escalate. Otherwise, I think the consequences will be very serious indeed.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Children’s services in this country are overstretched at the moment. Will the Minister ensure that adequate resources are made available to deal with this situation? Is he waiting for a ruling from the courts in relation to British nationality? He has talked about unaccompanied children, but that ruling could mean that there are accompanied children. Does he have contingency plans for that?
Dr Murrison
Referring to the point I made earlier, I think that the scale of this is containable. It is the responsibility of local social services to deal with it, notwithstanding the specialist nature of some of the services that will have to be provided to the vulnerable people concerned. I think I can give the hon. Gentleman the assurances that he seeks in relation to vulnerable children returning to this country having the specialist services they need to ensure their welfare and rehabilitation.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
My constituent Kate has written to me to share her concerns about the intensifying and dangerous situation facing these children stuck in camps. Can the Minister confirm beyond any doubt that the UK Government accept their duty of care for these children and will take responsibility for these British citizens?
Dr Murrison
We look at each case individually; I can give the hon. Lady that assurance. I do not want to get wrapped up in a strict legalistic interpretation of “duty of care”. I want to ensure that we apply our moral duty to do what we can for innocent British nationals; I can give her that assurance
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
I am left a little bit perplexed, particularly following the Minister’s last response. Can he confirm, with a yes or no answer, whether all these young British children are the legal responsibility of Britain and the UK Government?
Dr Murrison
The difficulty is that if they are not unaccompanied or orphaned, they are in the care of their parents. I think the hon. Gentleman is confusing two things. It is important to ensure that children in this country and anywhere else remain in the care of their parents wherever possible. As a parent, I can say that it is vital that children remain in a family setting. That is what we will seek to ensure. The state abrogating responsibility for children is an extreme measure, and we will seek to keep families together wherever we can.
Mr Speaker
I am most grateful to the Minister and to colleagues for taking part. [Interruption.] Yes, I will take points of order. The day would not be complete without them.
Points of Order
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I would like to ask your advice about what measures you think the House should be taking to deal with the possible security risk of the Government’s programme motion, which tomorrow sets us up so that all Members, staff and others will be leaving at the same time, when there is no public transport and the likelihood that there will not be enough taxis. Ministers may be able to go home in their ministerial cars, but for everyone else, including staff, this is surely a security risk. What advice can you give us about what precautions we can take?
Mr Speaker
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for her point of order. I have not got immediate advice. I will consult the Parliamentary Security Director and report back to the House as expeditiously as I can. She has raised a serious point and it does warrant a serious response, and a serious response has to be a considered one, based on consultation. I hope that that is helpful to her for now.
Justine Greening (Putney) (Ind)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The House is about to start a debate that is vital for our country’s future national interest, yet we have just a few hours to debate the principles of the Bill and, after that, just a few more hours in a matter of a couple of days in this House to table and debate amendments to the Bill. The Bill itself is not just a few clauses, but 115 pages long, with a long explanatory text. This House has a duty of care to the people of our country to make sure that we scrutinise and amend legislation and to hold the Government to account as appropriate. It is simply not possible to do that under the current programme motion, yet there is no chance even to debate the issue of what an appropriate amount of time for the programme motion would be; we will simply have a vote on it. Can you therefore give the House some advice about an appropriate amount of time to take on this Bill and, perhaps more importantly, your reflections on the importance of the duty of care this House holds to the British people to make sure that the legislation we will have to live under is scrutinised properly?
Mr Speaker
Everybody who has a responsibility to make a judgment, which means to vote on this matter, has an equal responsibility to study the legislation as carefully as possible before either speaking or voting. I recognise the very real constraint that now applies to Members trying to discharge that obligation, but doing anything about that is not within the gift of the Chair. What I would say to the right hon. Lady and others is that the House has ownership of this matter in the sense that the House is ultimately the determinant of the allocation of time, and the House will have to make its own judgment about that. However, I do not treat what the right hon. Lady has said lightly. If she talks to others and they feel like-minded, they must make their own representations or reach their own judgment about how to proceed. We will have to leave it there, I am afraid, for now.
European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill 2019-19 View all European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill 2019-19 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
19:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 329 / Noes: 299 - Question accordingly agreed to.
19:16 - The House divided: - Ayes: 308 / Noes: 322 - Question accordingly negatived.
Mr Speaker
I inform the House that I have now considered advice on the certifiability of the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill under Standing Order No. 83J, with which I am sure colleagues are all closely familiar—Certification of bills etc. as relating exclusively to England or England and Wales and being within devolved legislative competence—and I have concluded that the Bill does not meet the criteria for certification.
I inform the House that I have not selected either of the reasoned amendments.
The Prime Minister (Boris Johnson)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
We come together now, in the very best traditions of this House, to scrutinise this Bill and then take the decision that this country expects: to make the verdict of the British people the law of the land so that we can leave the European Union with our new deal on 31 October.
I of course wish that this decision on our national future had been taken through a meaningful vote on Saturday, but I respect perfectly the motives of my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), although I disagree with the effects of his amendment.
I regret, too, that after Saturday’s vote the Government have been forced to act on the advice of the Cabinet Secretary and to take the only responsible course, which is to accelerate our preparations for a no-deal outcome.
Today, we have the opportunity to put all that right, because if this House backs this Bill and if we ratify this new deal, which I believe is profoundly in the interests of our whole United Kingdom and of our European friends, we can get Brexit done and move our country on—and we can de-escalate those no-deal preparations immediately and turn them off next week, and instead concentrate on the great enterprise of building a new relationship of the closest co-operation and friendship, as I said on Saturday, with our European neighbours and on addressing our people’s priorities at home.
Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Ind)
A number of people, before they vote today, will be very concerned about various rights that are enshrined in Europe but might be vulnerable if, and hopefully when, we leave. One of those sets of rights is rights for working people. Will the Prime Minister give an undertaking, so that we have it on the record—the Bill is quite clear—that if the Government agree with enhanced rights for working people that will become the law of the land here, but that if the Government disagree with a single one or a number of enhanced rights he will bring those proposals before the House and we will have the chance to vote to instruct the Government to accept them?
The Prime Minister
I can of course give the right hon. Gentleman the assurance that not only will this country maintain the highest standards both for environmental protection and of course for workers’ rights, but in the event that this House wishes to have higher standards than those proposed by the EU or if this House wishes to adopt standards proposed by the EU and the Government disagree, there will of course be an amendable motion to give this House the opportunity to have its say. We will ensure that that is the case.
If we pass this Bill tonight, we will have the opportunity to address not just the priorities of our relations with the EU but people’s priorities at home. I believe that if we do this deal—if we pass this deal and the legislation that enables it—we can turn the page and allow this Parliament and this country to begin to heal and unite.
For those, like me, who believe our interests are best served by leaving the European Union and taking back control, this deal delivers the biggest restoration of sovereignty in our parliamentary history and the biggest devolution of power to UK democratic institutions.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
I absolutely recognise that people who voted for Brexit did not necessarily vote on economic lines. However, the Government are refusing to publish an impact assessment of this deal. The Prime Minister is expecting MPs to vote for something that we know will damage this country economically, without revealing the impact assessment. What do this Government have to hide?
The Prime Minister
If I may, I say to the hon. Lady that I understand the point she makes, but she has had an answer, I believe, from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor yesterday. I think it will be clear to everybody that the best way to avoid any disruption from a no-deal Brexit is to vote for this deal today—to vote for this deal to get it done. I think that will unleash a great tide of investment into this country and be a demonstration of confidence in the UK economy. By voting for this deal tonight, we will deliver a powerful, positive shot in the arm for the UK economy, and I hope very much that she will do so.
Once more, under this agreement, British people will be able to live under laws made by representatives whom they alone elect and can remove—laws enforced by British judges in British courts.
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Ind)
The Prime Minister must recognise that the arrangements that he has come to for Northern Ireland precisely do not deliver that for the people of Northern Ireland. Of course, opinion may be divided in Northern Ireland on whether they want that or not, but the reality is that the vassalage clauses—as they have been described by the Leader of the House in the past—will continue to apply to Northern Ireland after the transition has ended for the rest of Great Britain. How does the Prime Minister square that with the recovery of sovereignty promised to the entirety of the British people?
The Prime Minister
We can square that very simply by pointing out that, yes, of course, there are transitory arrangements for some aspects of the Northern Ireland economy, but they automatically dissolve and are terminated after four years unless it is the majority decision of the Assembly of Northern Ireland to remain in alignment with those arrangements either in whole or in part. The principle of consent is therefore at the heart of the arrangements.
Under the Bill, British farmers will escape the frequently perverse effects of the common agricultural policy; British fishermen, liberated from arcane quotas, will be free to fish in a way that is both more sensible and sustainable; and this House will be free to legislate for the highest possible standards.
Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)
The Prime Minister will be well aware that four pages in the Bill address and enlarge the responsibilities of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. That is all very well and good, but there is not a single sentence in the Bill that explains the new consent process contained in the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal. I say clearly to the Prime Minister: do not take the people of Northern Ireland for fools. We are not fools. He needs to explain in detail how his new consent process will operate—in detail, please.
The Prime Minister
The process for consent is of course set out in detail in the unilateral declaration made between us and the Republic of Ireland. The hon. Lady will understand that it is, as I have indicated to the House, a process by which there are a small minority of economic arrangements in which Northern Ireland remains in alignment, such as sanitary and phytosanitary and manufactured goods, for four years, unless and until by a majority vote of the Stormont Assembly Northern Ireland elects to remain in alignment. Otherwise, for the vast majority of the Northern Ireland economy, Northern Ireland exits with the rest of the UK whole and entire, able to do free trade deals from the outset and participate in all the other benefits of Brexit. I hope that that point commends itself to the hon. Lady.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
I congratulate the Prime Minister on getting us to this critical point in the long Brexit journey. Clause 36 relates to parliamentary sovereignty, and I invite him to confirm that the UK will retain its own sovereign military capability as outlined in paragraphs 92 and 99 of the political declaration and not be committed to any EU mission, military initiative or procurement project unless we do so voluntarily.
The Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend alludes to an important change that we have been able to secure in the course of the negotiations, and he is right that full independence will be retained in the vital sphere of defence and security. I am grateful to him for drawing attention to it.
The House will be free not only from the common agricultural policy but from the common fisheries policy, and free to legislate for the highest standards. That is a crucial point for the House to grasp.
Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)
Will the Prime Minister give the House a categorical assurance that we will not make the mistake of the 1970s and use our marine resources and fish stocks as a bargaining chip to be traded during the upcoming negotiations? Will he guarantee that we will take total, 100% control of all our waters and resources within the exclusive economic zone and, like any other independent marine nation, will then annually engage in common- sense negotiations of a reciprocal nature with our marine neighbours?
The Prime Minister
I can happily give that assurance to my right hon. Friend, who has campaigned long and valiantly on those issues. I can confirm that we will take back 100% control of the spectacular marine wealth of this country, not least the marine wealth of Scotland, which the SNP would discard as senselessly as the superfluous catch dictated by the common fisheries policy.
The House will be free to legislate for the highest possible standards. Let me stress that nothing in the Bill undermines workers’ rights or the House’s natural desire to protect our environment. On the contrary—
Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab/Co-op)
I know that the Prime Minister has been doing a good job trying to reassure MPs such as me from towns that voted leave, but can he explain the loopholes on workers’ rights in the document that would not give us the security we would need on non-regression for manufacturing communities that need those workers’ rights?
The Prime Minister
The hon. Lady raises an important point. People will need reassurance about that. There can be no regression. The UK will maintain the highest possible standards. Let me make the point more clearly. If the EU decides that it wishes to introduce new legislation on social protection, it will be automatic that the House will consider that. As I say, there will be an amendable motion by which the Government will give parliamentary time for the implementation of that measure. That is the opportunity that the Bill gives us. In essence, it takes back to the House the powers to decide such matters. I do not believe that we should shy away from those responsibilities or lack confidence in our collective ability to use those powers for the public good.
It is thanks to the efforts of Labour and Conservative Members that the House is already ensuring that this country does more to tackle climate change than almost any other country in the EU. Our Environment Bill will enshrine the highest standards possible.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
I am sorry to say that there is a difficulty and a fundamental issue of trust in the Prime Minister’s word. If he tells the House that he is committing to reviews of matters such as unfair dismissal protections, including reducing the qualifying period from two years to one year, and anomalies in employee terms and conditions in relation to TUPE regulations, will the Government write into the Bill the date by which BEIS will begin the consultations on those really important rights?
The Prime Minister
We have already said that we will set out how we propose to address the concerns of hon. Members on unfair dismissals and TUPE. I understand the hon. Lady’s desire to get cracking—my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary will write to Members with more details—but I can certainly commit to her now across the Floor of the House that we will indeed commit to a date for the implementation of those measures.
Our Environment Bill enshrines the highest standards in law: far-reaching and legally binding targets to reduce plastics, restore biodiversity, and clean up our air and water.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
Does the Prime Minister agree with himself when he said:
“We should go into those renegotiations with a clear agenda: to root out the nonsense of the social chapter—the working time directive and the atypical work directive and other job-destroying regulations.”?
If that is what he said then, why should we believe a word he says on this now?
The Prime Minister
Because it is absolutely clear on the face of the Bill and from what I have said that this country will maintain the highest possible standards and will give this House the collective ability to keep pace with Brussels and, indeed, to do better.
As I say, we have the highest possible environmental standards. We will match the environmental standards that Brussels brings forward. Indeed, we now have the opportunity to do better. I have stressed for four years—[Interruption.] No, that is not true. It is said from a sedentary position that we have always had the opportunity to do better. I am afraid that that is mistaken. There are plenty of ways in which we are currently prohibited from going forward with higher standards. Under the Bill, we will have the power in this House to do something for which I think the people of this country have yearned for years, which is to strengthen controls on the live transport of animals. I hope we will do that now. That is currently forbidden under EU law.
On fiscal measures, we will now have the power to cut VAT on sanitary products. As for the protection of workers, we will now be able, under the Bill, to take action against employers and agencies who undercut our laws, including where agencies bring in overseas labour from the EU so that local people do not get a look in. That is currently impossible within the EU.
Clause 34 and the accompanying provisions in schedule 5 include a duty on any Minister—to get to the point that has been raised—who introduces relevant legislation to make it clear that workers’ rights will not be weakened in any way. Whether it is tackling air pollution or enhancing biodiversity, this country can do better than simply sticking with EU norms. We can achieve our vision of a dynamic, high-wage, low-tax market economy precisely because we champion high skills and high standards.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
Like the Prime Minister, I would like to get out of the European Union as speedily as possible. What more can he do to reassure the people of Northern Ireland, who feel they are being cut off? They could perhaps have accepted some regulations on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland because that happens at the moment, but they have been absolutely astonished to find that trading between Northern Ireland and Great Britain is somehow now treated as if they are sending something to a foreign country. That is not acceptable.
The Prime Minister
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady. It is very, very important that we stress—I must make myself absolutely clear—that Northern Ireland is leaving the EU with the rest of the UK, whole and entire. We have achieved with this deal what I think few people thought was possible: Northern Ireland is leaving the EU as part of a single customs territory with the rest of the UK. On her specific point, there will be no checks between NI and GB, nor would she expect there to be. It is made absolutely clear in article 6 of the protocol. It is up to the UK Government to insist on unfettered access for trade NI-GB. I give way with pleasure and with respect to the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds).
Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
I am very grateful to the Prime Minister. It is quite clear that whatever he says about Northern Ireland in the UK customs union, de facto the European Union customs code applies in Northern Ireland, if the protocol comes into place, which requires exit declarations from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.
Nigel Dodds
Yes, it does. The Brexit Secretary said yesterday they would have to be corrected by HMRC. Is the Prime Minister saying that at the end of December 2020 Northern Ireland will not go into the protocol if there is a free trade agreement, and that if we are in the protocol and a free trade agreement is agreed we will automatically come out of it, and that that will be written into law?
The Prime Minister
For the clarification of the right hon. Gentleman—I know he realises this already—there are no checks GB-NI. There will be some light—touch measures to ensure there is no illegal trade—[Laughter]—in endangered animal species and banned firearms, which I think he would agree was sensible. The most important point is that even these measures evaporate and are terminated automatically. They automatically dissolve unless a majority of the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont votes to keep them.
Furthermore, to get to the right hon. Gentleman’s point, there is a further sense in which these measures are transitory. They all may be replaced in the great work of beginning the free trade agreement and the new partnership that we intend to build between the UK and the EU—a work in which I devoutly hope Northern Irish Members will be involved in building a whole UK-whole world free trade policy. That is the prize before us. The UK, and the UK alone, will control these vital standards as we leave.
For those who share my belief in the transformative power of free trade, perhaps the single greatest engine of global prosperity, a new deal, enabled by this Bill, will allow us to sign free trade agreements around the world.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (LD)
Schedule 5A to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 lists workers’ retained European Union rights. The directive on work-life balance for parents and carers is omitted from the schedule, along with many others in the same vein. How can those omissions be consistent with the Prime Minister’s commitment to the highest possible standards for workers’ rights?
The Prime Minister
We have been very clear that we will maintain the highest possible standards, but I am very happy to study what the hon. Lady says and can assure her that whatever the House believes has been omitted can easily be replaced.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
I think we agree across the House that there is a climate emergency and that the UK must be a leader, not a follower, when it comes to low-carbon living. I welcome the pledge that the Environment Bill will enhance and not reduce the UK’s standards, but will the Prime Minister commit today to reinforce that ambition with a clear non-regression clause, as we have on workers’ rights, and write it into the Bill. Would that not provide some of the reassurance the House needs about not only protecting but enhancing environmental standards?
The Prime Minister
I can indeed make that commitment, and I thank the right hon. Lady for the work she is doing to champion the environment. I remind her and the House that our Environment Bill will set up, for the first time, legally binding targets and an office for environmental protection to enforce those targets in this country. The crucial thing that will reassure her is that in the event of the EU bringing forward new legislation, we in this Government will bring forward an amendable motion so that the House may choose to match those standards.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Prime Minister
I must make some progress. This new deal will allow us to sign free trade agreements around the world, encouraging innovation, lowering prices, maximising opportunities for world-beating British companies to find new markets and bringing good new jobs to communities who, for too long, have been left behind. Let me repeat: in any future trade negotiations with our country, our national health service will never be on the table.
I wish to say something not just to those who think that Brexit is a great opportunity, as I of course do, but to the 16 million who voted to remain.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Prime Minister
I identify one in my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake).
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
On workers’ rights, the EU requires employers to offer 14 weeks of maternity pay. In the UK, we offer 39 weeks of maternity pay. If we wanted to reduce workers’ rights, why would this Government not have done that already?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend makes exactly the right point: this Government wish to have the highest possible standards for workers across the country because we believe that that is the right way forward for the British economy. I am glad he made that point.
I wish to address the 48%, whose concerns must always be in our minds. The revised political declaration sets out a vision of the closest possible co-operation between the UK and our European friends—a
“relationship…rooted in the values and interests that the”
European
“Union and the United Kingdom share…anchored in their common European heritage.”
To British citizens living in EU countries and to EU citizens who have made their homes here and who have contributed so much, I say that this Bill protects their rights, ensuring that they can carry on living their lives as before.
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
The Prime Minister and some of his Ministers say they are against live animal exports. Does that mean from Dover to Calais, or longer journeys from GB—for example, Stranraer—to Northern Ireland, or longer journeys still, such as to the Hebrides, the Orkneys and the Shetlands? When he says he is ending live animal exports, what does he mean? We need details. Are they short journeys to the continent only or longer journeys, including to Northern Ireland?
The Prime Minister
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman—he rather makes my point for me, because what he may not realise is that animals are currently being shipped from this country to Spain and, indeed, to north Africa in conditions of extreme distress. I do not believe that it is the will of this House, or indeed, of the hon. Gentleman, that we should continue on that basis.
I say to those who care, like me, for the rights of EU nationals living in this country: I argued during the referendum that we should guarantee their rights in this country immediately and unilaterally, and I regret that this did not happen, but the Bill today completes that job.
Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is being characteristically generous in giving way. So that we are absolutely clear, going back to the Northern Ireland issue, I ask him again: is it his and the Government’s intention—as I understood and still understand it to be—that in the phase in which we negotiate a free trade agreement, we would negotiate it on the basis that Northern Ireland would form a whole and singular part of that agreement and therefore be treated exactly the same as Kent?
The Prime Minister
I can give exactly that assurance. That is exactly what this Bill does and what this agreement has secured.
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
Prime Minister, my constituents voted to leave, by 55% to 45%, but they want to ensure and believe—and it is a question of trust—that there will be certainty and decent rights for all workers as we leave the EU, and in the future. I welcome the announcement of an employment reform Bill, but given that he had his pen out in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), will he set the date and tell us when he is going to put it in this Bill so that we know when it will happen?
The Prime Minister
I can confirm that we will be doing that, but it is probably best done in the course of the Bill, and we should get on with the debate as fast as possible.
Let me come to our compatriots in Northern Ireland. This Bill upholds in full the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, as Lord Trimble has attested, and our unwavering commitment to Northern Ireland’s place in the Union.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
Prime Minister, the central plank of the mechanisms for ensuring that both communities are protected in the Belfast agreement— I state this from the agreement—is
“to ensure that all sections of the community can participate and work together…and that all sections…are protected”
and
“arrangements to ensure key decisions are taken on a cross-community basis”.
How does that square with the terms of this agreement under which, as the Prime Minister has stated in this House, decisions will be made on a majority basis?
The Prime Minister
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. I thank him and his party for the work they have done to help us to change this deal very, very much for the better, and he played an instrumental role in that.
On the point that the right hon. Gentleman raises, he knows that this is a reserved issue, and I simply return to my point: the salient feature of these arrangements is that they evaporate. They disintegrate. They vanish, unless a majority of the Northern Ireland Assembly elects to keep them. I think that it is up to Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly to assemble that majority if they so choose. Further, there is an opportunity to vary those arrangements in the course of the free trade agreement and the new partnership that I hope he will join us in building together.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Prime Minister
This new deal explicitly respects the territorial integrity of the UK. It takes the United Kingdom, whole and entire, out of the EU, and, of course, there is a set of special provisions applying to Northern Ireland—
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. I apologise for interrupting the Prime Minister, but a lot of Members are bellowing in a rather bellicose fashion at him, although he has already made it clear that at the moment, he is not giving way. He has taken a lot of interventions and he may take more, but he is proceeding with the development of his case.
The Prime Minister
Mr Speaker, I give way to the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson).
Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)
I am very grateful to the Prime Minister for giving way. I have heard clearly not only what he has tried to do this afternoon to assure the House, but his answer to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). How can the Prime Minister square the pledge he has given—that Northern Ireland can fully benefit from free trade agreements—with the provisions in the agreement he reached at article 13(8) that require the EU to have a say in whether we secede from the protocol arrangements?
The Prime Minister
There is absolutely no provision for the EU to have a say. As the hon. Gentleman knows, there are special provisions in the agreement that apply to Northern Ireland in respect of trade in goods, sanitary and phytosanitary measures and the single electricity market. The benefit of that temporary four-year alignment is that it allows us to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland—that is its great benefit—and to respect the Good Friday process, but those arrangements are automatically terminated after—
Mr Speaker
I gently say to the right hon. Gentleman, who has already had an opportunity to question the Prime Minister, that I hope it is a point of order rather than a point of frustration.
Sammy Wilson
The Prime Minister has claimed to the House today that the agreement does not rule out the interpretation that he has given to the House, but paragraph 8 of article 13 states quite clearly that any
“subsequent agreement between the Union and the United Kingdom shall indicate the parts of this Protocol which it supersedes”
and that the EU will have a say in that. How then can he claim to the House that we have total freedom of decision making?
Mr Speaker
The right hon. Gentleman is an experienced denizen of the House. His point of order is a matter of consuming interest within the Chamber and beyond, but he is a cheeky chappie, because it is not a matter for adjudication by the Chair. He has made a point, in his own way and with considerable alacrity, to which the Prime Minister can respond if he wishes and not if he does not.
The Prime Minister
I will respond by just repeating the point that those arrangements are automatically terminated after four years unless a majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly expressly decides to retain any or all of them, so those arrangements naturally and legally dissolve into full alignment with the whole UK. The default position is alignment with the UK unless, as I say, there is a majority vote in the Assembly against that alignment. In any event, those arrangements can be replaced by the future relationship based on the free trade agreement that we will conclude with the EU.
At the same time, the agreement ensures that Northern Ireland is part of the UK customs territory and benefits immediately from any UK trade deals. Clause 21 gives effect to those measures in the protocol. Apart from those special provisions, there are no level playing field provisions covering only Northern Ireland. Nothing in the new deal requires different treatment of Northern Irish services, which account for over 70% of the economy, and nothing in the revised political declaration would oblige Northern Ireland to be treated differently in the future relationship with the EU, which we will soon begin to negotiate.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
I cannot believe for a minute that the Prime Minister is seeking in any way to deceive the House, but he has said repeatedly today that there will be no differences between the way Northern Ireland is treated and the way Kent or anywhere else in the reset of the UK is treated. Why, then, does the impact assessment produced by his own Government, slipped out late last night, make it quite explicit, in paragraph 241, that goods
“moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will be required to complete both import declarations and Entry Summary (ENS) Declarations”,
which
“will result in additional…costs”
in Northern Ireland? How can the Prime Minister square that fact with the bluster and rhetoric he is serving up today?
The Prime Minister
The House will know full well that these are transitory arrangements. If the people of Northern Ireland choose to dissent from them, they melt away, unless by a majority they choose to retain them. I repeat: there will be no checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Nothing in the revised political declaration obliges Northern Ireland to be treated any differently in the future relationship, and I would expect Northern Ireland Members to be involved intimately in devising a whole-UK whole-world trade policy—and, indeed, the whole House.
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
Is not the fundamental point that, to deliver the UK whole, secure and prosperous out of the EU, Members of this House need to vote for Second Reading and, yes, vote for the programme motion so that it can all be done on time, and then stand firm behind the Prime Minister and his negotiating team, so that he has the power to deliver just the relationship that is being urged upon him to put before the House in due course?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend has given excellent advice to the House, and I thank him very much for his support. I wish to stress that the whole House will be involved in devising that future partnership.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Prime Minister for his reassurance that workers’ rights—avoiding a race to the bottom, no regression, and so on—will be written into the Bill, because it is a huge issue for many Opposition Members and needs to be recognised by many Government Members. Can he give the same reassurance that consumer protection will also be written into the Bill?
The Prime Minister
I can indeed give the hon. Gentleman that assurance. [Interruption.] There will be no race to the bottom. For right hon. and hon. Members who wish to be involved in the building of our future partnership, there will be every opportunity at every stage for the House to be involved, and quite properly so. [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. There is so much noise in the Chamber that I fear that the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), who enjoys the exalted status as Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, cannot draw attention to the fact that he wishes to intervene in the debate, which is regrettable for the hon. Gentleman.
The Prime Minister
I am delighted to repeat our unequivocal commitment to consumer standards and protections.
Simon Hoare
Thank you for your good offices, Mr Speaker.
Trying to square the difficult circle of delivering Brexit under the umbrella of the Good Friday agreement and maintaining peace on the island of Ireland was always going to be a big ask. Not everybody will be happy with what the Prime Minister’s is bringing forward, but all communities should be happy that nobody is talking about a coach and horses being driven through the Good Friday agreement and that there are no communities, particularly on the border, that now fear a resurrection of violence, bloodshed and hatred. He is to be congratulated.
The Prime Minister
I am very grateful to the Chairman of the Select Committee for his remarks. I intend to bring the whole House into the process of decision making and into our confidence and to draw on the expertise of the House.
The Prime Minister
That will be the case not least in environmental matters, on which I know the hon. Lady speaks with great authority.
Caroline Lucas
The Prime Minister has been giving so many reassurances to Labour Members that I wonder whether he could give one to me about the trapdoor at the heart of this Brexit deal. We know that if no arrangement is agreed by the end of December next year, we risk crashing out with no deal. Can he reassure me that he will extend that transition and guarantee now at the Dispatch Box that we will not crash out at the end of December next year?
The Prime Minister
I can indeed assure the hon. Lady that there will be no crashing out, because we will negotiate a great new friendship and partnership within the timescale. I know that hon. Members on both sides of the House have every confidence in the Government to do that. They said we could not change the withdrawal agreement in the 90 days we had, that we would never get rid of the backstop and that we would not get a new deal, but we did get a new deal—we got a great deal—for this House and this country, and we will get a great new free trade agreement and a new partnership for our country.
Before us lies the great project of building a new friendship with our closest neighbours across the channel. That is the common endeavour of our whole nation, and that will begin with clause 31, which will give Parliament a clear role, including the hon. Lady.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
Is it not the case that to secure a deal with the EU, the Prime Minister had to make a choice over Northern Ireland? The choice that he made was to sign up to EU trading rules to secure frictionless trade with Ireland and the rest of the EU. Is not the truth that at the end of all the negotiations that the rest of the UK will face, we will be confronted with exactly the same dilemma? Either we remain close and sign up to the rules, in which case we give up our say—so what is the point of Brexit?—or we break totally free, in which case what is the price?
We have not made that choice. The Prime Minister has made it over Northern Ireland, and we face it over the rest of the UK. This is not getting Brexit done; it is continuing the agony for years to come.
The Prime Minister
Obviously I have a vision of this country having a very close friendship and partnership with the EU, but also being able to engage in free trade deals around the world. I think that those objectives are compatible, and I think that the way in which they can be made compatible is evident in this great new deal that we have done, but it is of course open to the hon. Lady to work with us to take it forward.
The Prime Minister
I give way with pleasure to the right hon. Member for Orpington. [Laughter.]
Joseph Johnson
I congratulate the Prime Minister on securing a deal. I never doubted it for a minute. [Laughter.] Can he reassure me that the moment the Bill receives Royal Assent—hopefully sooner rather than later—he will work tirelessly, along with the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to secure the closest possible relationship with European science and research funding programmes?
The Prime Minister
I thank my right hon. Friend and brother very much for what he has said. He has worked tirelessly in that sphere himself. I know how much he values such co-operation, as, indeed, I know how much Members throughout the House value it. We will protect, preserve and enhance it, and, as I have said, Members throughout the House will be involved in that process, but, as I have also said, under clause 31 Parliament is given a clear role.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)
I thank the Prime Minister for giving way; he is being incredibly generous. He will no doubt have heard, as I have, the dire warnings in certain quarters that if we leave the European Union, there will be problems at Dover and chaos on the roads of Kent. Can he assure the House, and me, and my constituents, that with this deal there will be no problems at the channel ports and no problems on Kent’s roads?
The Prime Minister
I can indeed give that assurance, and the best way to avoid any problems whatever is to vote for this deal tonight.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Prime Minister
By your leave, Mr Speaker, I shall make some progress.
Let us pause for a second and reflect on the scale of the choices before us. If we rejected this new deal, what would the House be saying to the country and to the world? What alternative course of action is open to us? Is it to undo Brexit and cancel the greatest democratic exercise in the country’s history? Even now, I find it impossible to believe that any democrat would contemplate such a course. Time and again, the House has promised to honour the referendum, and the fact that the Leader of the Opposition is now proposing a rerun shows a regrettable contempt for the verdict of the British people. The House has repeatedly rejected a second referendum, and, in my view, must emphatically do so again.
Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)
Does the Prime Minister agree that a referendum took place and a decision was made by the British people? It is up to Parliament to accept that decision and work with it. Those are not my words, but the words of the Leader of the Opposition.
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend has encapsulated the point perfectly, and I think that the Leader of the Opposition should reflect on what he has said.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Ind)
I worked closely with my right hon. Friend when he was Mayor of London, and I know how much he valued the contribution of EU citizens. I have the great good fortune to represent a constituency that contains one of the highest proportions of EU citizens. May I ask my right hon. Friend to look again at the arbitrary deadline for applications for settled status?
The Prime Minister
I am delighted to say that the settled status scheme is proceeding apace, and we have every hope that the entire 3.4 million will have registered by the time of the deadline. However, the best way to give all our citizens confidence and security, and to give all our friends confidence and security—particularly those 3.4 million—is to get this deal through tonight, because that is how we will protect their rights.
I know that some colleagues have been contemplating certain amendments that are not about delivering the new deal, but rather about trying to change its fundamentals. What would that say to our European friends about our good intentions? That we are proposing to come back to Brussels to ask for a third agreement? That we will put it to a fifth vote, perhaps after another six months or another year? Is there anyone who seriously believes that the EU would reopen the withdrawal agreement again? On the contrary, our European friends could not be clearer. The deal on the table is the one contained in the Bill. The decision for the House is whether to ratify this deal, rather than going round in circles in a futile effort to construct a new one.
Then there is the question of yet further delay. I know that some colleagues have been contemplating the timetable for the Bill and asking whether scrutiny should take longer. I do not think that we in this House should be daunted by the task that is before us. Let us work night and day, if that is what it takes to get this done. Our European friends are not showing any enthusiasm about agreeing to the delay for which Parliament has asked.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
I congratulate our Prime Minister on achieving this deal. I had always thought that it would be enormously challenging to get all the other 27 leaders to agree to change the existing deal. However, this deal needs to be voted through not only by us but by the European Parliament, and it needs to be ratified across Europe. Does the Prime Minister agree that if we do not support the programme motion tonight, we will add great, great uncertainty and will push up the risk of no deal?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is completely right. Those who have argued for three years that they are motivated primarily by a desire to avoid no deal have only one logical course of action tonight, and that is to vote for a programme motion that will ensure that we leave with a deal on 31 October. Doing anything else would, I am afraid, mean this House abdicating its responsibilities and handing over to the European Council the decision on what happens next: whether the EU will offer a short delay, a long delay, or no delay. The decision will be down to the EU.
The public do not want further delay. The House has discussed these issues for three and a half years. What on earth will the public think of us if the House votes again tonight not to get on with it—not to deliver Brexit on 31 October, but to hand over control of what happens next to the EU, closing the path to leaving with a deal on 31 October and opening the path to no deal in nine days’ time? Members claim that they want more weeks or months, or perhaps even years, in which to debate this matter, but the public will not be deceived about the real purpose of such delay. When we are so nearly at the end of this process, are Members really going to tell their constituents that at the last hurdle they chose to hand the decision to Brussels?
Even if the European Council were to agree with Parliament on a further delay, what would happen in the period after 31 October? As my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) rightly said, there would be yet more of the uncertainty that is holding our country back. I invite Members to picture the businesses in our constituencies freezing their investments, the jobs that will never be created, the contracts that British firms will neither bid for nor win and the exports that will never leave our shores.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
My right hon. Friend will know that the Mayor of the West Midlands is in very close contact with manufacturers in the area, including Jaguar Land Rover. They are saying that the most damaging thing to manufacturing and industry as a whole is the uncertainty due to delay. They—not just me, not just the Mayor, but manufacturers—want the deal done and the deal done now.
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is right, and the consequence of not getting this done and not voting through this deal tonight is to continue with the creeping paralysis that is affecting certain parts of our economy.
The Prime Minister
Perhaps even worse—[Interruption.] Perhaps even worse, if we do not get this thing done we face the continuing acrimony and the abuse that I am afraid is still heard—perhaps increasingly heard—on both sides of the argument.
The Prime Minister
The divisions will continue. [Interruption.] I give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Gareth Snell
May I start by thanking the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) and the hon. Members for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) and for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) for helping getting me noticed? I must have been hard to spot.
May I bring the Prime Minister’s attention to clause 31, which is basically the amendment that my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and I tabled to the last meaningful vote? However, whether by accident or by sneak, the Prime Minister has managed to add a small addendum, which means that any future vote would have to comply almost exclusively with the political declaration, meaning that this House would be constrained in what it could set as the future negotiating mandate. Can the Prime Minister explain why that has appeared? Also, on the purpose of scrutiny, this Bill specifically disapplies section 20 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 which requires a 21-day resting period for all international treaties; why has the Prime Minister decided to do that on this, and is that something he plans to do on any future trade arrangements?
The Prime Minister
On the hon. Gentleman’s point about clause 31, the intention is very clear: the intention is to allow the House to participate actively and fully in the building of the future partnership. If he reads the political declaration, he will see that there is plenty of scope within that political declaration for very active and full participation by all Members of the House in devising that partnership.
On the hon. Gentleman’s second point about the deadline in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, there is in my view ample time for us to get this done. The House of Commons has been discussing this issue for three and a half years. We have chewed over this question again and again; our constituents will not be fooled by any further delay—they will not understand why that is necessary—and if we delay again, I am afraid that we will miss an opportunity to heal the divisions between us, and the paralysis will continue. Let me make it absolutely clear: there is no way—
Several hon. Members rose—
David Linden
It is indeed a genuine point of order concerning the programme motion. The BBC breaking news app is reporting that the Prime Minister has said that if he loses the programme motion he will withdraw the Bill. Given that the Prime Minister is talking about working with the House, has he given you any notice, Mr Speaker, that if the programme motion falls he will pull the Bill tonight?
Mr Speaker
The Prime Minister has not given me any indication on that matter, and we must leave him to develop his case.
The Prime Minister
Let me be very clear, to come to exactly the point the hon. Gentleman raises, that I will in no way allow months more of this. [Interruption.] No, I will not give way. If Parliament refuses to allow Brexit to happen and instead gets its way and decides to delay everything until January, or possibly longer, in no circumstances can the Government continue with this. And with great regret I must go directly to the point that the hon. Gentleman raises: with great regret I must say that the Bill will have to be pulled, and we will have to go forward, much as the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition may not like it, to a general election. I will argue at that election—[Interruption.] No, I will not give way. At that election I will argue “Let’s get Brexit done,” and the Leader of the Opposition will make his case to spend 2020 having two referendums—one on Brexit and one on Scotland—and the people will decide.
There is another path. [Interruption.] No, I won’t give way. And that is to accept, as I have done, that this deal does not give us everything that we want, and all of us can find clauses and provisions to which we can object, as we can in any compromise, but it also gives us the opportunity to conclude that there is no dishonour in setting aside an entirely legitimate desire to deliver the perfect deal in the interests of seizing the great deal that is now within our grasp—of seizing the opportunity to begin healing the divisions, and to satisfy the aching desire of the British public that we would just get Brexit done and to move on to do what those who sent us here want us to do, which is to address their priorities.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
Will the Prime Minister give way?
The Prime Minister
No.
For three and a half years this Parliament has been caught in a deadlock of its own making—
Mr Speaker
Order. Notwithstanding the fact that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) must emphatically be the loudest Member of any Parliament anywhere in the European Union, he cannot insist that the Prime Minister gives way if the Prime Minister is disinclined to do so. I think the Prime Minister may be approaching his peroration, to which we should listen.
The Prime Minister
I think I have given way quite a lot during this speech and I wish to wind up because I know that hon. Members will wish to make their own contributions to the debate.
For three and a half years, this Parliament has been caught in a deadlock of its own making, and the truth is that all of us bear a measure of responsibility for that outcome, yet by the same token we all have the same opportunity now. The escape route is visible. The prize is visible before us: a new beginning with our friends and partners; a new beginning for a global, self-confident, outward-looking country that can do free trade deals around the world as one whole entire United Kingdom. The deal is here on the Table. The legislation to deliver it is here before us. A clear majority in the country is now imploring us to get Brexit done in this House of Commons. I say to the House: let us therefore do it and let us do it now and tonight. I commend this Bill to the House.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
On Saturday, we warned that, if the House passes the Government’s deal, it would be a disaster for our country. Now, as we look through the details of the Bill, we see just how right we were: page after page of what amounts to nothing less than a charter for deregulation and a race to the bottom; a deal and a Bill that fail to protect our rights and our natural world, fail to protect jobs and the economy, and fail to protect every region and nation in the United Kingdom. The Bill confirms that Northern Ireland is really in the customs union of the EU and goods will be subjected to tariffs. On Saturday, the Prime Minister said there would be no checks, but yesterday the Brexit Secretary confirmed to the Lords European Union Committee that under the Government’s proposals Northern Irish businesses that send goods to Great Britain will have to complete export declaration forms, and today the Government estimate—this is the Government’s estimate—that exit declaration forms will be between £15 and £56 per customs declaration. So the Prime Minister was at best—I am being generous here—mistaken on Saturday. The more divergence, the harder that border will become and the greater danger and risk it will put on the historic Good Friday agreement.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman think that we should still leave the European Union—yes or no?
Jeremy Corbyn
We are challenging this Bill today and that is the whole point of this debate. As the hon. Gentleman well knows, my party’s policy is that we would negotiate an appropriate deal with the EU and allow the people to make the final decision. This deal leaves open the possibility of the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal by the end of next year.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
I do not disagree with what my right hon. Friend said, but does he understand why those of us in seats that voted heavily to leave, and who stood on a manifesto in 2017 that said that we would respect the result of the referendum, feel very strongly that this Bill must be allowed to proceed to Committee so that we can engage in the detail and see whether it is possible to get a Brexit deal that protects our constituents? For many people back home in towns such as Wigan, this is an article of faith in the Labour party and in democracy, and those of us who are seeking to engage in the detail do so not because we will support a Tory Brexit—our votes at Third Reading are by no means secure—but because we want to see if we can improve the deal and keep people’s trust in our democracy.
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I also thank her and other colleagues, some of whom represent seats that voted heavily to leave, for their engagement, for the discussions and for the constructive way in which all that has been approached. I do understand the concerns in those constituencies and communities. I know that she supports the principle of a customs union, which the Labour party placed in its manifesto and has restated since. My view is that we should vote against this Bill this evening for the reasons that I have set out. I understand her view that it is possible to amend it in Committee—that is always the process in Parliament—but my recommendation would be to vote against this Bill. However, I understand and respect the way in which she has approached this and the way in which she represents her community and her constituency. She will join me in being pretty alarmed at the stress that the manufacturing industry is under at the moment. If we do not have a customs union, manufacturing in this country will be seriously under threat.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
For many areas that rely heavily on manufacturing, the deal as it has been set out, which includes leaving the customs union and single market, inevitably means tariffs, which inevitably means less manufacturing and fewer jobs in those areas.
Jeremy Corbyn
My right hon. Friend’s constituency, which I know very well, was once a centre of manufacturing in Britain, but the Government of Margaret Thatcher put paid to that. He is right that, in the event of tariffs being introduced on manufactured goods and in the event of WTO conditions, the opportunities for sales in the European market, which are obviously huge at present, would be severely damaged. I ask colleagues to think carefully about what I see as the dangers behind the Prime Minister’s approach, because he does not offer a safety net—[Interruption.] There are so many people trying to intervene. Can I deal with one at a time, please? That would be kind. The Prime Minister does not offer a safety net—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. If I may gently say to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Seely), it is at the very least a tad tactless, when he has just been advised that the Leader of the Opposition is dealing with one intervention first, immediately to spring to his feet. I enjoin him to remember his emotional intelligence.
Jeremy Corbyn
I do not think there is any process that allows an intervention on an intervention on an intervention. I think you would probably notice it, Mr Speaker.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
I am minded to vote in favour on Second Reading not because I support the deal but because I do not; I want to improve the deal so that it reflects the manifesto that I stood on and respects the referendum result, and so that we leave with a deal that protects jobs and trade. Does my right hon. Friend understand my motivation?
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Having on several occasions spent time with her in her constituency, talking to people in her community and visiting factories and enterprises in the area, I fully understand both her concerns and their concerns. I commend her for her work in representing that area and the obvious friendship that exists between her and all the people she represents—she is a great MP. She wants to represent her constituency and her constituents’ concerns. I hope that she will understand why I believe this Bill should not be given a Second Reading, but I am sure she will agree with me that to bring this Bill for debate less than 17 hours after it was published is a totally unreasonable way of treating Parliament, and I hope she will join me in the Lobby this evening in opposing the programme motion.
It is no wonder that some Conservative Members are suddenly so keen to jump on board with this deal, because it opens the door to the no-deal exit that this House has voted against on numerous occasions.
Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman understand that the reason so many Opposition and Government Members want to get the Bill through is that we want to avoid no deal? The best way of doing that is to support this deal, so why will he not support it?
Jeremy Corbyn
I do not know what has happened to the hon. Gentleman’s maths, but so far three Members have intervened who have expressed disagreement with the Bill and want to get a better deal to get a customs union, which is hardly the position he adopts, so he should be careful of assuming that all my colleagues over here, who are desperate to represent hard-up communities that have been so disgracefully treated by this Government, are suddenly jumping on board with him. I have news for him: they are not.
It is plain and simple: this Bill is a charter for a Brexit that would be good for the hedge fund managers and speculators, but bad for the communities that we represent, our industries and people’s jobs and living standards. Industries from chemical processing to car manufacturing are all deeply worried about how the Bill will operate.
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
One of the reasons so many of us are concerned about the programme motion is how little time we have to bottom this out. The Prime Minister tells us that things will be better if we leave the European Union. He just said that he would look at the European work-life balance directive, but on 2 September the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy already ruled out to me implementing it. It is a directive that would give people carers’ rights and care leave that our constituents do not currently have. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the problems with rushing this through is not just what we will lose, but what we will miss out on because this Prime Minister will not give any commitments on them?
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Of course, she is absolutely right that, while the Prime Minister claims that there is no intention in his mind to undermine workers’ rights—I cannot see into his mind, so I do not know, but that is what he says—there is no legal protection within this Bill for dynamic alignment with the European Union on consumer rights, environmental protections, workers’ rights and much else besides. I therefore urge colleagues to think very carefully about how they vote on the Bill tonight.
Mr Baker
I treasure the interview that the right hon. Gentleman and I gave to Sky News before he became Leader of the Opposition, when the only thing that we agreed on is that we should leave the European Union on democratic grounds. What has changed since he became leader of the Labour party? Can he not see that, if he votes against the programme motion, he and his whole party will be seen as voting against delivering Brexit?
Jeremy Corbyn
Parliament needs to do its job and that is what we should be given the chance to do; we should not be rushed into this 17 hours after the Bill’s publication. I would also say—I was a trade union organiser and official before I came into this House—you do not give up what you have won and gained; you protect what you have and try to get better in the future. The Bill undermines workers’ rights in our country and in our society, and those who vote this thing through in its present form will find that many of our current rights will be severely damaged.
Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)
This place can be quite intimidating at times. I came here believing that people who sounded a bit posh and walked around with an air of entitlement somehow knew what they were doing. If nothing else, I thank the Prime Minister for disproving that at least.
Jim McMahon
I was catching a breath—the Prime Minister wore me out; I was getting up and down so much earlier.
Opposition Members are genuinely agonising over the best way forward in reconciling constituencies that have very different views on Brexit, and I thank the Leader of the Opposition for the work he is doing to try to retain that coalition. Regardless of where people come from, surely it is important that we have the right information and the right risk assessment. Is it not wrong that the risk assessments are incomplete and that the Government’s own advisers have not even been able to rate their risk assessments because of the lack of time?
Jeremy Corbyn
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As a distinguished former leader of his local authority, he knows the importance of going through documents in detail and having a chance to take advice on the implications. Even with the greatest brains in the world—I am sure this House does contain the greatest brains in the world, there is no doubt about that—17 hours is not very long to deal with 40 clauses and 110 pages of legislation.
The Prime Minister is trying to blindside Parliament to force through this deal, and this Parliament must challenge him.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that, should it be passed, this Bill will open us up to a free trade agreement with the US that will have huge ramifications for our valued national health service and for the food we eat?
Jeremy Corbyn
Yes, it will. The only way forward for the Prime Minister would be to go on to WTO rules and then to seek a special trade deal with the United States. I do not know whether the Prime Minister has noticed, but Donald Trump adopts an “America first” policy. Donald Trump’s attitude towards trade is, to put it most generously, one-sided towards the USA. There will be no equitable deal with the USA, and those companies in the USA that want to get control of our health service will come knocking on the door to take over our national health service.
This is a Bill of huge significance and complexity, and it will decide the future of our country, of our economy and of the economic model we follow. Accepting the programme motion will mean that all 40 clauses have to be considered and voted on within 48 hours, starting this evening. That would be an abuse of Parliament and a disgraceful attempt to dodge accountability, scrutiny and any kind of proper debate.
David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Has my right hon. Friend noticed that clause 36(1) says
“It is recognised that the Parliament of the United Kingdom is sovereign”?
Yet the Prime Minister will not give this Parliament of the United Kingdom the chance to fully scrutinise his proposals.
Jeremy Corbyn
My right hon. Friend makes a strong case that Parliament should have the opportunity to properly scrutinise what the Executive want to do. I do not think the Prime Minister has really taken that into account in his botched and speedy procedure and in his obsession with getting all this stuff through in a few days.
What the officials once said would take four weeks to properly scrutinise is now being done in one day. Colleagues on both sides of the House should simply ask themselves why. So much for Parliament taking back control. Parliament is being treated as an inconvenience that can be bypassed by this Government.
There is a crucial element to this. When we in this House deal with major issues for the country, we need the information and we need—
Several hon. Members rose—
Jeremy Corbyn
If hon. Members hang on a second, I will deal with this. No economic impact assessment whatsoever has been made or presented to this House. At the very least, this House should have that assessment and that expert advice in order to scrutinise the Bill. The Chancellor of the Exchequer does not seem to think it is relevant that this Bill and their deal need that kind of scrutiny—even more so in the light of today’s dire public finance figures.
Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that there has been no economic impact assessment of the Bill, so many of us have to rely on the impact assessment of the previous Prime Minister’s withdrawal agreement, which showed a detrimental impact on the north-east to the degree of 7% of our GDP. How can that be justified to our industry and manufacturing in the north-east, which are already so far behind the rest of the country?
Jeremy Corbyn
Indeed. My hon. Friend represents a constituency that has suffered grievously from the Tory Government’s industrial non-strategy. SSI Redcar was closed down, and there are huge issues for manufacturing investment across her region and across her constituency. This House knows full well—and if Conservative Members cared to listen, they would know full well—that this proposal will damage manufacturing industry and therefore jobs, particularly in the north-east, which is the only part of the country with a manufacturing surplus on trade with Europe and the rest of the world.
Catherine McKinnell
The Prime Minister shakes his head, but every single Member represents people who voted leave and people who voted remain. Nobody voted for a wing-and-a-prayer, cake-and-eat-it, blindfold Brexit with no economic impact assessment of the biggest transformation of our economy in peacetime history.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a completely unacceptable way to bring forward this legislation? It is not fair on this House, and it is not fair on the people who will lose their jobs as a result.
Jeremy Corbyn
I commend my hon. Friend for what she says and the way she says it. We all represent people who voted in different directions in the referendum, or who did not vote at all. We all have to represent them, but in making these decisions, we have to ask ourselves this question: if this deal is good for our country, why have the Government not produced a single scrap of evidence showing that?
Lady Hermon
I am enormously grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Let me pay tribute to a former Labour leader, Tony Blair, who was the architect of the Good Friday agreement, which delivered much needed peace and stability to Northern Ireland after 30 years of atrocious violence that affected all communities right across the island of Ireland.
I am extremely concerned that the Labour party, the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues have anxiety that the Prime Minister’s new Brexit deal, in some way, undermines the Good Friday agreement and its achievements. Will he please take a few moments to explain his concerns? I think that is really important.
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I am sure she and the whole House would agree that the Good Friday agreement was an historic step forward that has brought relative peace to Northern Ireland. My concern is that this Bill creates a customs frontier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK—the Prime Minister told the DUP conference that that is something he would not do—and requires the certification of goods before they can be sent from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK, and it therefore creates a different trading relationship.
Although there might not be an aspiration at the moment to put any physical customs points on the road borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic, I gently say that the direction of travel is not a good one. The hon. Lady knows as well as I do that, as soon as we start doing that, we will end up seriously undermining the historic achievements of the Good Friday agreement.
Mr Duncan Smith
I return the right hon. Gentleman to a simple fact, about which I am concerned. Does he recall that he once sponsored a Bill to repeal the European Communities Act 1972? Can he explain what has changed and why, in voting against this Bill, he will be voting against repealing the 1972 Act?
Jeremy Corbyn
I also recall that I strongly supported the social chapter to try to bring social justice across Europe, and I just remind the right hon. Gentleman of his historic achievement of bringing in universal credit and all the damage that has done to so many people in this country.
The only economic evidence we can go on is the economic assessment carried out under the previous Prime Minister, and that was clear.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should not vote for anything that could make our country poorer, and this Brexit deal would do exactly that? Does he also agree that the previous referendum should have been regarded as illegal due to the overspend by the Prime Minister? The only way forward is a people’s vote.
Jeremy Corbyn
People voted in different ways in the referendum in 2016—that is obvious—but nobody voted to lose their jobs, or to find that their regulations and living conditions had been damaged. The function of Parliament is to hold the Government to account and scrutinise this agreement. A bare bones free trade agreement, which is what the Prime Minister is promising, would dramatically hit our country’s GDP, and would disproportionately hit the poorest regions and make everybody in this country worse off. It would also lock in the existing privatisation of our national health service, and nothing in this Bill protects our health service or public services from future trade deals.
Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend acknowledge that many EU nationals in this country are really afraid, because they do not know what their future is going to be? An Italian flower seller in a market in my constituency has lived here 15 years and has been constantly asked, “When are you going home?” Today, I have received an email from a doctor in the constituency, who said of a colleague:
“There are significant concerns about the tardy response by the ‘Brexit department’, for want of a better name for that organization, in that there has been no confirmation of—
this German doctor’s residency and—
“status going forward.
He is obviously very anxious and distracted by this situation.
We need to keep primary care morale up in the current difficult times and our valued European doctors—
and nurses—
need to feel confident about their future within the UK.
This doctor has been a cornerstone of the NHS in Wales for over 20 years.”
My right hon. Friend knows very well that we are losing doctors and nurses, and we cannot afford to do it.
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. She says it with heartfelt passion and she is right: there are many people who have come to this country from all over the world, made their homes here and made a massive contribution to our lives and our society, and every one of us owes our health to those people who work in our NHS, whether they come from Commonwealth countries, other countries or the European Union. They should not be put through the strain either of the Windrush hostile environment or the sword of Damocles hanging over many at the moment because they know they have only five years’ definite stay in this country. I will just remind the House that in July 2016, my party, through Andy Burnham, then our shadow Home Secretary, moved a motion guaranteeing permanent rights and residence of EU nationals. The Prime Minister was the only Tory to support it at that time. I do not know what has happened to him since then.
On trade and investment, will the Chancellor do his job and provide the House with a comprehensive economic impact assessment on this deal? At the very least, will he do so before Report stage? This Bill falls hugely short in all areas.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jeremy Corbyn
I have given way a great deal, as I am sure all Members would agree. I am going to make some progress and then give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas).
On jobs and manufacturing, this deal will reduce access to the market of our biggest trade partner and leave our manufacturers without a customs union. As we have heard in many interventions, Members have heard desperate pleas from businesses in their constituencies all saying that they need frictionless supply chains. So I ask all Members to do the right thing: let us work together to make sure that a comprehensive customs union is hard-wired into our future relationship with the EU.
Jim Fitzpatrick
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. He knows that we disagree on elements of this Bill and this issue. As his former Whip, with my Whips tie on, may I ask him for an assurance that Labour Members who exercise their conscience this evening and do not follow the whip will not have that whip removed, any more than he had it removed when he exercised his conscience?
Jeremy Corbyn
I believe in the powers of persuasion and tonight I would like to persuade my hon. Friend: come with us, vote against this Bill and vote against the programme motion, because I believe, and I think he may agree with me, that that is in the interests of his constituents.
Caroline Lucas
Does the Leader of the Opposition share my concern that this Brexit deal could lead to a loss of freedom of movement within the island of Ireland for international family members of Irish or UK citizens? In other words, it imposes the equivalent of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, denying families their reunification rights. Will he acknowledge that this is a barely mentioned but worrying aspect of yet another way in which this deal breaches the Good Friday agreement?
Jeremy Corbyn
Yes, I understand and accept the hon. Lady’s concerns on that. She is eloquently making the case for far more scrutiny of this Bill, so I am sure she will be joining me in opposing the programme motion this evening, because it will prevent just that kind of scrutiny. I note that the programme motion allows just one hour for consideration of all Lords amendments, however many there may or may not be.
Jeremy Corbyn
I will give way to my hon. Friend, with his quiet demeanour, but let me just say, on workers’ rights, that by removing any level playing field provision the Government are asking us to give them a blank cheque on rights at work.
Mr Speaker
It is a great relief to the House; I was worried that the hon. Gentleman might explode in the atmosphere, which would have been a most unfortunate scenario.
Karl Turner
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition for eventually giving way. I was incredibly concerned when I was reminded by my wife earlier today that we spent longer choosing a sofa than this House has to debate this incredibly important Bill. The important point is this: the Prime Minister’s own legislative adviser, Nikki da Costa, has said and advised him that she thinks this House needs at least four weeks to debate this important legislation in order for it to go through both Houses. We have just not got enough time to debate this—does my right hon. Friend agree?
Jeremy Corbyn
My hon. Friend makes a strong point. We got the Bill at 8.15 last night and this afternoon at 1 pm we start debating it—that is utterly ludicrous. We are then going into Committee stage. The Bill then goes to the Lords and comes back, as I said in response to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion, for a one- hour debate on Lords amendments. These are serious issues that have huge implications for communities, factories, jobs and people. This should not be dealt with in this way.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
Over the past couple of years, Members from across the House have asked many, many questions about the customs relationship between the EU and the UK post Brexit, but nobody thought to ask whether customs arrangements within their own country would be affected. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Prime Minister should have, at that Dispatch Box, apologised to the businesses in Britain that trade within Britain and are now going to have start filling out forms that they would never have had to fill out before?
Jeremy Corbyn
Indeed, and that is just one aspect of the Bill that has been revealed today. I suspect much more will come up.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
One reason why we need greater scrutiny is that as a result of the Bill, the relationships in Northern Ireland fundamentally change the decision-making processes. The stakes are so high and the risk is evident for us all to see. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need proper scrutiny and more time to consider the Bill, for the sake of peace?
Jeremy Corbyn
Indeed, the Northern Ireland peace process—the Good Friday agreement—is one of the most significant things that this House has ever done. We should understand the threat that the Bill brings.
I was speaking about workers’ rights, on which the Government want us to trust them. The provisions in the Bill will mean that the Government merely have to inform the House if they propose to diverge from EU standards. Am I correct in understanding that no notification, let alone a vote, would be required if the measure is currently contained in secondary legislation? The provisions fall way, way short of those in the Workers’ Rights (Maintenance of EU Standards) Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), and the TUC concluded:
“The deal itself does not meet the TUC’s tests that any brexit outcome must protect jobs, rights, and peace in Northern Ireland. By moving away from a close economic relationship with the EU, the deal would be a disaster for working people’s jobs and livelihoods. The deal would not require”—[Interruption.]
I am surprised that Government Members do not want to hear what the TUC says about the deal. The TUC continued:
“The deal would not require government to maintain existing rights, would not require rights to keep pace with those across the EU, and would leave workers with a significantly reduced ability to enforce the rights they do have.”
The TUC concluded by saying:
“It would do nothing to improve employment rights in the UK, now or in future.”
The Government talk about maintaining world-class environmental standards, but actions speak louder than words, so can I ask the Prime Minister—
Several hon. Members rose—
Jeremy Corbyn
I am not giving way for a while.
Why has the Prime Minister, instead of entrenching non-regression environmental standards into the Bill and the deal, taken out the level playing field commitments? I always say, Mr Speaker, that on all these issues you do not have to take my word for it; manufacturers and industry are deeply concerned about this deal. Environmental campaigning groups and green groups are deeply concerned. I challenge the Prime Minister to name a single trade union in this country that backs this deal. He knows that he cannot, and they have made their views very clear through the TUC.
Several hon. Members rose—
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. The Leader of the Opposition has made it clear that he is not giving way at the moment. There is a fine line between beseeching someone and hectoring, and Members are in danger of falling on the wrong side of that dividing line. The Leader of the Opposition is entitled to continue with his speech, and he will do so until he is ready to give way.
Jeremy Corbyn
The Prime Minister and I agree on very little, but we both give way a great deal. I am not going to give way for the moment.
Clause 30 makes it worryingly clear that if no trade deal with the EU is agreed by the very ambitious date of December next year, Ministers can just decide to crash the UK out on World Trade Organisation terms. That is not getting Brexit done; it is merely pushing back the serious threat of no deal to a later date. Let us be clear: as things stand the Bill spells out the deeply damaging deal that the Prime Minister has negotiated—and he knows it, which is why he is trying to push it through without scrutiny. Labour will seek more time to scrutinise. We will seek a clear commitment on a customs union, a strong single market relationship, a hard-wired commitment on workers’ rights, non-regression on environmental standards and the closure of loopholes to avoid the threat of a no-deal Brexit once and for all.
Lastly, the Prime Minister’s deal should go back to the people; we should give them, not just Members of this House, the final say. They always say that the devil is in the detail; I have seen some of the detail and it confirms everything we thought about this rotten deal. It is a charter for deregulation across the board, paving the way for a Trump-style trade deal that will—[Hon. Members: “Oh!”] Government Members do not like hearing this bit, so I will say it again: it will pave the way for a Trump-style trade deal that will attack jobs, rights and protections and open up our precious national health service and all the history and principles behind it, and other public services, to even more privatisation. That is exactly what the Prime Minister set out in his letter to the President of the EU Commission, when he said that alignment with EU standards
“is not the goal of the current UK Government.”
There we have it in his own words. That is a vision for the future of our country that my party, the Labour party, cannot sign up to and does not support. That is why we will be voting against Second Reading tonight and, if that vote is carried, we will vote against the programme motion, to ensure that this elected House of Commons has the opportunity to properly scrutinise this piece of legislation.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. Just before I call the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), I will take a point of order from Yvette Cooper.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Home Affairs Committee was due to take evidence from the Home Secretary tomorrow afternoon. I have been trying to speak to the Home Secretary today, because she has now informed the Committee that she does not want to give evidence tomorrow. We have offered to change the timing of the sitting to tomorrow morning—
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Priti Patel)
indicated assent.
Yvette Cooper
I can see the Home Secretary nodding; I hope she can now agree to give evidence tomorrow morning, because we have been seeking to get this session in the diary since the beginning of August.
Mr Speaker
This is a matter of diary management between the right hon. Lady and the Home Secretary, but I think the general principle is that if a Minister has for some reason to duck out of appearing before a Select Committee, which sometimes has to happen, an alternative arrangement is made.
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the Home Secretary for signalling, with her usual good nature, that she is willing to appear before the Committee.
Mr Speaker
Well, all right: because I am in a generous mood, I will take one more.
Yvette Cooper
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I would be grateful if the Home Secretary confirmed that she is able to attend, because the sitting was due to be on preparations for Brexit.
Mr Speaker
I think the matter will be resolved speedily. [Interruption.] I do not require any help from a Member on the third row who thinks he has some role to play in these matters. He has absolutely no contribution to make whatsoever.
Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
Although I am not on a time limit, I know that time is short, so I will be as brief as I possibly can to ensure that everybody else can get in.
Some 25 years ago, the Maastricht treaty finally passed into UK law. I remember with some fondness going on many occasions through the Lobby to vote against the Government—heaven forfend—and I was always joined by the jolly figure of the current Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). We shared many a conversation about how terrible it was and how, given the opportunity, we would one day join together to repeal the European Communities Act 1972. I am sorry to say to the Leader of the Opposition, in genuine friendship, that I would love to know what happened in the intervening 25 years that changed his mind about the European Union such that he now no longer wishes to repeal that Act. I miss our friendship and would like that to be put on record. [Interruption.] As my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) said, it was literally the only thing we ever agreed about.
Today, I am going to—
Mr Duncan Smith
I will not give way just yet, because I am conscious of time and will be very brief.
I rise to congratulate my right hon Friend the Prime Minister on what I thought was an excellent speech and to say that, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, I will support the Government tonight in both votes—on Second Reading and, massively importantly, on the programme motion. We did not have programme motions during Maastricht. Some people might recall that we had to have 100 hours in Committee before we could actually get a limit on speeches. Sometimes, I wonder whether that would not be a good thing, but not tonight, it has to be said. There is a reason for that—we have had more than 100 hours in Committee over the past three and a half years. The reality is that, if there is anything about this arrangement that we have not now debated and thrashed to death, I would love to know what it is.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Duncan Smith
I will give way in a minute.
Those who say that they do not have enough time in the next few days, because they have so many things to debate forget that there was a White Paper published last year—I see my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington) sitting on my left—that contained, sadly, most of the elements of the withdrawal agreement. That was debated, and the issue has been debated in meaningful vote after meaningful vote. Many of the things in the agreement have not changed. I for one would like to see more of it changed, and I will come back to that in a second.
Stephen Timms
I just want to emphasise the need for scrutiny. In an earlier intervention, the right hon. Gentleman said that this Bill is repealing the European Communities Act 1972. In fact, in clause 1, it reimposes it. Surely that should be scrutinised properly by the House.
Mr Duncan Smith
The right hon. Gentleman has known that for more than a year now. There is no surprise there. I certainly have real concerns about that matter, but I have to say to him that I have known about it for some time. This did not pop up suddenly in my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister’s agreement. We have thrashed this out through the White Paper and in meaningful vote after meaningful vote. Honestly, we have to ask ourselves the question: has this House not debated that element to absolute destruction?
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Ind)
I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way. I regret that I am on a different side from him on this occasion, as I was on Maastricht, but I am enjoying his speech as much as I did then.
Does my right hon. Friend accept that, until very recently, there was no suggestion that England, Scotland and Wales were going to go into their own customs union and single market, and that the whole of Ireland, including Northern Ireland, was going to go into a single market and customs union with the continent of Europe? Indeed, that was expressly ruled out only a few months ago by the present Prime Minister. At the moment that issue is due to be disposed of in three hours, with other issues being disposed of tomorrow morning. If every member of the DUP tries to speak, they will be reduced to a three-minute time limit in their speeches, and that also applies to other Members of the House. Having spent more than 100 hours over Maastricht, when he occupied quite a lot of the time himself, why on earth does he think that we should not debate such important constitutional issues?
Mr Duncan Smith
I say to my right hon. and learned Friend that, absolutely, I am very happy to debate it. He touches on the one issue that was not in the White Paper and is different, and I accept that. I am sure that, had the Opposition sat down with the usual channels and carefully discussed the really serious elements on which they wanted more time, it may have been possible to have allowed that. The reality is that they have taken the position from day one that they would oppose this Bill, but make no other propositions. We could, for example, go round the clock—he and I agree about that. We have time. After all, what is the weekend for? I do not have any problem with that. I have a simple point to make, which is that those who argue endlessly that there is not enough time are really arguing that they do not like the idea of the deadline of 31 October and do not want to stick to it. My right hon Friend the Prime Minister has said that it is in law and that we are going to stick to that.
Mr Duncan Smith
I want to move on in a second. I will not give way, as I am conscious that others want to speak. I just want to get through these points. I might take another intervention but not immediately.
Mr Duncan Smith
With due respect to the hon. Gentleman, he does intervene a lot. The reality is that we have also spent a lot—[Interruption.] I do not mean that rudely, I just genuinely mean that he does intervene a lot.
There is a very good video doing the rounds. I am sure that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) has not seen it, but it would be good if he had. It is not about him; it is about many others who have argued here for one case, but who now, since the referendum, seem to have managed to change their views massively. The streets of Westminster are marked by the skid marks of politicians who have done U-turns on the position they took directly after the referendum. We had pledges to implement the referendum. I note that, when the result first came out, the shadow Secretary of State for Brexit said on two occasions that the referendum would have to be implemented and that freedom of movement would end when we left. Now, of course, the Opposition are shifting their position around and they want to delay. More than that, the Leader of the Opposition has said that he now wants to make certain that the Bill cannot possibly go through.
That brings me very briefly to two points that have been made. One is on a second referendum, which some Members want to include in an amendment to this Bill. They want more time to do that. I have a simple point to make: those who want a second referendum argue very carefully that it should not contain a question about leaving, which strikes me as bizarre. More importantly, why should any member of the public, or any one of our constituents, who voted in the first referendum—
Mr Duncan Smith
One second. May I just finish my point?
Why should any of our constituents believe any one of us now? We promised them at the time of the previous referendum in 2016 that we would implement it. We then came into this House and voted to implement it and voted to implement article 50. Why, when we go back to them, should we be able to say, “Don’t worry. Trust us. Despite what we said to you last time, and although we have now reneged on that, we’re going to give you another chance, because we think that, somehow, you might change your decision, and if you do not, you need to trust us that we will stand by the decision that you have not changed, even though you gave us that decision earlier.”? That, frankly, is utterly absurd.
Mr Grieve
I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. It may have been inadvertent, but he did suggest that those advocating a people’s vote or second referendum did not want to put the option of leaving in it. That is, I have to say to him, entirely inaccurate. Perhaps he would like to consider this: he believes that this debate should be curtailed. One thing that I have learned is that, if we want to get public acceptance of a decision that people do not like, the process of debate is absolutely key. Therefore, he will maximise the resentments when, in fact, an opportunity exists for him to go back to the people and ask them to confirm that the deal is what a majority want.
Mr Duncan Smith
I am always grateful to receive an intervention from my right hon. and learned Friend, but I have to tell him that I disagree with him. The British people voted to leave the European Union, so they clearly like it and they like the idea that we are going to get on with it. I do not know who he is talking to in his constituency, but I have to tell him that most of those in my constituency—even those who voted remain—keep on saying, “Whatever else we do, let us get this done and get it done now.” My right hon. and learned Friend will know full well, because he has played a very significant part in all these debates under two Prime Ministers, that he has not missed a single opportunity to table amendments and to debate almost every single part of this agreement that now sits in front of us. I have no problem with that, and I respect him entirely. He remains a friend. Despite the fact that we disagree, I refuse to be rude or antagonistic. I simply say that he knows he has played his full part.
Mr Duncan Smith
I will give way for the very last time to the right hon. Gentleman.
Frank Field
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Is not one of the real problems faced by this and the previous Parliament that when we voted, for whatever reason, to give the decision back to the people, we decided to be not representatives but delegates? On this one issue only, we are delegated to carry out the wishes of the majority. That does not mean that we should ignore the minority, but why, after saying that we should be delegates, are the same people advocating a second a referendum in which we would be delegates, when they cannot manage the first one?
Mr Duncan Smith
I always love giving way to the right hon. Gentleman—in fact, I will call him my right hon. Friend in this particular moment—because he talks common sense. When we passed the European Union Referendum Act 2015, we made it very clear—and we confirmed this after the referendum—that, although we are a House of representatives and not delegates, we were handing back to the British people the sovereign power that comes from them to us for the period of a Parliament. We gave that power back to them to make the decision. They have made that decision, and as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister knows, we now must act on it. As far as I am concerned, the deal has flaws and includes things that I do not particularly like, but I recognise that the overarching priority right now is to deliver on the referendum and leave the European Union, and this remains the only way that we can achieve that. I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Duncan Smith
I am not going to give way any more; I have given way enough.
If there is any attempt in this process to amend the Bill to keep us in a customs union, I would simply argue that I thought it was made very clear throughout—and there were many comments by Opposition Members, including the Leader of the Opposition, to this effect—that leaving the customs union was part of the package of leaving. [Interruption.] Others will disagree. I do not say that they are wrong. I simply say that I think it was pretty explicit throughout the whole referendum campaign that the jewel in the crown of leaving was being able to set our own trade negotiations and trade deals. Taking that power back is a really critical part of taking back control. If we handed that power back, it would be an enormous mistake. It also has to be said that such an amendment—this will be up to Mr Speaker, of course—would be a wrecking amendment, because it is not possible to go back and ask the EU to change the deal one more time. Such an amendment would therefore wreck the Bill and there would be only one reason for it: to stop this Bill and prevent us from leaving the European Union. Although others will want to do that, I do not agree with them.
We all have to make difficult choices. I do want the Government to engage enormously with our colleagues from Northern Ireland, because there is very much an issue regarding them leaving with us when we strike a future trade deal. It is really important that we engage with them, because we must leave as one Union, not separated or separable.
Emma Little Pengelly
The right hon. Gentleman has said to the House that very little has changed and that we do not need further debate, but the Prime Minister and members of the Government repeatedly said—just a few weeks ago—that they would never accept a border down the Irish sea. This change in the agreement is the most fundamental change to our Union since the Act of Union. That merits debate and discussion, and this House needs to listen to that discussion.
Mr Duncan Smith
I genuinely agree with the hon. Lady that it merits discussion, but I also think that there is another key element. There are lots of things in the implementation period that many of us dislike, and there are things that I dislike—not least some of the arrangements I am discussing the with the hon. Lady. But the key question is surely this: to what degree can the hon. Lady’s party discuss and agree with the Government that when we finally strike that free trade deal, we leave as one Union and do not continue with those arrangements? That is the point of the question I asked earlier.
In conclusion, although there are some things that we disagree with and dislike, the honest truth is that we are faced tonight with two votes on a simple question—do we now want to give reality to the referendum in 2016, when the British people voted to leave the European Union? If we delay one more time, not only will we have defied them; worse than that, the British people will utterly lose faith in this place. This place has to be their representative body, but it will seem to them that it is no longer. Let us get this done and start the process tonight.
Emma Little Pengelly
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have serious concerns that there has been some mistake in the printing of the withdrawal agreement Bill. We have repeatedly heard reference in the speeches of the Prime Minister and others to clauses and measures under which the terrible arrangements for Northern Ireland would disappear on the signing of a free trade deal with the EU. I cannot find those clauses. During the Leader of the Opposition’s speech, I took the opportunity to look at the Bill again, but I cannot find those clauses in my copy. Could you give me clarity on how we can get some certainty? Perhaps my copy has some missing pages or there has been some form of misprint, or perhaps the Government could outline where these clauses exist, because I cannot find them.
Mr Speaker
I am sorry, but the hon. Lady, in the course of her attempted point of order, frankly elevates me to a status that I do not enjoy. It is well beyond my limited capabilities to know the precise order of clauses, or that which is present and that which is not. My counsel to the hon. Lady is that in her pursuit of her mission, she could make a point of intervening on colleagues who speak with a compendious knowledge of the contents of the Bill to seek to extract from them the information that she seeks. I can see many pointy-headed, brilliant brains on the Government Benches who are doubtless going to rise to celebrate the merits of the Bill and whom she could usefully question on this matter.
Mr Speaker
Oh, very well. Whether it will profit the hon. Lady, I do not know, but I am offering my benevolent assistance within the limits of my modest capabilities.
Catherine McKinnell
I, too, noted that the Prime Minister referred to checks and declarations on GB-Northern Irish goods as being “transitory”. He also said that they would “melt away” unless a majority of Northern Ireland chose to retain them. I share the concerns of the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) that that is not in fact correct and that perhaps there has been some confusion between the future decision relating to a single market and being in a customs union. Does it not highlight the challenge that we face that the Prime Minister appears to need additional time to consider the real implications of the decisions being taken that will have a significant impact not only on this country, but in particular on our trading relationship with Northern Ireland and on trade from Northern Ireland to the European Union? This really adds to the weight of concern about the lack of time to properly scrutinise such issues in this debate.
Mr Speaker
I have two points. First, I do not sniff or cavil at the concern that the hon. Lady raises about the allocation of time, but ultimately the House has ownership of time in the simple sense that it determines acceptance or otherwise of the programme motion. Secondly—please do not take this as a pejorative observation, as I am just trying to take a holistic view of the situation—what she is really saying is that there is great disagreement about what is or is not the case. It calls to mind the fact that people often say, “Well, give us the facts and then we’ll make a judgment.” Sadly, it is not so simple. There is no agreement on what the facts are, and I am afraid that that has to come out in the course of the debate, which, as I say, is well beyond the competence of the Chair.
If there are no further points of order, we can now proceed, because I think that the leader of the Scottish National party, the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), is in a state of heightened animation at the prospect of being able to orate to the House.
Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
Indeed, Mr Speaker, as always.
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). We do not perhaps agree on the destination for which we should be heading, but he certainly makes his case with passion.
The points of order that have just been made absolutely demonstrate that we must have proper scrutiny of absolutely fundamental legislation that is going to affect all of us, our children and our grandchildren for decades to come. We must be able to tease out the facts.
The Government in London have an obligation to negotiate with parties from Northern Ireland, as the right hon. Gentleman said, but also to negotiate with the devolved Administrations in Edinburgh and in Cardiff. In the spirit of generosity that is suggested by the Government, there has to be real dialogue and negotiation with all parties that are involved in this.
The simple fact remains that while we on the SNP Benches have no desire to leave the European Union, it is regrettable that over the past three years we have not had the opportunity to explore in detail a compromise position, which may have been staying in the single market and customs union and would have resolved many of the difficulties that we now face with Northern Ireland.
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for reminding us that we spent 100 hours in Committee on Maastricht.
Ian Blackford
More than 100 hours—so what on earth are we doing pushing this Bill through over a couple of days? I appeal to everybody—and I mean everybody; I am looking at Government Members—to let this House do its job and to have proper scrutiny of something that is so absolutely fundamental.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
Having been at the heart of the Maastricht rebellion, I will make a very simple point: first, there was no manifesto commitment to the Maastricht treaty; and, secondly, there was no referendum.
Ian Blackford
I am not sure what the relevance of that intervention was at all.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (IGC)
Is not one of the most critical points that not only is this a new deal but I can find no part of it that actually meets a single promise made by the leave campaign in the referendum? Not one of its promises has been met by anything in this very important new agreement. It must be right that this place should scrutinise it because not only are people—inadvertently, I am sure—standing up and asserting things that do not appear to be the case, as we have already heard, but, as we all look through this huge, weighty document, which contains new parts, we discover on almost every turn of the page something new that should be scrutinised.
Ian Blackford
The right hon. Lady is absolutely correct. The Bill was published only last night. Effective scrutiny takes time. I can see many Government Members who, if this was happening with the boot on the other foot, would be screaming like mad that this House was not being able to express its democratic obligation to look at things carefully.
The transition period will end at the end of 2020. If the Government wish to seek an extension to transition, they have to apply for it by the summer of next year. Does anybody in this House really think that the United Kingdom will be able to conclude a complex trade arrangement with the European Union by the summer of next year, giving us the security of knowing that we do not need that extension? Quite frankly, they are living in a fantasy land if they do. On that basis, I say to Members all around the House, but particularly to Opposition Members who are tempted to vote with the Government this evening: be careful, because you are writing a blank cheque to the Prime Minister and the Vote Leave campaign that runs this Government to drive the United Kingdom out of the European Union on a no-deal basis at the end of next year—and, friends, there is nothing you can do to stop it.
Alan Brown
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point, but I want to go back to what he said about the ridiculous timescales whereby, even if this Bill passes, all this stuff has to be done by the summer. Yesterday evening, I was in a Delegated Legislation Committee considering a technical paper on railway safety. Even then, the Government transition period was two years. As I said in the Committee, we have two years for railway safety transition, but this lot think they can get a free trade agreement and future arrangements done in a few months. It is a joke.
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend is quite correct.
It simply is not feasible that the Government can negotiate from scratch—because let us remind ourselves that none of this has yet started; it cannot start yet. They have not started that trade agreement process. When we look at the years it has taken for Europe to conclude trade deals with other countries, we can see that this is a fantasy. Anybody who thinks that that is possible is quite simply deluded.
Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is making a great stooshie about time in relation to this Bill, but was it not the case that, when the SNP Scottish Government introduced their continuity Bill in the Scottish Parliament, they operated a ruthless guillotine to prevent proper scrutiny? That is the case; they ran a guillotine on that Bill, and there was a very limited amount of time allowed for debate and scrutiny, yet he complains about that happening here. [Interruption.]
Ian Blackford
Oh, my goodness! The continuity Bill, which was dictated by legislation that was going through this place, was not an international treaty. That is a completely bogus comparison for anybody to make. It is no wonder that people are laughing.
Several hon. Members rose—
Ian Blackford
Let me make some progress. I will happily take interventions later on—[Interruption.] I have not even started yet.
It will come as no surprise to the House that Scottish National party MPs will not vote for this Bill that seeks to implement the destructive Brexit deal, and I commit all 35 of our MPs to not doing so. We will be united. Scotland voted to remain: 62% of those who voted in Scotland voted to remain, and we are the only part of the United Kingdom being taken out of the European Union, the single market and the customs union against our will. England voted to leave; Wales voted to leave; and Northern Ireland is getting a differentiated deal—there may be issues with it, but it is getting a differentiated deal—and that at the very least puts Scotland at a competitive disadvantage. Scotland is being sidelined and silenced, but Scotland will not be silenced. The SNP is here to fight this toxic Tory Government. Scotland’s voice must be heard, and we must be respected.
Ian Blackford
I really have to question whether Conservatives are thinking about these interventions before they make them. Scotland is a country. London is a city. There is a world of difference between them. This reminds me of the Prime Minister’s statement that a pound spent in Croydon was worth more than a pound spent in Strathclyde. What about London, indeed! Our Scottish Parliament must be respected and have its say on the legislative consent motion for this Bill. I say to the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) that this is the difference: Cardiff and Edinburgh must provide consent to this Bill, but that is not the situation for the city of London.
Members should note that the Scottish Government have now lodged in the Scottish Parliament a legislative consent memorandum for this Bill. It concludes by recommending that the Scottish Parliament withhold legislative consent. We were told after our referendum in 2014 that we were to lead the UK. Under the respect agenda, we were told that we were an equal partner and that our opinions would be respected, yet here we are today, with our Parliament and our views being disregarded, and our rights as EU citizens about to be taken from us against our will.
Mr Ellwood
First, I want to take the right hon. Gentleman back to what he said earlier. It is absolutely right that we scrutinise the Bill and ask ourselves whether there is time for a new deal to be done in the next year before time runs out, but the voices that are questioning that now are the same ones that were questioning whether the Prime Minister would come back with a deal.
Secondly, the political declaration gives an indication of where we want to go. Work has been done on that. Thirdly, we are dealing with two aligned trading systems that work together today and that need to diverge, rather than two divergent systems that need to come together. It can be done. It is possible, and I ask him not to say that it will be the Conservative party’s default position to seek no deal in a year’s time. I will not be seeking that, and I will not be supporting it.
Ian Blackford
I have respect for the right hon. Gentleman, but the Prime Minister’s deal is worse than the previous Prime Minister’s one, and he should not conflate what has happened over the last few months with the challenges of doing a trade deal. If the Government do not negotiate a trade deal in a timely manner next year, there is nothing the right hon. Gentleman can do, there is nothing I can do and there is nothing that a single Member of this House can do.
Ian Blackford
It does not give us the right to seek an extension. That right rests with the Government, and if the Government have not asked for an extension by the summer, that is it—we are out of Europe on a no-deal basis, and it is the end of the story.
The House will be aware that the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales wrote a joint letter to the Prime Minister reminding him that the UK Government are required to seek legislative consent for this Bill from both legislatures. The Prime Minister must make it clear that consent will be sought from the devolved institutions and that the will of the devolved institutions will be respected. That, after all, was the promise made by the Tory Government to the people of Scotland—that our devolution settlement would be protected and respected, not ignored. That promise has already been broken in their shameful power grab at the time of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which gave UK Ministers the powers to restrict the competences of the Scottish Parliament unilaterally and without agreement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr Robin Walker)
indicated dissent.
Ian Blackford
I see the Minister shaking his head, but I am afraid that that is a matter of fact. That was the first time in the 20-year history of devolution that any Government legislated on devolved matters without Scotland’s consent. That shameful act was a direct and deliberate downgrading of our devolution settlement. It disrespected those who voted in the devolution referendum of 1997 and the Scotland Act 1998, which defined the limitations of Westminster’s powers and established that this place could not interfere without consent, and it undermined the Sewel convention, breaking once again the promises that the Conservatives made to the Scottish people. SNP Members made their anger known at those actions. I pleaded on that day—before you threw me out of the House, Mr Speaker, and I do not quibble with your judgment—that Scotland would not stand for it, and we will not.
Let Members on all Benches be warned: if they support the Government today, they will show disregard for the Scottish Parliament and the sovereign will of the Scottish people, and there will be a price to be paid. It is worth noting that in their letter to the Prime Minister, the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales were clear that that extension must be sought.
Jane Dodds (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that this Bill is extremely damaging to people in Wales and that the rights that he is talking about for Scotland should also be afforded to Wales? This Bill is damaging to the people of Wales, including the farmers whom many of us represent, and to our businesses. I thank him for giving me the opportunity to speak.
Ian Blackford
I am most grateful to the hon. Lady, because she makes a valuable point. I want to thank the Welsh Government, who have worked hand in hand with the Scottish Government. Quite simply, our rights are being diminished by what this Government are doing, and we have a responsibility across not only Governments in the devolved areas but parties to work together to make these points.
The devolved institutions must be given a full opportunity to scrutinise this legislation. The fact remains that the Scottish Parliament is in recess and is having to be recalled because of this Government’s desire to ram legislation through at short notice. Here we are today with the Government pushing on ahead. [Interruption.] People watching can see the chuntering, shouting, complaining and laughing that we get from Scottish Conservative Members every single time we are in this place. The UK Government are ploughing on against the requests of the leaders of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. It is clear that this Prime Minister has no respect for devolution.
That should come as no surprise to us because the Conservatives have opposed devolution every step of the way. A leopard does not change its spots. At every step in the Brexit process, Tory Governments have sought to frustrate parliamentary scrutiny and to frustrate our Government, but they simply do not care. The Prime Minister does not care about process, Parliament or the rule of law.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman has been very generous in giving way. There have been some press reports that the SNP is abandoning the idea of having a second referendum, but in the joint letter he cited from the First Minister of Wales and the First Minister of Scotland I am pleased to say that they both called for such a referendum and for an extension to allow it to happen. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that that is still the SNP’s position?
Ian Blackford
We have been four-square behind a people’s vote over the course of the last year, and indeed I spoke at the rally in London on Saturday, so I absolutely stand by the words of our First Minister in that letter.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
A number of people have raised concerns today about the lack of scrutiny and the lack of time to look at this Bill. My right hon. Friend has pointed out that Scotland has of course been ignored in this process—a nation that voted significantly to remain in the EU. Does he share my concern that, in among all this, we continue to forget, conveniently for some perhaps, the fact that this referendum was won on a very narrow margin across the UK? The Electoral Commission has said that electoral law was broken, but that has been swept under the carpet, and I call into question the legitimacy of the result at all.
Ian Blackford
I think there are very legitimate questions to be answered, and my hon. Friend is quite correct. I am conscious of time and I have taken a number of interventions, but I am not far from the end and I wish to move on and conclude. [Interruption.] Really? “Thank God for that” is what we get from Government Members. That is the disrespect that is shown to the Scottish people. Perhaps they should stand up and put it on the record. That is an absolute disgrace.
It is simply an insult to democracy that the Government are trying to push this Bill through in limited time, and I urge Members—I urge even those on the Government Benches—to ask themselves: is this really how they want things to be done? Even the previous director of legislative affairs at No. 10, Nikki da Costa, stated in May that this Bill would take “more than four weeks”. What has changed? Moreover, it was agreed that this legislation must not be passed until the UK Government have published an economic impact assessment of their deal, yet on “BBC Breakfast” on Saturday, the Brexit Secretary confirmed that no economic analysis has been done by this Government on the final deal. That is the height of irresponsibility. There is no economic analysis on a deal that is going to have a fundamental impact on the lives of all our citizens.
Each and every one of us in this House knows—because we have seen the evidence, we have listened to the experts—that there is no such thing as a good Brexit. In every scenario, Brexit threatens jobs, it risks environmental standards, it risks workers’ rights, it unravels co-operation and opportunities and, importantly, it poses questions about the future values that the UK has fostered hand in hand with the European Union. This Government are closing their eyes, putting their head in the sand and hoping that the sun comes out—the sunny uplands that the Brexiteers talk about—but that is reckless and it is foolish. The arrogance and the incompetence of the Government cannot and must not be allowed to go unchecked. Our priority today must be to ensure that an extension is negotiated and secured with the European Union, so this House can scrutinise fully and properly the significant lasting changes that this legislation will mean.
In closing, I want to touch on some of the substantive points about why, in no circumstances, will the SNP ever vote for Brexit and this shameful deal. Despite our efforts to compromise, this legislation will take us out of the European Union, out of the single market and out of the customs union. With the Prime Minister’s deal, under a free trade agreement Scotland’s GDP would be around 6.1% less, or £9 billion worse off, than if we stayed in the European Union. That is equivalent to £1,600 per person in Scotland. That is the cost of the Prime Minister’s Brexit for Scotland. Northern Ireland businesses will have easier access to the European single market while simultaneously enjoying “unfettered” access to the UK market. There is significant uncertainty as to how the economic impact may play out, but it could see Scottish business losing market share with direct competitors. The risk is that supply chains may be reorganised to take advantage of Northern Ireland’s preferential access to the single market. It may even play a role in location decisions in some cases.
The SNP is significantly concerned that the removal of the commitments on environmental protection from the withdrawal agreement, and restricting them to the non-binding political declaration, opens the door to UK divergence from EU standards. The political declaration remains weak in relation to human rights, and in particular on the importance of continuing UK compliance with the European convention on human rights.
Scotland will be worse off—unfairly disadvantaged—despite our will to remain. Therefore, I urge Members not to sell out Scotland. Listen to the will of the Scottish people, protect our devolution settlement, respect our democratically expressed wishes and stand by the rights of the Scottish people, businesses, farmers, crofters, fishermen, students, doctors and nurses. Stand by them and vote to stop this disastrous deal and to give the Scottish Parliament, and therefore the Scottish people, their say.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
We will begin with a time limit of six minutes on each Back-Bench speech, although I do not know how long that will last.
Sir David Lidington (Aylesbury) (Con)
The Bill and the agreement that it seeks to implement represent a compromise. It is a compromise that I believe is acceptable, but I will not conceal the fact that I and many other Government Members will find elements of it difficult and uncomfortable. My decision to support the Government tonight rests above all on what I and the great majority of Members on both sides of the House pledged to the electorate in 2016—that we would, however we campaigned and however we voted, respect the decision that they took in the referendum.
When I look through the Bill, I see that much of it is familiar territory. That is hardly a surprise as much— indeed, most—of it ratifies precisely the same negotiated text as that negotiated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). Of course, one significant change has been in relation to Northern Ireland. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, said in an intervention earlier, there are advantages to what is in the deal. The guarantee of an open border on the island of Ireland is not only vital to allow trade and, indeed, normal economic life for people living in the border counties to continue, but is essential in my judgment for the maintenance of peace and security in the border areas. It is also important for the maintenance of the Union. When I look at the demographics of Northern Ireland as someone who passionately wants to see the Union continue and grow stronger, I conclude that for that to happen the Union will need to command the support—or at the very least the acquiescence—of a large number of people who identify as Irish or who are non-aligned in their affiliation.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
Is the creation of a hard border in the Irish sea maintaining the Union?
Sir David Lidington
I shall come on to that point, but I want to say a few sentences about the consent mechanism. I understand the disquiet that has been expressed by those on the Unionist Benches about the design of the mechanism. It is nevertheless worth noting that that mechanism gives to Stormont a power that is unique in Europe. No other regional Parliament or Assembly anywhere else in Europe has the power, unilaterally, to decide to end the application of a set of European Union rules and regulations to its territory.
Having said that, I do want to recognise the fact that elements of the new package as regards Northern Ireland have aroused genuine disquiet and anger in Unionist communities across Northern Ireland. There is a perception that they have been treated unequally and that their place in the United Kingdom has been made less secure. I ask my right hon. Friends on the Government Front Bench urgently to seek ways to address those concerns and to assert the Government’s continued commitment to the Union.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
First of all, Unionists are greatly dismayed at what has happened in relation to the withdrawal agreement, but does the right hon. Gentleman also recognise the issues for businesses, including in the agrifood sector, in my constituency? The cost implications for Lakeland Dairies, which has two factories in Northern Ireland and two factories in southern Ireland, will be enormous. The Government have not given that full consideration. There will be an impact on Unionist opinion and on business.
Sir David Lidington
I recognise the concerns expressed by business, although I also note that the view expressed by business representative organisations in Northern Ireland has generally been that Parliament should go ahead with this deal and enact the legislation, but then address the concerns that the hon. Gentleman rightly identifies that they raised. I therefore ask my right hon. Friends on the Front Bench to also act swiftly to minimise the impact that additional inspections and red tape required by the new policy will impose on Northern Ireland businesses. That might include financial support, particularly to small and medium-sized enterprises to enable them to buy and operate new systems; efforts to simplify or dedramatise checks and form-filling required; and for the Government to give urgent priority to such measures as seeking a veterinary agreement with the European Union and other such arrangements that would enable the risks to Northern Ireland business to be minimised.
James Brokenshire (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Sir David Lidington
If my right hon. Friend will forgive me, time is limited.
I believe that this House also needs to take account of the shift we are seeing in attitudes among other Governments in the European Union. Sometimes I think that colleagues in this House are a little guilty of wishful thinking. Frankly, those Governments are no longer hanging on, hoping somehow that the United Kingdom will change its mind. They are impatient. They are increasingly exasperated with all political parties and at the ability of the UK political system to take a decision on this matter. As far as the EU Governments are concerned, they want this brought to an orderly conclusion as soon as possible in a way that does as little harm as possible to the interests of the EU27. That interest includes the future constructive and close relationship that they—like, I believe, most in the House—wish to see between this country and the continuing European Union.
There are strategic challenges that face our country and every other European democracy. We debate them when we are spared time from debating Brexit: climate change, terrorism, serious and organised crime, and the mass movement of people. As European democracies, we are having to confront those challenges in the context of a shifting balance of world power, with a Russia that is aggressive and actively seeking to divide democratic European states, a China that is assertive and offering economic opportunity but championing a model for government and society at odds with that embedded in our own democratic and liberal values, and a United States whose unquestioning support for European security and a rules-based international order can no longer be taken for granted. I believe that because of the referendum result we have to leave, and we need to get on with the task of trying to build a different but close and enduring partnership with our European neighbours and allies and to work together to meet the challenges that confront us all as fellow democracies on a shared continent. Passing this Bill will enable us to take one step closer towards starting on that task.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
Brexit will be bad for our country and that is why Liberal Democrats will be voting against this Bill tonight. We know that it will be bad for the economy, because the Government’s own assessment in November 2018 looked at the impact of a free trade agreement on the British economy and concluded that it would mean that our economy would shrink by more than 6%— greater than the amount that the economy shrank during the financial crash.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer says that this will self-evidently be good for our country and economy, but I do not know when we decided to do away with the idea of having any financial responsibility and looking at the actual numbers. This Government have not even bothered to do a proper economic impact assessment. I am sure that we do not all agree with the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who said that he had “had enough of experts”—actually, I would quite like the Government to get the experts to look at this, thank you very much.
We know that Brexit will be bad for our NHS. We have already lost 5,000 nurses from other EU countries from our NHS. At a time when we face a huge shortage of nurses, we can ill afford to lose 5,000 EU nurses and to lose more in future. The truth is that freedom of movement is good for our NHS. It is good for our public services and good for our economy.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
Does the hon. Lady recognise that the fact that more than 40% of applicants for settled status are being given only pre-settled status is increasing the insecurity of European citizens?
Jo Swinson
The hon. Lady is right: the way that this country is treating those 3 million citizens from other EU states is shocking.
This Brexit deal will be bad for our security, because it will rob our police of the ability to use the European arrest warrant, which, since 2004, has seen 1,600 criminals extradited back to the UK to face justice. This Brexit deal will be bad for our United Kingdom family of nations. It beggars belief that this Conservative Prime Minister has agreed to a deal that will see a border down the Irish sea—something he said that he would never do. There are people who will try to use this to break up our country, but we must not let them break up our family of nations. Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are stronger working together.
Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank the hon. Lady, my constituency neighbour, for giving way on that vital point. By sacrificing the idea of a customs union for the sake of their English nationalist agenda, the Conservatives are rending the fabric of the United Kingdom itself. What a shameful act by a so-called Unionist party.
Jo Swinson
I entirely agree. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that this Government are acting in a nationalist way. The Prime Minister of our country should take his responsibilities to protect the United Kingdom, our family of nations, much more seriously.
We also know that this Brexit deal will be bad for environmental protections, because even the weak protections that had been agreed by the former Prime Minister have been removed from the withdrawal agreement and put in the political declaration, where they are not worth the paper that they are written on. On workers’ rights, the same is true. There are no guarantees or protections that we will retain the advantage that we have as current members of the European Union, nor indeed that we will keep pace with future regulation.
Jo Swinson
I am pressed for time, so I will not give way further.
I caution any MPs—in particular, friends on the Labour Benches—against believing the promises of this Prime Minister when it comes to workers’ rights, and I speak as a former employment relations Minister in the coalition Government, so I know a little about what I am talking about when it comes to what the Conservatives want to do to workers’ rights. We cannot believe the promises that they make on this. Who would you trust on workers’ rights—Frances O’Grady and the TUC, who say that this deal would trash workers’ rights, or the Prime Minister, who has been giving out all these assurances today but is prepared to say anything and sell out anyone if it is in his own personal interest? He cannot be trusted and no one shall be fooled. He is sinking, and the question tonight is: will Labour Members throw him a lifeline by voting for his bad Brexit deal? People will remember what they choose. We are here because of the Conservative party’s bizarre obsession with Europe and because of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, who seemed to make his renegotiation and the decision on benefit arrangements about Polish plumbers, rather than about the big picture of what is in our country’s interests. This is not a small decision; it is a big decision about our future.
We live in an uncertain world. In the east, we have the rise of Putin and China; in the west, we have the uncertain, unpredictable, duplicitous President Trump in the White House; and as President Trump says, in No. 10 Downing Street, we have Britain’s Trump. In these circumstances, should we go it alone? Or are we better and stronger working in close collaboration with our nearest neighbours across the EU in a community of 500 million people, where we share values, where we have much more clout on the international stage, where we have a single market for businesses without tariffs or regulations and with the ability to stand up to the tech companies to protect our consumers, where we are better able to address the climate emergency and take co-ordinated action to lead the world on something that threatens our very survival? Together the future is brighter.
This is not about institutions; this is about who we are. Wanting to stay in Europe is about choosing the kind of country we want to be: open or closed, generous or selfish, standing united with our friends or standing alone in the world, saying no to the bully boy populists in the Kremlin and the White House or following their example, fighting for our children’s futures or closing off their opportunities to live, work and study across the EU. We Liberal Democrats are clear: we will continue to stand up for what is best for our country, let the public have the final say on this bad Brexit deal and give them the chance to choose to remain in the EU. The most signed petition in parliamentary history was from 6 million saying they wanted to revoke article 50. Hundreds of thousands marched on the streets on Saturday for a people’s vote. People are joining the Liberal Democrats in record numbers. Together we can stop Brexit. Whatever the result tonight, this is not over. I will never give up on our children’s future.
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), the leader of the Liberal Democrats. I give her and her party credit for consistency. No one has ever been in any doubt about where they stand on Europe. Unfortunately, that is not the case for the Labour party, whose leader, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) has already pointed out, supported leaving the EU for a long time, fought an election on the wish to respect the result of the referendum and said consistently that a second referendum was out of the question.
Members will be aware that the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) was forced to abandon his 60th birthday party as a result of the House sitting on a Saturday. The House may not be aware that he and I were born on precisely the same day and that, as a result of the programme motion, I have now postponed my own 60th birthday party. However—unlike, I suspect, the hon. Gentleman—I regard that as a small price to pay, and one that I am very willing to pay, if the result is that we get Brexit done.
Members have said that the Bill is being rushed through and that there has not been time to look at it properly. I have been privileged to serve as a member of the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union since 2016, and we have spent an awful lot of time scrutinising the process by which the UK will leave the European Union. We looked at the withdrawal agreement as originally proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), and, of course, we have taken numerous sessions of evidence for the purpose of further examination.
As was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green, many parts of this withdrawal agreement are similar to what was presented by the previous Prime Minister. The major differences between the agreement that we are considering today and the previous one are the changes that have been made, first, to the Northern Ireland protocol, and secondly to the political declaration and the direction of travel for our future trading agreements.
Like the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Leader of the House and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green, I did not support the Government in the first two meaningful votes, but I did support them in the third, because I wanted us to fulfil the promise that had been made that we would leave the European Union by 29 March.
Sir William Cash
I just wondered whether my right hon. Friend was aware that the provisions relating to parliamentary sovereignty and those dealing with the protection of vital national interests, both of which are included in this Bill, would not have appeared in the previous Bill.
Mr Whittingdale
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because I was about to say why I regarded this Bill as being a considerable improvement on the previous agreement, and he is right to point that out. The agreement that we are considering this afternoon does address the principal concerns that a number of us had, particularly about the so-called backstop and the risk that this country could be locked indefinitely into membership of the customs union, which would prevent us from achieving one of the great prizes offered by Brexit, the ability to negotiate our own trading agreements.
Lady Hermon
I am enormously grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene. He has mentioned that the Prime Minister’s new deal contains very different provisions for Northern Ireland. They are particularly different, and very complex, in the context of the new consent arrangements. That being the case, why on earth does the Bill to which we are being asked to give a Second Reading not contain a single sentence explaining those very complex consent mechanisms?
Mr Whittingdale
I have heard the hon. Lady express those concerns, I have heard them expressed by our friends in the Democratic Unionist party and I take them seriously. The Prime Minister gave an assurance that these measures were transitory and that they would be self-dissolving after a certain period. I hope that he will continue to talk to the hon. Lady and to colleagues in the Democratic Unionist party and will assure them that that is the case. Obviously, I hear what she says about the Bill, and I hope that she can receive an assurance on that point.
Mr Whittingdale
If my right hon. and learned Friend will forgive me, I feel that I must press on.
As I was saying, I believe that this is an improvement on what we were offered before, but there are still elements that I do not like. I am not happy with the idea that, for 15 months we will be, in the words of the Leader of the House, essentially a vassal state, taking orders from the European Union without being able to vote on them and continuing to pay in. I am willing to pay that price as long as there is a clearly defined end point after which we will be free to set our own rules and to reach the trading agreements that I want to see and no longer be subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.
Mr Whittingdale
If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I must press on.
I congratulate the Prime Minister on having defied all the sceptics. My right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), sitting next to me, at least has had the grace to say that he was wrong when he said that the Prime Minister could never reach a new deal with the European Union. There are others in the Chamber who said that repeatedly but who have been less honest in now accepting that.
Mr Whittingdale
I must press on if my hon. Friend will forgive me.
I do believe, however, that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington) said, the European Union has reopened this deal once but it is not going to do so again. When I and my colleagues in the Exiting the European Union Committee—its Chairman, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), is sitting opposite me—have been to see Mr Barnier, Mr Selmayr and Mr Verhofstadt, they have all asked us, “What is it that will get a majority in the House of Commons?” That is what they have wanted to know. That is what I hope we will be able to show them tonight.
There is no question about it: the European Union is as fed up with this dragging on as I think the entire United Kingdom is. It wants to get the matter settled. To be honest, those who vote against tonight will, I suspect, find fault in whatever deal is put forward; actually, their agenda is stopping Brexit. This represents an opportunity finally to settle this matter and to deliver what the people voted for now coming on three and a half years ago. I hope that the House will—at last—vote in favour of the deal that is before us and in favour of the programme motion in order that we can get it delivered and fulfil the promise by 31 October.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), who is the vice-chair of the Exiting the European Union Committee, and with whom I have the pleasure to serve. May I also say to the right hon. Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington) that he is absolutely right that the vast majority of the withdrawal agreement is as it was before, which is why I cannot understand why the Government did not publish in draft the bits of the Bill that have been available in Whitehall for ages so that Members had a chance to read them a long time ago, rather than scrabbling around since eight o’clock last night, because it would have dealt with some of the justifiable objections to the speed with which the Government are trying to push this through?
I do not know whether that earlier draft contained clause 36, but I must say my eyes widened when I read this statement:
“It is recognised that the Parliament of the United Kingdom is sovereign.”
Do we really need to say that about ourselves in legislation—was that ever in doubt? I suspect the reason it is in there is to soften the blow when certain Government Members realise—although the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) made the point—that the European Communities Act will be repealed and then the provisions will be stuck back in for the length of the transitional period.
The other thing we have learned about is the consequences of the new Irish protocol for trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, and I return to the point that was put to the Prime Minister by several Members, but to which there was no answer: the question why goods moving from Northern Ireland to the rest of the United Kingdom will require an exit summary declaration, because, as I understand it, that is only necessary if goods are leaving the customs territory of the European Union. Is that correct, because I thought we were told—it says it in the new protocol—that Northern Ireland will be in the customs territory of the United Kingdom? So the question is this: if Northern Ireland is in the customs territory of the United Kingdom what are those goods exiting, because they are in the United Kingdom customs territory? I am afraid there has been no answer, because I do not think the attempted explanations really square.
Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend raises the most compelling point about the Northern Ireland protocol. Is he also as astonished as I am that in some of the slight impact assessments on the Northern Ireland protocol everything about customs administration, VAT, tariffs administration, agrifood regulation and manufactured goods regulation is non-monetised—the Government do not even know how much this is going to cost?
Hilary Benn
I was surprised when I read that in the impact assessment, and the truth is that a whole load of questions remain about how the system will work. How will we identify goods at risk, as it is described, of passing into the Republic of Ireland? That is for another day.
Several hon. Members rose—
Richard Graham
The right hon. Gentleman wrote in September that it would be
“utterly irresponsible for the Government to be rushing headlong towards”
no deal. Now that the House knows that the Government have a deal on the table, surely he and all his colleagues, who were elected on a manifesto pledge to respect the result of the referendum, should support this deal, rather than risk no deal. Is it not the case that no deal will ever be good enough for him?
Hilary Benn
The direct answer to the hon. Gentleman, with whom I also have the pleasure of serving on the Exiting the European Union Committee, is that to attempt to say to Members that the choice has to be between a bad deal—this is worse than the previous Prime Minister’s deal—and no deal is not a very attractive proposition. During the passage of this Bill—if it gets its Second Reading—I hope that we will attempt to improve some elements of it.
Clause 30 goes to the heart of the point about no deal, because the withdrawal agreement makes provision for the possibility of an extension to the transition period, which, at present, will end in 14 months’ time. Clause 30 says that the House can agree to a further extension, but it requires a Minister of the Crown to move the motion in the first place. The situation I am worried about is what if the Minister of the Crown fails to come to the House, does not move a motion proposing that the Government should request to the joint committee that the transitional period be extended, and the answer is that we would fall out without a deal in 14 months’ time if an agreement had not been reached. The House has voted on several occasions to make it clear that it is opposed to leaving with no deal, and there are arguments on either side as to whether people think that is a good thing or a bad thing, so I flag this up at this stage, because we will need to deal with that point—I gather that an amendment is on its way if it has not already been tabled—and to safeguard against it.
There is a second related problem to clause 30. What happens if a deal has not been negotiated by the end of December 2022 when the two-year extension has been applied for and secured? Now we would be facing exactly the same difficulty: the possibility of exiting without an agreement at the end of the transition period. In those circumstances, there is no way under the agreement that the British Government can get a further extension, so we have to find a way of ensuring that a deal is concluded by that time.
Ministers claim that, because of the high degree of alignment, it will all be done really quickly. I would just observe that took three and a quarter years to get to this point, and it took Canada six to seven years to get an agreement. Michel Barnier said this morning that he thought it would take around three years to negotiate such a deal, so we will be looking for assurance from the Minister in Committee that under no circumstances will the United Kingdom leave the European Union at the end of the transition period without a deal. I think another amendment may be on its way about that. The same point is relevant to citizens’ rights, which have not been raised much in the debate so far. We could do with clarification from Ministers, because if the transition is extended, will they also change the deadline by which EU citizens have to apply for settled status?
As I said on Saturday, I will not be voting for the Bill, above all because of the political declaration—I do not have a problem with the withdrawal agreement—which is not the right approach to take, because it is not good for business. I am very surprised, like other hon. Members, that the Government have just blithely said, “We are not going to undertake an economic assessment,” and I assume that the reason for that is simple. They did one before which showed that a free trade agreement is the second-worst outcome up for the economy after no deal, and they do not really want to have to point that out again.
My final point is about clause 31, and it links to the economic impact of the political declaration. The clause deals with the oversight of negotiations on the future relationship, and it appears to give Members some oversight, some say, over the nature of the negotiations on the future relationship, but proposed new section 13C(3) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 says:
“A statement on objectives for the future relationship…must be consistent with the political declaration of 17 October 2019”.
I simply point out that if, in one, two or three years’ time, the House realises that the objectives of such a free trade agreement are not in our economic interests, because we finally realise the damage it will do to the economy—we have seen what businesses have said and the concerns they have expressed—the current wording of the clause gives no opportunity for Parliament to get a Government to change those objectives. I do not think we should accept the Bill on that issue, as it is currently worded.
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Ind)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn).
I am conscious that we are at the end of a long process and that we are all very tired and very weary. We have also said some quite hard things about each other, including within our own political parties, so I would not want this evening to pass without acknowledging that those who come forward to argue that we should leave on these terms have a perfectly valid point. Indeed, in trying to honour the 2016 referendum result, they have a powerful argument.
My difficulty in considering this Bill is that I have tried to cast my mind a little forward to what this Bill can and cannot do. Although this Bill is undoubtedly needed if we are going, I think there is a slight tendency to lose sight of some of its realities. For example, I listened carefully to the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), who said that she will vote for the Bill but that she wants to change it. We have to understand that, as this is an international treaty, the scope for changing the treaty is out of the question.
Of course we can provide some safeguards. We can put in a referendum lock and, indeed, I will vote for that in due course, but I do not want to burden the House with that this evening. We can try to change some of our domestic law, but that is a little like a letter of wishes to one’s children—there is no guarantee that the children will decide to carry it out.
If my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister wishes to follow the passage of this legislation with a general election, which I can understand—I, for one, will no longer be in this House—the new Parliament, over the next year, will have to reconsider the issues raised by this withdrawal agreement and this Bill, and nothing we do can fetter the rights of this House to change completely the expression of intentions that we may decide to enact.
What is clear is that this Bill reveals a number of things that can be described as truths. First, the intention of the Government, both in the treaty and in the drafting of the Bill, is to take us towards a free trade agreement that, in reality, is likely to be very hard to negotiate, and it will have to be negotiated in the next year.
As a consequence, the risk of our crashing out at the end of 2020 is very great, because otherwise we will have to lengthen the transition, which has been described, of course, as “vassalage.” Indeed, it is a form of vassalage, which is a rather emotive word, but the reality is that we will be bound by rules that we cannot influence.
I see a very great risk that, far from the argument that the Bill will bring our problems to an end, we are just postponing the issues in a way that will continue to divide us, even though I would very much like us not to be divided.
Lady Hermon
I am enormously grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for allowing me to intervene. He has been a great friend to Northern Ireland for a long time, and he has been a great defender of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement since it was signed 21 years ago. I would be enormously grateful to him if he explained to the House his concerns, if any, about how this new Brexit deal, brought back in triumph by the Prime Minister, has caused such anxiety in Northern Ireland that it actually undermines the great achievement of the Good Friday agreement.
Mr Grieve
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that, and I was coming on to the issue as my next point, because the other big impact of this legislation is on Northern Ireland. Of course, there is a lock mechanism, and I listened to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who said that it could “melt away” if there was a double majority—of both communities—to remove it in four years’ time, although that does mean that for four years Northern Ireland is locked into arrangements that the Government have decided are not desirable for the rest of the United Kingdom. But what was glossed over is that article 13.8 of the Northern Ireland protocol makes it clear that any future arrangements thereafter are a matter for negotiation. So the suggestion that we can get a satisfactory free trade agreement for ourselves and then insist that Northern Ireland be included within it is simply wrong.
I have to say that as someone who has always seen himself as a modern Unionist, wanting to recreate or help to develop the Union of the United Kingdom in slightly different ways from those traditionally stated in relation to both Scotland and Northern Ireland—I have family coming from both—this matters to me a lot. It seems to me that this is an extraordinary move for a Unionist party to make, because the reality is that the more we detach ourselves, through our own free trade or whatever other routes we take, or if we crash out, the greater the difference we are going to emphasise, and the stronger and harder the border down the Irish sea will be. There may be some in Northern Ireland who welcome that, for perfectly valid reasons of their own, but for Unionism this is a very odd thing to do. In the Scottish context, it raises a perfectly clear grievance, whereby Scotland would say, “If Northern Ireland can have these arrangements, why cannot we?”
Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)
I have listened to the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s speeches for a great deal of time and have a lot of respect for him, but on this issue I disagree with him. I ask him to reflect on the parallel he has just drawn between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is a war-torn Province that has been subject to a civil war, and it is completely irresponsible for any politician to draw a parallel between Scotland and Northern Ireland in this context. Northern Ireland has a very specific history; it is subject to treaties to maintain peace on the island of Ireland. That is why it is having special treatment, and it is why Unionists support that and are trying to work so hard to have a deal that works for all parts of the United Kingdom, but it is not equivalent to Scotland.
Mr Grieve
I value my hon. Friend and neighbour—in terms of our rooms—far too much to ignore what he has to say, but I have to say to him that my Unionism extends to Scotland in a very big way, and I think he knows that. Admittedly one can make powerful arguments to the contrary on this, as indeed he and his colleagues have done—it is such a pleasure to have them here as dotted Conservative representatives from north of the border. That has given me such pleasure, but we cannot ignore the arguments that will be made by those who disagree with us. I simply make the point that I think I know enough about the situation to see that that argument is going to be made in a context where, on the evidence of the 2016 referendum, a majority in Scotland wanted to remain.
It is not that Scotland is the same as Northern Ireland—I wish to reassure him on that point. There are exceptional features to Northern Ireland, but I simply say that we, as a Unionist party, are creating an extra layer of difficulty for ourselves, which we will have to argue our way through. Of course, that may be an inherent consequence of Brexit; it is one reason why I regret so much the 2016 result, although I acknowledge that we cannot ignore it. However, I have suggested repeatedly—I will not go over this now—that there is a better way of trying to address this issue: by going back and getting confirmation that this is what people really want, because of the nature and consequences of what we are about to do.
My final point is about why I will vote against this Bill on Second Reading. I might have abstained otherwise, but I very much regret the programme motion, which is treating the House in an insulting way. It also says something about this Government that worries me. I am a Conservative—even though I have lost the Whip I remain a Conservative—and to see a Government, on a constitutional measure, playing bully-boy tactics with this House can only be counterproductive to the very aims they would like to achieve. This is not the quiet government I came here to try to deliver, and I therefore regret very much that I will vote against the programme motion and against the Government on Second Reading.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
I would love to vote today for a Bill that would take us out of the EU, but unfortunately we find ourselves in a position where we cannot support this Bill. I want to make something clear: allegations have been made that the agenda of those who oppose the Bill today is to keep us in the EU, but neither I nor my party has any desire to stay in the EU, nor does the record of my party indicate that. What we demand is that, as we are part of the United Kingdom and took part in a United Kingdom-wide referendum, as part of the United Kingdom we leave on the same terms as the rest of the United Kingdom. That is not the case with this Bill, nor with this agreement.
The Prime Minister has said that if we do not agree to this Bill, we will not get another chance—that if we do not agree this deal, the agreement will not be reopened. I have heard those arguments made before; in fact, the Prime Minister just ignored them when they were made previously, because he knew that they were untrue. Given the enormity of the issues involved, I do not believe that we should vote for the Bill tonight.
A number of arguments have been made. The first is that this is our chance to take back sovereignty. It is not a chance to take back sovereignty in Northern Ireland; indeed, Northern Ireland will be left out of that move towards taking back sovereignty. Let us just look at the facts about Northern Ireland: we will be left in an arrangement whereby EU law on all trade, goods and so on will be applied to Northern Ireland. We will be in a situation where, despite what the Prime Minister says, we will be subject to the full implementation of EU customs regulations. Goods moving from GB into Northern Ireland will be subject to declarations, checks and the imposition of tariffs. We found out yesterday that, despite the promise of unfettered access to the UK market, checks will occur in the opposite direction for the thousands of firms in Northern Ireland that currently export to GB. At the moment they do not face any impediments or costs, but they will face them now.
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman, a fellow member of the Exiting the European Union Committee, will know that a stream of Northern Ireland businessmen and farmers’ representatives have come to the Committee to beg that we deliver a deal. That is the right thing for the United Kingdom and for businesses in Northern Ireland and, indeed, the south of Ireland.
Sammy Wilson
That is right, but the one thing that they have always demanded is that we have unfettered access to the market, which is our main market. We sell five times more to GB than we do to the Irish Republic, yet as a result of this Bill and our being trapped in the customs union, we now find that we will be subject to checks.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
But should the right hon. Gentleman not also weigh in the balance the fact that a widget maker in Northern Ireland would not only have access over the border into the Republic, but would also be able to take advantage of any trade deals that the United Kingdom as a whole was able to secure with third countries? Is that not an advantage that he should weigh in the balance?
Sammy Wilson
I am glad of that intervention, because it brings me to the very next point that I wish to make, on the issue of sovereignty. Although the Prime Minister has claimed that what the hon. Gentleman says is the case, the withdrawal agreement makes it quite clear that it is not. According to article 5, paragraph 1, that access will be available only depending on whether the agreement or trade deal conflicts with EU protocols. It must not conflict with the protocols in the agreement. It says:
“provided that those agreements do not prejudice the application of this Protocol.”
Those are the only conditions under which we can take part in the free trade arrangements that the Government may set up with other countries.
On the issue of sovereignty, we are part of the EU regulations, we are part of the EU customs code, we have checks down the Irish border, and we are subject to any future trade deals on which the United Kingdom agrees, subject to whether they conflict with EU protocol. The Prime Minister said, “Oh, but it will all dissolve if there is a free trade arrangement that allows it to be dissolved.” But again, it has been made quite clear that it is only if the EU agrees to release us from the protocols that we can take the benefits of that free trade arrangement.
Sammy Wilson
I will not give way, because I have very little time.
That is the issue of sovereignty. Northern Ireland will be left as a semi-detached part of the United Kingdom. In the long run, of course, the whole focus of attention will move from Westminster to Dublin. Who will speak for us in Europe when these regulations come through? Who will speak for us in Europe when the customs rules are affecting us? It will not be the UK Government. Increasingly, the focus will be on the Dublin Government.
The second argument is that we can vote our way out of the arrangements. The mechanism for voting our way out of them is now a simple majority vote. I never thought that I would hear a Prime Minister who has insisted that we adhere to the rules of the Belfast agreement suddenly bring up its central premise in this way. The first issue that was addressed in the Belfast agreement was what kind of checks and balances should be in place to protect both communities when it come to the operation of the Assembly. The Belfast agreement said that, to give those protections and ensure that all sections of the community could participate and work together, arrangements would be put in place
“to ensure that key decisions are taken on a cross-community basis.”
There is no greater and no more divisive a decision than this issue of our relationship with the EU, yet the safety valve in the Belfast agreement has been taken away. The Prime Minister said, “Oh, it has been taken away because it is a reserved matter anyway.” These are not reserved matters. Indeed, the very reason why we have a whole section in the Bill about what the Northern Ireland Assembly can and cannot do is that they are devolved matters, yet on these devolved matters, and on this one issue in particular, the Government have agreed to take away the central principle of consent. That will do damage when it comes to the operation of the Assembly in future. We cannot be selective like that, and certainly not on an issue such as this.
I come now to the last issue. I nearly choked when the Prime Minister said, “Don’t worry about it, because all of these changes that will affect Northern Ireland will be light-touch. It is not really a boundary down the Irish sea; they are just light-touch regulations.” These light-touch regulations require firms to make declarations when they sell goods to another part of their own country and to pay duties for goods that come from a part of their own country, which incur costs. I would at least have had some respect had the Prime Minister said, “I have a deadline of 31 October. I have to get this round. I am therefore having to make concessions and, unfortunately, Northern Ireland is a concession, and you will understand that.” What I cannot take is a Prime Minister who thinks that I cannot read the agreement that has been published, and who thinks that I cannot see in that agreement what the impact on Northern Ireland will be—
Mr Speaker
Order. I am immensely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman.
In a bid to accommodate the maximum number of remaining colleagues, there will now be a four-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches with immediate effect. Interventions are part of debate, but I simply counsel colleagues to be sparing in them, because it will stop other people speaking.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
This Parliament is letting the public down. Three years and four months ago, I and 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union. We voted to take back control of our laws, our borders and our money, and we are still waiting for that to happen. We were told by the then Prime Minister that he would send a letter announcing our decision immediately after the result, and under the treaty we expected to be out after two years with or without agreement by the European Union.
Instead, we find ourselves today having yet another debate after so many groundhog days in this place, with the same people rehearsing the same arguments, as around half the Members of the House of Commons—we will find out whether it is more than half—are still trying to stop any kind of Brexit, and are forcing those of us who believe in Brexit to dilute what we are trying to do and delaying our enjoying the fruits of our Brexit vision.
Let us look at the agreement, because it is far from ideal from the point of view of a leave voter. I am delighted that the Prime Minister has today reassured us that we will completely take back control of our fish, and that we will decide how that amazing resource is nurtured, looked after and used by our country. That is very welcome. I also accept that the documents show that we will not have to go into battle with our troops on a vote that we have lost, and that we are not about to be sucked into losing the sovereign control of our Government and Parliament over our foreign and defence policy.
But we are still in trouble with the powers of the European Court of Justice over our laws. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) for contributing to the Bill, because there is now a sovereignty clause, and I hope it works; it is a definite improvement. However, I am extremely worried by the situation in Northern Ireland.
Jim Shannon
Does the right hon. Gentleman not understand that Unionists believe that our sovereignty has been removed by this agreement and that being a Unionist in Northern Ireland is very different from being a Unionist in the rest of the United Kingdom, including the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency? Does he not feel that Unionists have been duped and deceived in how this agreement has been brought forward?
John Redwood
I do not like the provisions on Northern Ireland for the reasons that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues have set out. I want the whole country to leave, and Northern Ireland to be a full part of the United Kingdom under the same arrangements. If there are any different arrangements, I certainly want a consent mechanism that is acceptable to the representatives from the Democratic Unionist party and the people they represent.
I am also extremely worried about the money in this set of proposals. We never talk about the money, and so many MPs seem to think that giving billions away to the European Union is just fine. Taking back control of our money was central to the campaign. Indeed, it was very contentious, because people argued about exactly how much it was. I do not think it has been properly quantified. The liabilities are potentially large and long lasting, and there is no attempt in the agreement or the Bill to control them.
Mr Paterson
Could my right hon. Friend give us his best estimate of what he thinks the bill will be?
John Redwood
Well, we are told £39 billion, but I think that is a very low estimate; I think it will be considerably more than that and will stretch many years into the future under some of the headings that we are providing for. My worry is that the EU will be the main driver in deciding what the bill is because there is not a satisfactory dispute resolution procedure. The EU could levy the bill, saying that it is European law and that it knows best what we should be paying. We have to be extremely careful.
If the Bill does make any progress tonight—that is not looking very likely from some of the things people are saying—I hope that there will be considerable concentration in Committee on whether there are mechanisms for having better discipline over the money, because we voted to take back control of the money. I want some of that money for hospitals, schools and other public facilities in my constituency, and I hope that many other Members of Parliament take the same view. It would be very galling indeed if we found that we were technically out of the European Union but were still paying it a great deal of money.
I approach this agreement in a spirit of disappointment, but I think the Prime Minister was deeply damaged and undermined by the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019, which greatly reduced the bargaining leverage of the United Kingdom Government, and I think people recognise that. It is strange that that legislation, which might as well be renamed the “breaking the Prime Minister’s promises” Act, is permissible because surely we either have confidence in our Government and in the Prime Minister to be able to keep his word, or we do not have confidence in our Government collectively, in which case we can get a different Government. This Prime Minister has said that he will take us out on 31 October. There is a lot of support for that in the country, and I hope that we can find a way to make it take place. The Prime Minister has said that we would preferably leave with a deal, but that if we cannot get a decent deal we will leave without a so-called deal.
I think the language is totally misleading. There is no such thing as a no-deal Brexit. There is either leaving and signing a withdrawal agreement or leaving and not signing a withdrawal agreement. Were we to leave not signing a withdrawal agreement, there is an aviation agreement and a Government purchasing agreement, there are haulage and customs arrangements, and there is a general agreement on facilitation of trade through the WTO, so we would have a managed WTO exit, which I think would work extremely well.
I want to spend that money in Britain to promote growth and a stronger economy. I want the free trade agreements that I think we might be able to generate with the rest of the world. If we just left, the EU would want to negotiate a free trade agreement with us, but all the time it thinks it has a chance of our not leaving it is not going to offer anything or be positive about that, because it thinks it might, from its point of view, do something better.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I am very grateful to have just a few moments to make a contribution to this important debate.
I think it has now been 1,216 days since the referendum, and it is clear that all of us in this House are weary and fatigued by, and some of us are certainly fed up with, the groundhog day of constant debate about this subject. In my constituency only the weekend before last, two men were knifed to within an inch of their lives. While we were sitting in the debate on Saturday, I saw an email from a constituent who was complaining that his 10-year-old son had just been mugged. I would so much prefer that we were talking about law and order and crime in our country. This morning, the GP practice that served me and my family growing up in Tottenham for most of my life was described as inadequate by the inspectorate. Again, I wish we were discussing health in this Chamber, not constantly returning to this issue.
As I reflect on where we are, and think about very good colleagues and friends on the Opposition Benches who are minded to vote for this Bill, I think of what connects constituencies such as mine and their constituencies in other parts of the country, and that is most certainly a degree of deprivation and poverty that our country should have escaped from by 2019 but is very real on our high streets when we look at the proliferation of betting shops and abandoned shops, when we visit our estates, and when we look at the prospects for too many of our young people.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend refers to people feeling frustrated, bored and fatigued. Does he agree that none of those things is an excuse for making what could be a very, very bad decision in haste, which is what the Government are trying to make us do today?
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Like my right hon. Friend, we in Coventry have many issues with young people and knife crime, and some instances of more serious crimes. Does he agree that it is totally illogical that the Government rejected the previous Bill and expect us all to support a Bill that makes people worse off? People in Coventry and the west midlands are concerned about their jobs and funding for universities.
Mr Lammy
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who brings me to the tenor of what I want to say.
On the Government’s own estimates, with a Canada-style free trade deal we would see in our country a reduction in GDP of 6.7%. When we use a figure like that, it almost does not mean anything, but in a constituency—
Mr Lammy
I will not give way; I am going to make progress.
In a constituency like Tottenham, it means everything. It means that the knife crime that I am worried about could get considerably worse. I do not want the South Side of Chicago in Tottenham. It means that the jobs that we need may not be there. I think of the constituencies that good friends represent in other parts of this country. If we leave a £220 billion European market and leave the single market and the customs union, we will inevitably get tariffs. Tariffs will inevitably affect the manufacturing that is left, and that will surely mean a reduction in jobs in those constituencies. How will that assist our country? On the Government’s own estimates, there would be a reduction in GDP of 11% in the north-east of this country, and a reduction of 8% in the west midlands and the east midlands. That is massive; it is bigger than the 2008 crash. The truth is that, while there has been some recovery in London, there has been very little outside London in parts of the midlands, the north-west and the north-east. How can we seriously contemplate making things worse for those people?
We have been talking about a trade deal with the United States. I went on an all-party visit to the United States in July and we sat with Republicans and Democrats to talk about the meat of what a trade deal looked like. They were all clear, as was the trade union body in America, that there would of course be a reduction in labour standards because their labour standards are lower than ours. They were clear about wanting some of our agriculture, our pharmaceuticals and our healthcare. They also raised issues about Hollywood getting its grip on our creative industries. Why would we do that? How will that help our people?
So, we would get tariffs and a massive drop in growth, yet I stand here prepared to vote for this deal, but only on the basis that we put it back to the British people so that they can have the final say: do they want this deal or do they want to remain? I am prepared, despite the poverty and hardship in my own constituency, to go for this deal, but on that one condition. That is how we get this done. That is how we bring our country together. We must actually use democracy to say, “Do you really want this deal?” That is the only way forward. The rest is noise. As weary as we are, I cannot walk through the Lobby and knowingly wave this through with so little scrutiny on behalf of my constituents.
Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
For those of us who felt compelled to vote down the previous withdrawal agreement and deal, I would suggest that this deal has indeed been worth waiting for, and, as indicated last week, I will support it in the Lobby tonight. The Prime Minister has proved his critics wrong. The withdrawal agreement has been reopened. The harmful backstop has been removed, and we have secured a better deal. All those who previously argued that that was not possible should perhaps now reflect.
No one is pretending for one moment that this is a perfect deal. As someone who voted leave, there are aspects of the transition period that I do not like. I question an element of the Bill. I question the EU’s say over our affairs, given that we voted to leave in June 2016. However, I also accept that compromises are required in any negotiation. Although I have qualms about the transition period to December 2020, they are manageable. For me, the elephant in the room was always the backstop. It alone could have trapped the UK indefinitely in a structure of the EU’s making. It alone could have denied us Brexit. It alone could have denied us the referendum result, and it alone would have made a bad deal—trade deal or no trade deal—more likely. That is no longer possible.
Now that the previous backstop has been banished, the pressure is on both sides to negotiate and agree a good trade deal. A good trade deal is therefore now more likely, not less likely, because the backstop has been removed. It takes two to tango. Both sides can now simply walk away, but it is far more likely—given their common starting positions, and the fact that it is in their common interests—that they will negotiate a good trade deal. No longer will there be any risk to the entire UK of not being able to benefit from trade deals that we might strike with the faster growing economies outside the EU, and meanwhile the Northern Ireland-Ireland border is kept open.
I suggest to the House that concerns about workers’ rights are somewhat misplaced, given the assurances provided by the Prime Minister and the fact that such regulations could be watered down only if Parliament voted to do so. We should have more confidence in our ability in this place to decide what is right, and such decisions will now be made here in Westminster, not by remote EU bureaucrats.
I urge colleagues on both sides of the House to vote for the Prime Minister’s deal this evening. It makes a good trade deal more likely, and it keeps the Irish border open, while ensuring that the whole UK leaves the customs union. Let us be honest with people outside this Westminster bubble. It has taken three and a half years to get to this point, and we still have not left. It is about time that we finally delivered on the referendum result. Let us now heal the wounds in this country and move on.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (IGC)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). I will not be voting for the Bill this evening, because it is nothing more than a charter for a no-deal Brexit. The safeguards in the withdrawal agreement negotiated by the previous Prime Minister that would have ensured that we would not leave without a deal at the end of the implementation period in 2020 have now been removed. It is quite clear that the so-called backstop for England, Wales and Scotland has gone. The reason why so many Conservative Members who opposed the previous Prime Minister’s deal on all three occasions it came to this House are now so keen to vote for this Bill and this agreement is that it will deliver the hard no-deal Brexit they believe in, and in some cases have done for decades.
The hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay referred to the backstop having been removed, but the reality and truth is that for Northern Ireland the new backstop is an arrangement that will be there in perpetuity. As this House knows, the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and I disagree on many things, but on this issue we are at one. In his speech, he made a number of serious assertions about the impact of not only the Bill but the withdrawal agreement on the Union and, in particular, Northern Ireland, and some Conservative Members sat and shook their heads, querying that. It concerns me that because of this terrible programme motion, there will be nothing to allow any Member, Committee or independent organisation to scrutinise and check whether his assertions are correct or false. Having read this Bill and the protocol twice, I think he is right, and we need to be sure.
Mr Baron
The right hon. Lady referred to me, so I thank her for giving way. Some of us were shaking our heads because we disagree with one or two of the factual statements made by the right hon. Member for East Antrim, but we are happy to pursue that conversation afterwards. As somebody who served in the troubles in the 1980s, I know that the Union means a lot to many ex-soldiers on both sides of the House. I can assure the right hon. Lady that we do not take this lightly. If I genuinely believed that this was a threat to the Union, I would not be supporting it.
Anna Soubry
The hon. Gentleman should listen to the voices from Northern Ireland—and it is not just the DUP or the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon); it is from across the community. This is a genuine threat, and it is incredible that Members of the Conservative and Unionist party are prepared to vote through this Bill when its attendant protocols will undoubtedly mean that there will be a separate arrangement for Northern Ireland in perpetuity. There is nothing in the Bill that will allow things to change.
I would also ask: how much better is our country since we had this referendum? Are we a happier, gentler people, and are friends, families and communities more united or are we divided now in a way that we have never experienced before? This Bill will do nothing to heal divisions; it will actually increase the divides in our society. That is a concern.
I believe with a passion that not one single promise that was made by the leave campaign has been fulfilled in any way, shape or form. We were promised a deal before we left. We were promised that Northern Ireland would not be treated any differently, and we were promised that it would keep and preserve the United Kingdom. We were made a promise that we would have the same trading relationship that we currently enjoy as a member of the single market and the customs union, and none of those things has been delivered in the Bill or any of the attendant documents.
I agree with the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). He and I disagree on so many things, but on this we are at one. If this is so good, it should go back to the people. That should not be by way of a general election, which will solve nothing just as the 2017 general election did not solve anything—
Anna Soubry
This now needs to go back to the British people. And may I just say that I do not actually mind losing my job, but I do care about the jobs of my constituents? I will do the right thing by my constituents, their children and their grandchildren, and by their jobs. That is why this matter must go back for a people’s vote now that we have clarity on Brexit and see what a disaster it is across the United Kingdom.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Ind)
In this whole debate, I believe there have essentially been two principles. One of them is the principle of how to honour the result of that referendum, and the second is the principle of how to take a deal safely and responsibly through Parliament. My big beg to the House—here I am speaking to colleagues who voted for Brexit—is let us, please, in these very final stages, do it properly. This is their great founding moment. This document is an opportunity for them to create an enormous constitutional change that can last for the next 40 years, so please do it properly—do it properly through the House of Commons. I know that is a very difficult thing to say, but this is possible to do.
I could make an argument about the philosophical principle here, but the reason to do this is essentially a reason of trust. We have heard a lot about trust from Brexiteers today, and for every kind of reason: there is every reason for Brexiteers to be enraged. They voted to leave, but they did not leave on 31 March, and they are in a boiling rage. They were promised we would leave on 31 October, and they want to leave. I get it. But it is also really important that we think about the other half of the population, and we have to think about how to do this legitimately.
This is not easy to do, but I promise this as somebody who voted remain and has backed a Brexit deal from the moment of that referendum again and again and again. I have done so for no reason at all: I am not a member of this Conservative party any more—I do not get any bonus points for voting for a second referendum—and I literally have nothing to gain from backing this Brexit. I am backing it for one reason only, which is that people voted for it, and I promised to respect the result of that vote. However, in return, people deserve scrutiny. This is a hell of a big document, and we cannot pretend that two and a half days is long enough to scrutinise it.
I know there will be many voices in the Chamber saying, “We’ve been talking about this long enough. What are we going to scrutinise anyway? What speeches are we going to hear that we haven’t already heard, and anyway the whole place is a talking shop.” We cannot think like this. This is our Parliament, and we cannot do down our Parliament. As the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has said again and again, this was an exercise in regaining the sovereignty of Parliament. If it is about regaining the sovereignty of Parliament, treat Parliament with respect. If we are taking back control from a European court to a British court, treat the British court with respect. If you are taking back control from a European Parliament to a British Parliament, treat Parliament with respect. If you are taking back control, show that you are worthy to exercise that control.
All I am asking for is a little patience. Three days in Committee and three days on Report and we could have the Bill done in the House of Commons by 31 October and taken in the Lords. I promise you, this founding moment for you, instead of being poisoned with the stain of illegitimacy and associated with bullying tactics and a casual attitude to the Supreme Court, the monarchy and the Parliament, could be done in an honourable, responsible and proper fashion of which you can be proud for the next 40 years.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
It has been obvious to me for some considerable time that Brexiteer politicians have never fully understood the consequences of their policies. That is why during the referendum they were able to claim that they wanted to end free movement while staying in the single market; why they said that leaving the customs union was compatible with the Good Friday agreement; why they claimed the new free trade agreement with the EU would be the easiest in history; and how the British state would be able to sign trade deals around the world based on divergence from EU tariffs and regulations while maintaining frictionless access to the European economic area. The Bill clearly shows that all of those claims are completely false.
Because of the obsession of the British Government and the Labour Opposition with ending free movement, the British state will have to leave the single market. The new FTA with the EU will not be negotiated until after the British state has left the European Union, meaning that this continues to be a blind Brexit.
Compatibility with the Good Friday agreement has only been vaguely achieved by effectively keeping Northern Ireland in the customs union and the single market, ending the economic coherence of the British state. Far from removing the backstop, as claimed by the British Government and the Prime Minister, it is now enacted as policy in the withdrawal agreement for Northern Ireland—a frontstop, as some have called it. In my country, people are asking, “If it’s good enough for Northern Ireland, why isn’t it good enough for Wales?”
We now know that it would be impossible to sign trade deals with the likes of the United States without drastically reducing our access to the European market. Writing last week in the Evening Standard, the right hon. Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Gauke), the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said that assessments indicated that for every £1 gained from international trade agreements, £33 would be lost through loss of access to European markets owing to the need to diverge on standards and the extra costs of tariffs.
“Get Brexit Done” is the latest slogan that we have heard ad nauseam from the British Government, but allowing the Bill to move to the next stages would not mean an end to Brexit. It would not even be the beginning of the end; it would simply be the end of the beginning as we enter phase 2 and start discussions on the trade agreements. The British Government will be negotiating one of the most complex trade deals in history, different from all others in history as it will seek to build barriers rather than break them down. They hope to do that in just over a year. As has been mentioned many times, the EU’s free trade agreements with South Korea, Canada, Singapore, Japan and Vietnam have taken between six and eight years to negotiate, with some of them still awaiting ratification.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the EU free trade agreements. We have probably got the best in the world. Any free trade agreements the UK has, say with the United States, will be only about a fortieth of what we will lose with the European Union. In total, from the 6% to 8% we lose with the European Union, a free trade agreement with every country in the world will only make up about 1.4% of GDP—a huge loss.
Jonathan Edwards
The Chair of the International Trade Committee speaks with great experience. That is, of course, why the British Government are refusing to publish the impact assessments on the deal.
The British Government will be negotiating the new FTA from a position of extreme weakness. We all know that at the end of the transition we will face the exact same situation as we currently face—further delays and extensions or a no-deal cliff edge.
My party will base our approach to the next stages of the Bill on some key areas. First, we will demand impact assessments on the withdrawal agreement in time for consideration and scrutiny. Secondly, we will seek membership of the customs union—not a customs union—with the European Union. A customs union would mean that the UK would have to open up its markets to any trade deals the EU makes, while not having reciprocal access to those other markets. Thirdly, we will be calling for the UK to remain in the single market. Fourthly, the Bill as it currently stands denies the voice of our democratically elected Parliament in Wales, y Senedd.
If this Government respected the principle and legitimacy of devolution, they would require any future free trade deal struck by the British Government with the European Union to have the consent not only of this House but of the Senedd, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly. As the Bill currently stands, the Parliament of Wallonia, a constituent part of Belgium, would have more influence over the future trading relationships between the British state and the European Union. That is simply not good enough.
Justine Greening (Putney) (Ind)
I would like to make a brief contribution on what is planned in the Bill, how the Government propose to take it forward, and where they are taking our country. They seem to be the pertinent questions tonight.
On what is planned in the Bill, I have deep concerns. The situation as the Bill pertains to Northern Ireland should not be just brushed away by Members of my former party, the Conservative and Unionist party. They are real issues that affect real people. To simply ignore them because it is inconvenient to take them on board is not only inappropriate but ultimately dangerous. I was very much struck by the speech by the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), a representative from Northern Ireland. He talked about two issues that go to the heart of the problems we are trying to grapple with, which affect Northern Ireland but have wider application. On cross-community concerns, the understanding in the Good Friday agreement was that communities had to go forward together if that agreement was going to work. We in this House should learn from that. We are a United Kingdom, yet we seek to go forward with this Brexit deal in a way that ignores the very clear concerns of the other nations in the United Kingdom—not just Northern Ireland, but Scotland and Wales.
Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (LD)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a seminal moment? The Conservative and Unionist party is handing over legal, political and administrative control of Northern Ireland to the EU—almost like the United States handing over control of Alaska to Russia—and giving the people consent six years after this has taken place. That surely cannot be acceptable.
Justine Greening
It is very concerning that the rules Northern Ireland will have to live under will, in many regards, be set by the European Union, a body in which it will not have representatives. Ultimately, that is a recipe for something failing politically.
The point about consent matters. It is absolutely unacceptable for people in Northern Ireland to be thrown into an important new political arrangement and mechanism, with no say over whether it happens to them. Equally, it is unacceptable for the rest of the UK to face the same situation, going into a form of Brexit that many people who campaigned for Brexit, including Nigel Farage, who heads the Brexit party, feel is not the Brexit they campaigned for. He has called this deal Brexit in name only. I obviously understand that there is disagreement over what Brexit means, but that is one of the reasons why, three and a half years later, we are reaching this moment today.
Many Members who campaigned for Brexit, not least the Prime Minister, held up a Brexit deal by voting against one they felt did not deliver on that referendum result. I respect their view, but that brings me on to my point about how the Bill is being taken forward. Frankly, it is absolutely hypocritical for people who held up Brexit because they thought it was the wrong one, to then decide that their version should be fast-tracked and steamrollered through this House because we have run out of time. It is down to their actions that we are three and a half years down the road and we have not moved forward. It is entirely unacceptable to ram this through in two days, and it simply stores up problems for our United Kingdom by doing it this way.
I see no problem with taking longer and giving this House of representatives time to genuinely air the important issues about this proposal, have them understood, and have the Government able to respond to them. We have heard some of them today, but we have not heard, for example, about clause 29, which talks about what could be an important role for the European Scrutiny Committee in raising issues on EU legislation that comes through during the withdrawal agreement period, when we will simply have to take those rules but have no say about how they are set. The clause says that a motion can come before the House and be voted on. What happens then? Nobody knows.
Those are significant issues, but perhaps my biggest problem with the Bill is that it does not address the underlying issues of inequality of opportunity, which I believe sat behind and drove many of the concerns that resulted in people voting for Brexit in communities such as the one in which I grew up in Rotherham. In the end, I believe that we will have to come back and tackle those, and my concern is that Brexit does not.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I am very happy to follow the powerful speech by the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening). The decision facing this House could not be more serious, nor could the stakes be higher. This is a debate about the kind of country that we want to become and the kind of values that we want to enshrine. I want to speak out for all those who do not share this Government’s vision of a mean-minded little Britain with our borders closed and our horizons narrowed; and for those who do not accept a future that betrays the hopes and dreams of our young people, who, let us remember, overwhelmingly voted to remain—we should think about their futures when we vote night. I want to speak out for those who are concerned about the threat that this deal poses to the fragile peace in Northern Ireland; for those who, like me, are proud to stand up for the precious right to be able to freely work and study, and live and love, in 27 other countries; for those who celebrate the role of and contribution made by the 3 million EU citizens in our country; for those who recognise that, imperfect though it undoubtedly is, the EU remains the greatest international venture for peace, prosperity and freedom in history; and for those who do not believe that democracy stopped in its tracks three and a half years ago.
As many others have said today, democracy is a process, not a single event. Since that referendum, we have had one general election, two Prime Ministers and a wealth of further information about the costs and complexities of Brexit, and the lies and lawbreaking that stained that poll on 23 June 2016. The Prime Minister has changed his mind on more occasions than it is possible to count, most recently over the prospect of a border in the Irish sea. It is wrong that the British people are apparently the only people who will not be allowed to change their minds.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Ind)
I am listening to what the hon. Lady says, as always. If another referendum were to come forward—that is not out of the question, although I think it is unlikely—and it were, say, to confirm a leave vote by 52% to 48%, would the hon. Lady accept that, or would she continue her campaign?
Caroline Lucas
I would both accept that and recommend that, if the Kyle-Wilson amendment was the kind of amendment that was put, it meant that it would not even have to come back to this Parliament—it would go straight into law. That is what should happen.
This Brexit is the hardest of hard Brexits. It is led by the hard right and, frankly, the rich and the reckless. It is yanking Britain completely out of the customs union and single market—the most advanced examples of international economic co-operation in history, which crucially, protect us with the strongest regulatory framework on earth, with high standards for food safety, workers’ rights and environmental protection.
The so-called guarantees on workers’ rights that are given in, for example, proposed new schedule 5A to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 are utterly worthless. They simply require a Minister of the Crown to make some statement about whether or not workers’ rights are going to be rolled back, and if they cannot get around to making that statement, that is fine, too, because they do not have to unless it is “practicable”. When it comes to workers’ rights, we know what the Government’s agenda is. This is not some kind of conspiracy theory.
Caroline Lucas
No, I will not. The Government have told us what their plans are. This Prime Minister has openly said that Brexit offers us an opportunity to “regulate differently” and when he says that, I do not think that he means increasing those standards—call me cynical.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady agree that this is a recipe for regulatory chaos, not just between us and the EU, but within the four nations of the United Kingdom, where different environmental standards will apply?
Caroline Lucas
I completely agree. That brings me on to the environment. Again, when we look at the so-called reassurances, we are supposed to believe that the Environment Bill can answer the question of how we properly regulate in the absence of the Commission and the European Court of Justice, yet the Environment Bill, when given any scrutiny, as on the Environmental Audit Committee, shows, for example, that the office for environmental protection is insufficiently independent, is answerable to Government, not Parliament, and cannot levy fines, which has been the one thing in the past that has finally made the Government come into line on issues such as air pollution. The environmental principles are also very weak. They simply sit there in a policy statement, which we have not even been allowed to see, rather than in the Bill. On the sector targets, there are only four out of the 10 headline goals of the 25-year environment plan and they do not even have to be met until 2037. That is inadequate, especially when the interim targets are themselves not legally binding. So let us be clear: this is all about a race to the bottom on social and environmental standards.
When I say that I support a confirmatory ballot and that I would vote to remain, I do not for a moment mean that we should go back to how things were before the referendum in 2016. The referendum outcome was a resounding radical rejection of the status quo and of an economy that brutally fails so many, forces parents to use food banks to feed their kids, demonises immigrants and condemns us to climate breakdown. It was also a powerful and furious comment on our broken democracy. Brexit laid bare the extent to which our government structures are derelict. When citizens were deprived of a credible representative power that clearly belongs or is accountable to them, it led to anger with the most remote authority of all. The EU was blamed for the UK’s structural elitism and held responsible as the source of all the powerlessness, yet Brexit shows no sign of giving us back control or changing the way we rule. Instead, the apparatus of government has been hijacked by the Vote Leave campaign.
I recoil from the economic vandalism of this hardest of Brexits and I worry deeply about the race to the bottom. But I understand that a way forward must be found, so I will compromise if the Government do. I will not oppose the passage of the Bill through the Commons if they attach a confirmatory ballot to it and allow the British people to have their say. Three and a half years after the 2016 referendum, so much has changed, including, I believe, the will of the British people. That is what the vast majority of polls indicate. If the Government are so certain that this Brexit is exactly what the British people want, why are they so afraid to put it back to them?
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
In the time available, I will make a few points regarding clauses 29 and 36, which I authored myself in negotiation with the Government because I was so concerned about article 4 of the protocol and part 4 of the agreement.
The entire Bill is ultimately about sovereignty. I would go further: we need not only to reaffirm that, as these clauses do, but to increase the monitoring and scrutiny of these arrangements within the framework of the House. The ports regulations were pushed through a few years ago. Similar provisions will be pushed through in the transitional period, when the EU will take control of us in the legislative process, and we will have no means of defence except by reference to the kind of clauses that I have produced and which I am glad the Prime Minister has accepted.
Section 1 of European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 is clear and unambiguous: we will repeal the 1972 Act on 31 October. That is the law of the land, as I have said repeatedly. It is clear and unambiguous and it is the law. Lord Denning, without doubt the greatest jurist in modern history, specifically stated that where Parliament wishes to assert its supremacy, it can do so by stating clearly that a domestic statute is to apply, notwithstanding European law, and this would include sections 2 and 3 of the 1972 Act. He stated clearly:
“If the time should come when our Parliament deliberately passes an Act with the intention of repudiating the Treaty or any provision in it or intentionally of acting inconsistently with it and says so in express terms”,
as section 1 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 clearly does,
“it would be the duty of our courts to follow the statute of our Parliament.”
Nothing could be clearer. I would add to that mix the fact that there are principles of sincere co-operation under article 4 of the treaty, and of wrongful reason in international law, which I have no time to go into.
This is the gravamen of the question, and the manner in which I believe we will be able, through the mechanisms provided under clauses 29 and 36, to give protection. I am deeply concerned about the provisions relating to Northern Ireland, and I agree with what others have said on that subject.
Sir William Cash
The hon. Lady is a member of my Select Committee. Let me simply add, having set up evidence sessions with departmental Select Committees and having taken control of the manner in which the report is produced on that evidence, that Ministers will be under an obligation to allow the motion to be moved, and furthermore we will be able to vote on it. The bottom line, therefore, is that there will be real opportunities for the House to express its views in conjunction with any Select Committee that is brought into the arena with the European Scrutiny Committee. We will work effectively with those other Committees, as we have already done, for the purpose of adducing that evidence. We will then, I believe, be in a position to rely on the fact that the Floor of the House of Commons will determine the outcome of that evidence, and when there is a vote on it, we will then be able to apply the principles of parliamentary sovereignty in line with the judgment of Lord Denning, which I do not need to repeat.
These measures go to the very marrow of our body politic, which is the birthright of our citizens, forged over centuries in war and peace throughout our history. We had a referendum, and we had a decision from the British people. We must implement that decision, and anyone who opposes the Bill is effectively undermining our democracy and our self-government.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, and instructive as ever, to follow the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has wanted this sort of dramatic, draconian, destructive Brexit to be brought about in our country for 30 years and more. He is obviously pleased because he thinks he is standing on the verge of achieving that, but I sincerely hope he is wrong.
There are many deplorable things in this Bill, and we could spend hours enumerating them, but unfortunately we do not have those hours because the Government are trying to railroad the debate through in a few short hours. I will therefore concentrate on Northern Ireland, a part of the country where I have worked, to which I have devoted a great deal of my life, and which I feel is being extremely ill served by the Government. Of all the awful things that they have done in respect of this Bill, the cavalier, reckless way in which they have treated Northern Ireland is the most deplorable.
I want in particular to talk about the prosperity and the political stability of Northern Ireland, two things that have gone hand in hand since the Labour Government created a carefully crafted, uniquely balanced peace settlement through the Good Friday agreement, which is now in jeopardy as a result of the way in which the current Government are handling this matter. The worst thing about the way in which they have handled it just today is the deceitful caricature that has been presented. We have been told by the Prime Minister that there will be no additional burdens, no additional checks and no new border. None of these things are going to happen to Northern Ireland; Northern Ireland will be just the same as Kent.
None of those things are true—that is the fact of this—and I do not know whether the Prime Minister simply did not understand what was in his Bill or he was misrepresenting what was in it, because late yesterday evening the Government did sneak out an impact assessment and it makes very clear that the 20,000-odd businesses in Northern Ireland, that do around £7.5 billion-worth of trade with GB—with the rest of the UK—are every year going to have additional checks, burdens, costs and responsibilities. They will have to submit import and export documents. They will be subject to checks at the border. All agrifoods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will be subject to checks. That is at point 261 of the official sensitive assessment.
There will be a new border—an agrifood goods border. All goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain will do so via a border inspection post. What sort of non-border has a border inspection post? There will be impacts to businesses in Northern Ireland in terms of their distribution. Point 278 points out that there would be extra checks, costs, delays and burdens for businesses in Northern Ireland.
There will be new risks. Point 294 states that
“economic risks associated with the proposals could include reduced trade, business investment and consumer spending due to uncertainty and divergence in regulation within the United Kingdom.”
That is not just for Northern Ireland; it is for the whole UK.
Finally, is this going to do anything good for the people of Northern Ireland? No, because the document concludes that it will drive up prices and increase the costs to consumers in Northern Ireland. All that extra cost will undermine the political stability in Northern Ireland, as we have seen here today, and it is a disgrace that the Government have not admitted it and have concealed it.
Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith); we share a Christian name—I think we are the only two Members of Parliament with the name—and I share his concerns about Northern Ireland, which I will come to in a minute, but I do not think we have that much else in common.
People are looking at this debate absolutely exasperated; people were told that this Parliament would give them the power of decision to decide whether we stayed in the European Union or whether we left, and we have this collision, which I have mentioned on numerous occasions before, between direct democracy and representative democracy. The representatives here have royally let down the people of this country, because for the first time the people have gone against the wishes of their elected Members, and the elected Members here have used every possible technique to thwart them, and they know it.
We promised to take back control. All Conservative Members were elected on a manifesto to leave the single market, leave the customs union and leave the remit of the European Court of Justice. Does this Bill do the business? It is a start. It is a very good start; that would be my judgment. There are numerous things in it which I do not like, but it does set the process in train for us to honour what we promised the people.
Sir William Cash
Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the most cardinal sins we can commit in this House of Commons is to vote for a Bill knowing full well what it says and then to reverse those votes in effect at a later date?
Mr Paterson
I totally agree with my hon. Friend. It was also wicked to promise the people that we would respect their judgment and not deliver it.
So this Bill does begin to bring laws back. It does not yet begin to bring money back, but there is, I am pleased to say, with this version light at the end of the tunnel, which is a free trade agreement, which is where we should have gone from the very beginning. That is what President Tusk offered us back on 7 March 2018, but we have inherited all this baggage from the previous negotiations and, in my opinion, an awful lot of that remains, which I regret.
There are two big areas that I am still very unhappy about. First, I am concerned that the transition period could be used to take advantage and to ruin what is left of our fishing industry. That is a wonderful natural resource. I find it completely extraordinary that Members such as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) talk in glowing terms about the environmental benefits of the EU; we throw back 1 million tonnes of healthy fish dead, because of the stupidity of the way the common fisheries policy is managed. I was delighted to learn from my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister’s reply to me earlier that we will bring back complete control of our exclusive economic zone and all our resources so that we can manage them in a modern way, as I wrote in a Green Paper way back in 2005. However, I am worried about what will happen during the transition.
Secondly, I am concerned about Northern Ireland. I wrote an article just 10 days ago saying that I was worried about antagonising the Unionists. There is great interest in republican activity, but I am concerned about the Unionist community, which the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) has mentioned on numerous occasions. We had an incident on the Newtownards Road last night. I hope that the Lord Chancellor will give us some assurance in his reply to the debate that all the arrangements in the current protocol will be dissolved when we conclude a free trade agreement with the European Union and that this sovereign UK Parliament and Government will pass a law to move Northern Ireland into the free trade agreement on a level pegging basis with the rest of the United Kingdom. That might alleviate some of the concerns in Northern Ireland.
If those two issues can be resolved, I will vote for this Bill, albeit without any great enthusiasm, because it sets us on the road. Having mentioned Ireland, it is worth looking at the example of the Republic of Ireland as it emerged from the Irish Free State. Michael Collins said something in the Dáil Éireann on 19 December 1921 that pretty much reflects my views this evening:
“Now as one of the signatories of the document I naturally recommend its acceptance. I do not recommend it for more than it is. Equally I do not recommend it for less than it is. In my opinion it gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it”.
This Bill begins the process of establishing our full freedom, and I hope that I do not suffer the same fate as Michael Collins in wanting to see that delivered.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
Juno Elsie Dakin was born last Thursday when this deal was being finalised in Europe. When she comes to maturity and is able to vote, she will be able to judge whether we did the right or wrong thing with the passage of this Bill. She will be able to judge whether we took steps to keep the Union together or whether it was imperilled, leading to Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving. She will be able to judge whether our place in the world is the same as it is now. She will be able to judge whether workers’ rights, consumer rights and environmental rights are as strong or stronger than they are now. It is a fact that no person born this century voted in the referendum, but every person born this century will have the biggest stake in the outcome. They will have a duty, as we have a duty today, to shape wherever we get to in the best possible way to keep this great country great—to keep the great in Great Britain—and to ensure that the steps that we take today do not imperil that or put it at risk.
As the Member of Parliament for Scunthorpe, I think it is crucial that manufacturing does well out of this. In many ways, my constituents are on the frontline of Brexit. Our largest private sector employer is in its fourth month of liquidation due to the risk of a no-deal exit. My constituents desperately want certainty, which is why I am pleased that we have got to this point in the process. It is a step towards certainty, but my constituents and the manufacturing and steel sectors do not want an outcome that is not good for industry. We do not want an outcome that leads to 25% tariffs on steel being sold into Europe, which would be disastrous for steel communities.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
It is a fact that the outcome most of them would want is to remain in the European Union. The current deal is the best deal, and there is no country in the EU that would accept the tawdry deal that the Prime Minister has negotiated.
Nic Dakin
In the end, we have to try to make this work. There is an obligation for us to work through it and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) said earlier, there will be an opportunity to do so if the Bill goes into Committee and if we have a decent programme motion.
Frankly, what has been said about the programme motion is outrageous. As the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) said, bully-boy tactics have been used to try to thrust the programme motion down the House’s throat when we should have civilised, British behaviour. Members should sit down to agree a sensible programme motion. That is what the Labour Chief Whip wants, so the Government Chief Whip should sit down and do it so that we can work through the Bill properly and see whether we can improve it to make sure it is a good Bill for the people of this country.
Yes, people voted to come out, but they did not vote to lose out. It is our duty to square that circle, and that is what we should do.
Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who is right to say that it is our grandchildren who will reap the harvest of what we sow tonight.
It is not our grandchildren whom I am concerned about this evening. You know better than most, Mr Speaker —I have bored you to death with this for weeks—that I have a particular concern about the plight of United Kingdom citizens living in other parts of the European Union, most particularly in respect of their pension rights, the uprating of their exportable benefits and, of course, their healthcare.
Because confusion has been sown by Departments, there has been a considerable degree of distress. Over the past few weeks, I have received harrowing emails from citizens across Europe expressing their concern. They are very frightened indeed about what they may face.
I spent the greater part of last night reading the Bill and the explanatory notes. I found reference to European Union citizens living in the United Kingdom and to Swiss nationals but, scour as I could, I found not one word of comfort for United Kingdom citizens living abroad in Europe. I spoke briefly with the Prime Minister this afternoon, and I am pleased to say that he has taken this on board immediately and courteously—[Interruption.] I will come to my peroration in a moment. I am assured that the rights and concerns of UK citizens will be taken into account and that a confirmatory letter to that effect will be with me in the next couple of days.
There are Members who prefer the grievance to the solution, but I am not one of them; I am in the business of seeking a solution. I very much hope that what will have been achieved as a result of my consultations with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with the Department for Work and Pensions and now with the Prime Minister will deliver something of great comfort to some very frightened elderly people. I also hope it will enable me not to have to move the amendment I have in preparation.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
I am grateful for the chance to speak on this Bill.
It will not surprise anyone that I will be opposing the Bill tonight, and I will continue to oppose it because it is a bad Bill that does bad things to people who have trusted me to look after their interests. The Bill diminishes the rights of every single one of my constituents. It diminishes the rights of every single one of our constituents, and for 3 million people it potentially removes those rights altogether.
People face being threatened with deportation, not because of what they have done but because of what this Parliament and this Government are threatening to do. I cannot vote for that under any circumstances. For businesses in my constituency and everywhere else, it seeks to replace the certainty of free trade with the biggest market in the world, and preferential trade deals with many of our other trading partners as part of the EU, with the uncertainty of having no idea of what deal, if any, they will be trading under while they are still finalising their annual accounts for the financial year in which they are currently operating.
We hear a lot of people saying, “Get Brexit done”, but this Bill does not get Brexit done. The withdrawal agreement does not get Brexit done; it only starts the process. Next year, we could still be tumbling out of the EU on no-deal terms; there is nothing in this Bill or the withdrawal agreement that prevents that from happening. Until no deal is taken off the table, the businesses in my constituency and elsewhere will be faced with the greatest of all uncertainties.
Most importantly and fundamentally of all, I cannot support this Bill because it is a direct violation of the fundamental principle that brought me into politics: the sovereignty of the people. The people of my nation voted by almost two to one to reject this chaotic, ridiculous Brexit in its entirety, and that fact has been given no recognition, not a single word of it, from Her Majesty’s Government over the past three and a half years.
On citizens’ rights, on 25 July I asked the Prime Minister to honour the promise he made before the referendum that no EU citizen would have their rights diminished in any way. I asked him whether he would guarantee their rights to healthcare, their pension rights, their right to leave the UK and return at any time, their right to bring their family over to join, their right to vote and all the other rights currently enjoyed by EU citizens. The Prime Minister, at that Dispatch Box, replied:
“Those guarantees, as the hon. Gentleman knows, we are giving unilaterally”.—[Official Report, 25 July 2019; Vol. 663, c. 1498.]
So he promised all these rights to our EU citizens, which he now intends to take away, and we are supposed to trust—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), is shaking his head, but that was in Hansard and he can check it out for himself. I wrote to the Prime Minister at the end of July to ask him to confirm what he said, and I am still waiting for as much as an acknowledgment. I am not looking for anything fancy; a bit of scrap paper without even a signature on it would do me quite well, as that seems to be what it is about.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
Last week, the Queen’s Speech was the most important thing to the Prime Minister, and today and previously we have been given all sorts of assurances. It almost felt as though if someone had asked him today whether he would assure them at the Dispatch Box that the moon is made of cheese, he would have given that assurance. His assurances, the Queen’s Speech—it means nothing.
Mr Speaker
Order. I just say to the hon. Gentleman that if he continually intervenes, he will be preventing others from speaking. That may not bother him, but I am just letting him know.
Peter Grant
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. We have had a lot of assurances from the Prime Minister at the Dispatch Box. We know that some of them cannot be trusted, and therefore we have to assume that we should not rely too much on any of them. He also promised at that Dispatch Box that after Brexit, full control of Scottish fishing would be returned to Scotland, but in fact Government policy is precisely the opposite.
I have gone through the specific concerns that a lot of businesses in my constituency have been raising over the past several years, and I have tried to go through the withdrawal agreement and this Bill to find out what parts of those documents address the specific worries that my local businesses have. To date, I have not found a single concern that has been raised with me on which I can go back to those businesses and say, “It has been sorted if these documents go through.” We get a lot of platitudes and reassuring noises, but there is absolutely nothing in any of these documents that will give businesses the certainty they are looking for. The Scottish Conservatives have even started to misrepresent the views of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce in their desperation to make it look as though the business community is telling us we should go ahead with this. What the SCC actually said was:
“On the surface this is good news but the devil is in the detail…until we see what the deal means for businesses on the ground, many are reserving judgement.”
That was hailed as a ringing endorsement, because it was as good an endorsement as is going to come.
The right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) said that he was looking for solutions. The House can be satisfied that Scotland has a solution. We have a solution that will get us out of this mess, and we will apply that solution if this Bill goes forward tonight.
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)
Along with most Members, I voted to trigger article 50. Since then, I have voted three times for the deals to leave that have been presented to this House. I intend to do the same again today. However, I think it would be fair to say that over the past three years I have not been blindly stumbling through the Lobbies. Given the importance of this issue and my access to information as a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee, I have critically reviewed each stage of the admittedly tortuous negotiations, in support of a withdrawal deal that I see as critical to supporting jobs and living standards for my constituents.
On the morning of the vote on the Benn Act, I was given the opportunity, with a number of other questioning colleagues, to meet the Prime Minister. I came away from that meeting persuaded of three things: first, that the Prime Minister wanted a deal; secondly, that he would provide adequate resource to get that deal; and thirdly, that the resultant legislation could be delivered by 31 October. In effect, I decided to put my trust in our Prime Minister. So far, against the expectations of many and in difficult circumstances, the Prime Minister has delivered on the first two items on my list. It would be wrong for us not to give him the chance to deliver on the third item by the end of this month. The timetable is ambitious but doable. Personally, if we needed a few more weeks into November, I would be totally supportive of pushing on, as for me, the important thing is the deal, not a date pulled out of the ether—originally by President Macron, by the way.
Parliament has been good at stopping Brexit proposals but bad at providing Brexit solutions. There are many arguments for delay, and I could be among the first to provide a list of issues with I have the terms of the deal, which is slightly less European-centric than the previous deal that was proposed. But at no point did the previous deal have the momentum to pass through the House, as this deal does. Let us be realistic: the chances of reopening the deal again are something less than remote. If anyone is going to vote against Second Reading, they should be honest and say that it is because they want a second referendum or to revoke the triggering of article 50.
Some Members have noted the lack of time to scrutinise the Bill, but given that most of the deal is the same as the previous version, this needs to be put in context. Other issues relate to the non-legally binding political declaration, so some suggest that extra provisions on trade should be inserted, but those debates can and will have to continue once we are in the transition period. They should not be used as the subject of wrecking amendments now. We should take the opportunity we have to sort out EU withdrawal, so that business knows where we stand and citizens know their rights. We can then move on to the important future relationship issues. The reality here and now is that we cannot know about or legislate for all the things that will undoubtedly need to be covered in our FTA with the EU.
Given all that, the main reason I see for delay now is, as I said, to frustrate Brexit or to force a second referendum, and I could not support those positions. That is even more true now that we have a deal. To my mind, we should settle this Bill and then move on to the FTA and start the difficult process of bringing British people back together post Brexit, reinforcing the bonds of our Union, and creating a new, strong and lasting friendship with the EU. Given the momentum towards being able to do that that I now see exists, the opportunity should not be squandered. The Bill and the timetable have my support.
Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)
The argument for the Bill is that it will get Brexit done. Having listened to the debate, that appears to me to be the only argument for it; I have heard very few people advocate for the measures in the deal. I understand that, because we are all tired and a bit sick of this. I think we would all like to talk about other things, but there are two things that we should acknowledge and be straight with the public about.
The first is that this deal—or any deal—does not get Brexit done. We have years of this to come, and we all know that. This is only the end of the beginning. We have the future relationship with the EU to negotiate, and then we have future trade deals, all of which will raise the same issues of national sovereignty up against economic integration. The journalist Helen Lewis said yesterday that voting for this deal to get Brexit done was like someone saying they want their pregnancy to be over so they can get back to going to bed early and reading their favourite novels. I could not have put it better myself. The Conservative party needs to acknowledge that, to own that and to be straight about it. As MPs, our job surely has to be to ask, “Is this deal good for our constituents and for the country?” We will never make a bigger decision, and if we get it wrong, we will never be forgiven.
Mr Gyimah
On getting Brexit done, does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that if this deal passes the House, we will quickly be in transition negotiations and negotiations on whether the transition is to be extended? That could cost around €10 billion a year. We should be honest with the public about that, rather than pretending it will get done this month.
Jonathan Reynolds
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I am reminded of the debate on article 50. There was tremendous pressure to trigger article 50, and I personally voted for us to do that. It was a test of whether we accepted the referendum result. It is now widely recognised that the measure, the timetabling and the timescale that we imposed on ourselves were disastrous for the national interest of this country.
There are three things—just three things—that I want to know: what does this deal mean for manufacturing; what does it mean for services; and what does it mean for the Union? I recognise that not everyone voted on economic grounds. Indeed, yes, there will be a short-term boost to the economy because of investment decisions that have been deferred through the process so far, but that is not the issue. That is not the measure of success. It is about the next 10, 20 and 30 years. If we get this wrong, it will be like a slow puncture at the heart of our economy, and we will regret everything that we have done to get to that point.
Let us start with manufacturing. There is a big difference between this deal and the previous one. Essentially, the previous one offered some sort of voluntary single market alignment on goods, and that has been taken out of this deal, so what does that mean? This is quite a hard Brexit for Great Britain, so what does that mean? I genuinely ask that because no one has given anyone in this Chamber an explanation of that decision. Does it mean that just-in-time supply chains will no longer function? Does it mean that rules of origin will now be required? Looking at the evidence, I think the answer must surely be yes. Does it pass the Nissan test? Will we see the continuation of Nissan’s business model, which has been a huge success story for this country? I have no answers to those questions, and I have 3,500 jobs of my constituents that depend on that.
Let us talk about services. The biggest problem with a bare bones FTA is what it does on services—we are a services economy. The previous deal was poor on services. This deal is equally poor. That is not a reason to walk away and pass it. So what is the plan? For all the imperfections of the single market in services, we should remember that trade in services between EU member states is freer than it is between federal states in the US or between different provinces in Canada. Moreover, the UK is a powerhouse of financial, business, legal, accountancy, consultancy and tertiary education services. What does this deal mean for them? We hear so much about fishing. With respect, the UK computer games industry is worth 10 times the value of the UK fishing industry, so let us talk about the things that really matter.
Finally, let us talk about the Union. I do not want to vote for anything that will lead to the break-up of my own country. I do not think that that is a dishonourable position to take. It is proposed that Northern Ireland should have a totally different Brexit deal. I admit that it could be a lucrative one; it could be very lucrative at the expense of the north-west of England. I can see why the Good Friday agreement requires something different for Northern Ireland. To be honest, I can also understand why it is a huge issue for colleagues in the DUP to accept and sign up to a deal in which a customs declaration is needed to export from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. For me, the bigger danger is in relation to Scotland. It is about the precedent that this sets for Scotland. I believe that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are stronger together, and I do not want to undermine that. We have no answers on those things.
Let me just say this in my final few seconds of the four minutes that I have had to discuss the biggest issue that we will ever be asked to vote on: I recognise that it is possible that any deal could have these problems and that even the best deal possible to negotiate could be a bad deal for the UK. In that situation, the public have to absolutely be told what they are getting, and they must take responsibility for that. They have to have their eyes open about this and know what it will mean. At the minimum, that requires a scrutiny process in Parliament and, frankly, it now requires the people having the final say on this matter.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Ind)
For me, the fundamental truth about Brexit is that it is as it always was: we cannot have Brexit and have nothing changed. What I have heard throughout the past three and a half years—and I have heard it constantly in the House today—from both ends of the divide is, “I want, I want, I want.” We want the same customs arrangements, the same citizens arrangements, the same security arrangements, and we want everything on the island of Ireland to stay the same and for its relationship with GB to stay the same. No, Mr Speaker, if everything is the same, then everything is the same. The British people chose a different path three and a half years ago, and it is up to this House to decipher that and to come up with an answer.
I have voted three times for a withdrawal agreement. I have done it twice inside government, as part of the payroll, I have done it once outside government, and I will do it tonight outside of the party that I was in when I joined this House.
The statecraft required of Brexit was always significant. It was significant with a big majority, and it was very difficult with no majority. It is a huge challenge. I pay great credit to the previous Prime Minister and the current Prime Minister for that statecraft and for the compromise at which they have arrived. Way too many people in this House are still fighting the last war; we heard it from the leader of the Liberal Democrats today. So many people are still listening to respond, not actually to hear. Along with many other Members sitting here who came into this House in 2010 when I did, I cannot believe that so much of my parliamentary career so far has been spent talking about the European Union.
I just want to touch on no deal. The Prime Minister knows my view. I resigned from the Government to stand against no deal, and I had the Whip suspended because I do not believe that leaving with no withdrawal agreement is in the national interest of this country. For the political reasons of my former party, I understand the “get it done” mantra and the feeling of “please just make it stop”, but we have to be better than that. It is literally our job to do that. Not least as a former Health Minister, I know that an exit with no withdrawal agreement in place would be an act of self-harm that we simply do not need to do to ourselves.
As the Prime Minister said on Saturday, to heal this country we have to move on from this in some way. In such a fractious situation, with such a close referendum result, we have to be generous in defeat and magnanimous in victory. As Nigel Farage said—and I do not quote him often—
“For a civilised democracy to work you need the losers’ consent”.
Fortunately, we can now have that because we are the dealers—the pro-dealers. The Prime Minister was true to his word and to the House that he would come back with a revised Brexit deal; he has done that. I fully understand that it is not perfect, but it is a good deal and it is a pathway to moving us on. And you know what? If you don’t want no deal, this really is your moment of truth.
As I said in the debate on the Queen’s Speech, I welcome the Environment Bill. I do not want to see us deviate at all from what the European Union pushes out with regard to environmental management, and I want to see us do even better than that.
I will not be supporting any proposals for a customs union. I voted remain to remain part of the customs union. We will have to take a different path that we have chosen.
On clause 30 and the extensions amendment, I think there are amendments that the House needs to consider carefully. I also welcome the stuff on the future relationship.
Having lost my party’s Whip over this process recently, I know that it is difficult for Members to go against their party. I know that this is difficult for Opposition Members. The Leader of the Opposition says that he wants to persuade, but I suspect that it is a slightly different story in reality. I know that it is difficult, but at the end of the day you only have to answer to yourself.
Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)
I think everybody knows my position; I genuinely believe that any deal should go back to the people for confirmation. They have the right to compare the results of any negotiations between the UK and the EU with the promises made by the now Prime Minister and other leaders of the leave campaign back in 2016, because in 2016 there was a vote to leave, but it was not a vote on how to leave. Brexit started with a referendum and any Brexit deal should therefore be confirmed or rejected by a referendum. This started with the people, and it should end with the people.
There are some who raise the political temperature by using the language of “the people versus Parliament”, but it is those who do not want this deal to go back to the people for a final say who are being disingenuous and cynical when they use such language. There are dozens of parliamentarians in this House who want to include the people in the final decision. They are the ones who are on the side of the people, not those who use the pitch of “the people against Parliament”. But as my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) said during the debate on Saturday, the Government say they are acting on the will of the people. We now have two negotiated withdrawal agreements and the threat of no deal. It seem that, for some, the will of the people takes almost as many forms as there are forms of Brexit.
Why not ask the people once again in a confirmatory and binding vote whether they still want to go ahead? Whatever agreement we achieve should go to the people. If they want to go ahead with Brexit on that basis, it should be implemented and that should be the end of it—no third referendum and no neverendum.
The next tactic deployed by right hon. and hon. Members supporting this agreement is to say, “Let’s just get on with it. People are sick of the process; they are tired of it.” I think we all share that view, but you do not give up on an issue of this magnitude because you are tired—you keep going until you get it right. Three days for debate on this withdrawal agreement is therefore outrageous.
As an example of people’s attitudes, on Saturday the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) said that people, metaphorically speaking, were dying for a decision on Brexit. I agree, so let them make the decision. I say to my constituents that I will vote for a deal as long as it goes back to them to confirm whether they want to go ahead with it or not. I think that is fair. I do not want the deal to get through this House and be implemented without their agreement, because for them Brexit will not be over. We do not know its impact; their jobs will be under threat; and the deal negotiated is not as good as the one we have now. We might try to reinvent the wheel, but we will find out that it is not as round as the original.
Therefore, as I have said, we need to get this over in the right way. We cannot do that if we do not even have access to an economic assessment of the basis of this deal. That is very important when one in five of the people who work in one’s constituency work in manufacturing. I genuinely believe that if we do not put this back to the people, we will live to regret it as a democratic institution and as a country. I do not want the deal to get through this House and be implemented without the people agreeing one way or the other, only to find out that for them Brexit is not over.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
There is now extreme pressure on time and therefore I would discourage interventions, though they are of course within the rules.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
I have struggled against the excesses of the European project for as long as I can remember—perhaps even as long as you can remember, Mr Speaker, and, given that you can remember everything, that is a bold claim. As it metamorphosised, if not in the eyes of its architects, then certainly in the perception of the British people, from a common market to a political union through successive treaties that I opposed in this House, I recognised that the British people were becoming less and less impressed with this project so beloved of the privileged classes.
Why did I struggle in that way? It was because this is essentially about a single matter, and no more than that—from where power is exercised, and how it is held to account. When power is detached from its effect, it first becomes careless and ultimately opens itself up to corruption.
As I have watched these matters being debated in this place, I have considered the two misassumptions that prevail among those who take a different view from my own. The first is about sovereignty. It is the Crown that is sovereign, not this Parliament, and the Ministers of the Crown have a mission to govern. Parliament’s job is to legislate and to hold those Ministers to account, but it is not this House’s purpose or role to govern, yet we have been constantly told, over the course of the consideration of this matter, that Parliament should do just that.
Secondly, there is a misassumption among the unreconstructed remainers about the character of allegiance. Pan-Europeanism may have a certain appeal to elements of the bourgeoisie, but it is no substitute for the shared sense of patriotic belonging that nourishes individual purpose and nurtures national pride.
Our legitimacy here depends upon the electors’ faith in the bond between those they choose to represent them and the people. Rejecting this deal risks breaching the trust on which that faith is founded. To face our democratic duty and to face down the alliance of nitpickers and doom-mongers is critical to maintain popular faith in the character of our democratic system of government.
There are some who agonise about the details of this deal who, frankly, would accept nothing that was negotiated: nothing would ever be quite good enough. No detail would ever be entirely perfect or well formed enough for those critics. Their endeavours are at best mischievous, and, at worse, malign.
Time and tide wait for no man, and the tidal wave of popular discontent about what this Parliament has done must not be resisted. G. K. Chesterton spoke of the people who had “not spoken yet”. Now their voices ring loud and clear. They are tired of waiting. They want Brexit, and they want it now.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
Many Members on both sides of the House understand the risks that this deal poses to the economy and their constituents’ jobs and livelihoods. They understand the risks that it poses to the Union of the United Kingdom, too. But for some Members, the even greater concern is the risk that not getting a deal through Parliament poses to trust in politics and our democracy as a whole.
I have thought long and hard about this issue. While Leicester as a whole voted remain, my constituents voted leave by around the same margin as the country, and they voted leave for all sorts of different reasons—because they are fed up with the quality of local jobs and wages and problems in the NHS; because there are not enough affordable homes or local school places; or because they believe that levels of immigration are too high. Some had never voted before, and all wanted change. Believe me, I know the risk to our democracy and to trust in our democracy, especially among people who feel that their views have been ignored for years. But I believe that those who voted leave will feel even more betrayed when it becomes clear that this deal will not sort Brexit out, will not provide answers to their problems and will not deliver the changes that they desperately want and need.
We have not even begun the negotiations over our future trading relationship with the EU, which will take years to conclude. In the end, we will face exactly the same dilemma for Great Britain as the Prime Minister faced over Northern Ireland. Either we will decide that we want to stay as close as possible and sign up to EU standards and regulations to get frictionless trade, as the Prime Minister has chosen in Northern Ireland, or we will decide that we want to break with those standards, with all the implications that that has for our service sector and manufacturing, which rely on both the customs union and single market alignment.
The Government have never been honest with the British people about the inevitable choice that Brexit brings. They are at it again with this Bill, promising the ERG, “Of course we’ll break free from all this nasty EU regulation and red tape,” and at the same time promising Labour MPs, “Of course we have no intention of slashing workers’ rights and environmental standards.” Both cannot be true. If we want frictionless trade, we will have to sign up to EU rules but give up our say over how those rules are decided—in which case, what is the point of Brexit? If we want to break free from those rules, the EU will not give us frictionless trade—in which case, what is the price of Brexit, and crucially, who will pay?
The truth is that what the Prime Minister and the ERG want from the free trade agreement and their vision of the UK as a low-tax, small-state, deregulated country will not improve the quality of my constituents’ jobs and livelihoods or give them more say and control. It will guarantee a race to the bottom. It will not put more money into housing, schools or the NHS. It will risk the economic growth on which our public services depend.
We have to put the real, inevitable choice on Brexit back to the British people, alongside the option to remain. That is the only way it will have any legitimacy and the only way we will get Brexit done. Otherwise, we will simply end up back here again and again, and that would pose the biggest risk of all to our democracy and trust in politics.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
It has been a long three years, but two themes have arisen in this debate. One, echoed by the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), is the frustration with the length of time it has taken us to get anywhere, and the other, in the same breath, is an entrenched position on a preferred outcome of Brexit. The two do not tally. It is against that backdrop that I congratulate the Prime Minister and his Front-Bench team on coming to the House with a deal we can discuss that has been approved by the EU.
The realpolitik has not changed. The parliamentary maths means that we will not get the pure outcome that we want. The thing that has changed is the frustration of the nation, who are looking at us asking, “Why haven’t you moved forward?” Labour Members have moved forward in their position: they have kicked the can down the road in wanting a second referendum, because they are divided about which way they want to go, but they have not made it clear what such a second deal would be. However, here is a deal. They want to have a second deal, but they have no appetite to go around this buoy again. The Liberal Democrats want to disregard the referendum completely and go to revoking article 50. The DUP has genuine concerns, and we must listen to those. As the part of GB that has a land border with the EU, those concerns will I hope be addressed in Committee.
We should all admit that this unusual form of democracy—a referendum, with its closeness, that took place three years ago—is testing our democratic process. With our appreciation and understanding, how should we interpret something that has been so close? I ask the Government Front-Bench team to qualify and make firm the position on clause 30. The idea has been put forward already—spun—that this is an attempt to take us to no deal. I think I am right in saying that it is the Government’s position that we want to depart with a deal, and I hope that will be confirmed today.
I would like to say that we have a simple choice. With opinion so divided, do we have the courage to compromise and seek a strong, close and workable relationship that 100% of the nation can live with and tolerate—not just the half who actually voted to leave, but the other half who might be wanting a second referendum, which would provide further delay and further division?
I would also say that I agree with contributors in saying how this has been damaging to British politics, to this Parliament and, let us be honest, to the Conservative party—my party—in our complexion and outlook. We have a repair job to do once we are on the other side of Brexit. It has also been distracting. We have had a spending review, but it hardly got any airtime whatever. There are domestic issues that the nation wants us to look at. It has been distracting on the international level as well; our voice is missed on the international stage, as events in Turkey and Syria underline.
Today is a real opportunity to clear the fog of Brexit, find a place of compromise, break the impasse and move the nation forward.
Several hon. Members rose—
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
First, it is worth noting that this House had more time to debate the Wild Animals in Circuses Act 2019, which affected 19 animals, than we will have on this particular Bill. The Institute for Government has said that the timetable appears to have been deliberately “designed to frustrate… scrutiny”. Clearly, it was, and I think the grin that kept on spreading across the face of the Leader of the House when he announced the business confirmed that.
It is right that Members have focused on Northern Ireland during this debate, and I want to focus on the tariffs that will be applied to goods or intermediary goods at risk of being sold into the Republic of Ireland. I want some clarity about what goods we are actually talking about, and how on earth they are going to be tracked. There is no technological solution that provides the granularity required accurately to track the movements of goods, because multiple goods may share the same pallet, never mind the same lorry. Consequently, it is hard to see how all companies will not have tariffs levied on them up front, and then be required to seek a rebate.
The impact on businesses in Northern Ireland is clearly going to be significant, and we have heard about the export forms that they will have to complete to send goods to Great Britain. All this is of course coming to them courtesy of a party that was apparently in favour of reducing red tape to businesses. The impact assessment —it looks only at the legislation, not at the impact of Brexit—says that costs will be running at £167 million per year. Interestingly, it says that the benefit to business is precisely zero.
The Chancellor has said that it is self-evidently in our economic interest to go for Brexit. We have focused extensively on the issue of no deal, but it is worth focusing on this deal and on whether there is in fact any economic interest in it for the United Kingdom. We know from the various analyses looking at comparable deals that we are each going to be at least £2,000 worse off, that the hit on wages is 6.4% and the hit on GDP is 6.7%, and that the non-tariff barriers are going to be catastrophic for the automotive and chemical sectors, for example.
How do we get out of the mess we are in? As other Members have said, there is only one way forward, and that is through a confirmatory vote. Certainly, the Liberal Democrats are adding our names to the Kyle-Wilson amendment, and I hope that amendment will secure the support of the House so that we can proceed with the sensible way out of the catastrophe that we are facing.
Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I am voting for the deal because the country voted to leave. My folks on the Isle of Wight voted to leave and it is a pleasure to represent them and speak on their behalf.
One of the things that confuses me about the Labour party—and indeed the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)—is the extent to which the European Union is used as a device to improve standards or for the development of a social Europe. The common agricultural policy has been bad for the environment, and the common fisheries policy kills millions of fish needlessly every year. Yet the Liberals, the Greens and the Labour party worship the institution of the European Union as though it were good for animals and for the environment. They want live animal exports; we want to ban them but are not allowed to do so under European Union legislation.
On human beings, the EU minimum for annual leave is 20 days; in this country, it is 28. Maternity leave is 14 weeks minimum paid in the European Union and 35 weeks minimum here. The posting of workers to other countries to undercut pay is illegal here and allowed in the rest of the European Union. Eighteen weeks of parental leave is allowed per person per child in the UK, but only up to the age of eight in the EU. If Labour Members want higher standards, they should leave the European Union, not attempt to stay in it.
The second point I will make, above the din of the Opposition trying to ignore what I am saying, is that 104 Labour MPs are in majority leave seats, 52 have leave majorities of 60% and eight have leave majorities of more than 70%. We are getting into North Korean percentage territory here. If I were them, I would be listening to my constituents more than I would my party leadership, because their constituencies are likely to be there longer than the leadership, which might be there for weeks or months. The constituencies will be there for many years to come.
It is easy for me to support the Bill because I voted for Brexit, as did my constituency. But I very much respect Members on both sides of the House who are voting for Brexit or allowing it to happen despite not having supported it. For me, the most important thing is that we finally get on and deliver something that is recognisably Brexit, so that we can move on and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington) says, talk about all the other important things we need to discuss in both domestic and international policy. That is why I will support the Bill.
Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)
The Scots Language Centre defines “thrawn” as meaning twisted, crooked and distorted, which—in my opinion—applies to the Prime Minister’s explanation of his Bill this afternoon. Across the Chamber, Members have asked the Prime Minister questions about what he said, and none of them seemed reassured in any way.
“Thrawn”, referring to a person, means stubbornness and absolute conviction, which I have in equal measure, because I will vote against the Bill and the programme motion because I am stubborn in wanting the best for the people of Motherwell and Wishaw and have the firm conviction that Scotland will be damaged if the Bill is passed. Its needs and economic interests are ignored by the Bill’s contents. I stubbornly refuse to vote to make my constituents poorer, limit free movement of people, lower environmental standards and reduce workers’ rights.
The Prime Minister referred to the law of the land in his speech. Perhaps he should remember that the Court of Session has a watching brief on his actions in relation to the Act of Parliament that requires him to apply for an extension from the EU.
The Prime Minister also referred to “a great tide of investment” that will come after we leave the EU. Will he tell that to those who have already lost their jobs in the financial services and in manufacturing and other sectors across the UK?
The deputy director of the Institute for Government says:
“Anyone who claims meaningful legislative scrutiny is possible on this timetable is—at best—misguided.”
I smell a rat. The Prime Minister is trying to rush the Bill through so quickly—could it be that it will not stand up to intense scrutiny?
I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) that the Bill completely ignores the wishes of the majority of the people of Scotland. NI differentiation does not help Scotland. Ignoring Scottish Parliament legislation does not help the people of Scotland. Devolution is being totally disrespected. Independence is now the only answer.
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. After almost three and a half long years, it is refreshing to get to the point where we can actually debate the proposed legislation that will take us out of the EU. It has been a wandering and, at times, tortuous path, but at last we are here. I am sure that, if the Bill progresses and passes Third Reading this week, many people across the country will breathe a huge sigh of relief that we are getting on with it. The last thing we need in this country is delay, dither, procrastination and prolonging the uncertainty.
During the debate today, I received a text message from the chief executive of one of our most prominent businesses in Cornwall. It is one of our largest companies and employs hundreds of people, both in Cornwall and across the country. He was concerned that the voice of business was not being heard enough in this debate. There is a clear message from the business community: get on with it, back the deal and pass the Bill. It is concerned about the economic impact that further delay and dither will have on consumer confidence and business investment. I am convinced that, if we can pass the Bill, we will see a release of confidence and investment in our country and in our economy.
In the time I have left, I want to address a couple of specific points. Many Members have talked about supporting the deal only if it is attached to another referendum. What I say to them is this: where is the mandate for that? In 2015, when I was first elected, I stood on a manifesto commitment that if the Conservative party won that election we would bring an in/out referendum on the EU. That was the mandate for that referendum. In 2017, the vast majority of Members were elected on a manifesto commitment to deliver on that referendum result.
Steve Double
I am not going to take interventions.
I say respectfully to Opposition Members that, if they wanted a second referendum, they should have put it in a manifesto and voted for a general election last month. They could have had the election last month and, if they had won, they could have had their second referendum. There is no mandate for a second referendum.
I welcome the measures in the Bill to protect the rights of EU citizens resident here. I believe the Government are doing the right thing. We need to send a clear message from this House that all EU citizens resident in the UK are welcome to stay. I respectfully say to Opposition Members that the reason some EU citizens do not feel welcome is that what they hear from some Members is that the Government do not want them. That is blatantly untrue.
We have an opportunity tonight to come together across the House to vote for the deal and to back the result of the referendum. That is what we should do.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
I want to make two very brief points. First, on workers’ rights, one does not have to be a member of the European Union to protect workers’ rights. Rights in this country already go above and beyond those of the European Union. Let me give the House four examples: the living wage, sick pay, maternity and annual leave. They are all protected by legislation passed in this sovereign Parliament. We will continue to do so, certainly on this side of the House.
My second point relates to the programme motion. Many of those who are today complaining about the programme motion are the same people who rushed through the Benn Act. Where were the voices complaining about the lack of time for parliamentary scrutiny when that Act was pushed through? It seems as though this is not an “in principle” objection to scrutiny, but one of convenience and political dogma. If hon. Members like the Bill, it seems that they are happy to be rushed through. If they do not like it, they are not, and that seems to be the case even more strongly this evening.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
For as long as I have been alive, this country has struggled with its position in Europe. We have been tied by geography and culture to that continent, but by history and language to the wider English-speaking world. The country’s attitude can perhaps be summed up as being like that of a passenger in a car who has constantly been asking to slow down or change direction. The increased integration that has always been envisaged in the European project, and which was made inevitable by the euro, has meant that at some stage, this country inevitably had to deal with the consequences of joining a political union while trying to persuade itself that it was just a trade bloc. So it was that 40 years of drift were succeeded by three years of division.
We have a chance to end all that tonight, because we are approaching the moment of decision in a country that is crying out for direction. It will not be possible for much longer for someone to continue to say that they respect the referendum result—remembering that 80% of us in this House were elected on manifesto commitments to carry out the referendum result—but that they want a deal, because we have one here. Further delay will be interpreted by the public either as blocking Brexit or as an inability to put party politics aside in the national interest. I suggest that the country will never be brought back together by telling the majority of the people in it that their decision was wrong. The only way that the country can be unified is by backing a compromise deal that brings democratic control of this country’s laws to this country, while ensuring the continuation of the co-operation, trade and culture that are valued by us all, but which those who voted to remain fear losing.
This is such a deal, but it is a compromise. There are elements in all of it that many of us may have reservations about—I entirely understand that—but it does satisfy most of the requirements of the referendum: it guarantees an open border in Ireland; it has a smooth handover for business; and it sets the path for an independent free-trading future. I ask all those with concerns to stand behind the Government and engage, with a view to influencing the next stage in ensuring that we have the free trade agreement. We must be clear: most of the objections that we have heard tonight really should be reserved for discussions on the future relationship. Only by voting for the Bill tonight can the country be moved forward—that includes the programme motion.
The country is crying out for a decision and for us to move on. Any delay will just lead to more discord. The time has arrived for us to move on—we must grasp it tonight.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
When the Prime Minister said that the odds were a “million to one” against no deal, some of us had doubts. I would have agreed with the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) that it was “utterly irresponsible” for this Government to be rushing towards no deal, if it were true. Now the Prime Minister has produced a deal, surely all those here against no deal can come together to support it. However, too many Members will never support leaving, despite the pledge that they were elected on. They want a second referendum to overturn the original one. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), goes further: she would not accept the wrong result of a second referendum, so contrary to what some people argue, a second referendum will not bring us together. We cannot trust the Opposition parties to carry out the result of a referendum that goes the wrong way any more than they have so far.
Some say that there is not enough time to debate the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) said that he wishes that there were three more days to debate it, but as the Institute for Government said, there are some for whom no amount of debate will be enough. Then there is the Leader of the Opposition, who said that his greatest worry is the serious threat to manufacturing from not being in a customs union. Therefore, he should support both the Bill on Second Reading and the programme motion, table an amendment in Committee and, if that does not work, put it in Labour’s manifesto, campaign on it in an election, form the next Government and negotiate that in the free trade agreement. The point is that the customs union, let alone the NHS, has nothing to do with the Bill. The manufacturers I know are a lot more concerned about what the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Chancellor will do to them than they are about the deal.
There are changes on the Northern Ireland protocol that are very relevant, but because they are internal matters, between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, they can be resolved between us, which is why it is so important that the Democratic Unionist party supports a deal to make sure it does not get the worst possible result for Northern Ireland, which would be no deal.
Let our constituents be clear: there will never be a perfect deal, any more than there will be a perfect job or a perfect marriage. I said three years ago that we needed a deal that few would love but most could live with, and there is enough in the political declaration to reassure those who are open to being reassured on environmental and workers’ rights, enough to respect the Good Friday agreement, and enough to reassure all those elected to respect the result of the referendum that we are delivering on the pledge that what the people decided we would implement. That is why we should all vote for the Bill and leave the EU in a sensible way.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
The Bill will have profound economic, social and political consequences for our country for decades. The jobs and livelihoods of our constituents depend upon our deliberations on the Bill and on our ability to look carefully at its profound consequences. I have listened carefully to over 30 contributions from the Back Benches and commend in particular those from my right hon. Friends the Members for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and my hon. Friends the Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and for Leicester West (Liz Kendall).
The Government, having tried unlawfully to shut down Parliament altogether, now try to shut down the ability of Members to properly scrutinise the most important piece of legislation that has been brought to this House for generations. Weariness with the politics of the last three years is no good reason to wave through a Bill of such huge significance in less than 36 hours. Rather, it is our duty to subject every clause of this monumental Bill to close examination and to understand its full impact on people’s lives up and down the country.
There was and is no good reason for the Government not to have extended the time allocated. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister comes in at an opportune moment: it was at his behest that we sat last Saturday, when it suited him, yet this week we are closing down deliberations on Thursday. It is not only unnecessary; it is reckless and an abomination to this House of Commons. The treaty of Rome had 22 days in Committee, Maastricht 23 days. Whatever one’s view of the Bill, the Government’s conduct is totally and utterly unacceptable.
I have read the Bill. It is no wonder that the Government and the Prime Minister are trying to ram it through in three days with so little scrutiny. Whatever people’s views across the House, the papers before us do not represent a secure future for our constituents.
James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman says we are not giving enough time for this discussion. Can he explain therefore why in this very important Second Reading debate the Labour party ran out of speakers some hour ago?
Nick Thomas-Symonds
There were over thirty contributions from the Back Benches, including some excellent contributions from the Benches behind me.
The withdrawal agreement and the Bill, even if passed, do not end matters. Rather, they open up a whole new series of disputes, and what do we hear today? The party that championed employment tribunal fees now asks us to trust them on workers’ rights. The Foreign Secretary at the weekend told us of smart regulations. Let me translate that: this Tory Party does not want to protect our rights; it wants to shred them. I quote:
“the weight of employment regulation is now back-breaking”,
and that includes
“the collective redundancies directive, the atypical workers’ directive, the working time directive and a thousand more”.
Who said that? The man sitting opposite me: the Prime Minister himself. He wants us to take his word on employment laws, but he mocks them when he gets the chance. He will never care about the working people of this country. The Prime Minister promised virtually everything in the debate earlier today, but if he was so concerned about protecting workers’ rights and about safeguarding our environment, he would have left those provisions in a legally binding withdrawal agreement and would not have shifted them to the non-binding political declaration. Why should we believe a word that he says now? That is why the TUC, Unison, Unite and the GMB all recognise that his eleventh-hour comments today are worthless.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making a very good speech. Does he agree that, as there is no mention of environmental rights in the Bill, there will be no surety in regard to the environment? Should that provision not be put back into legislation?
Nick Thomas-Symonds
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The damage that the Bill does to workers’ rights is just the tip of the iceberg. It will create a border in the Irish sea and impose burdens on Northern Ireland-Great Britain trade, something that the Prime Minister himself promised would never happen. Clause 21 makes that explicit, yet, extraordinarily, the Prime Minister continued to deny it when he opened the debate. What did he talk about? Light-touch measures to deal with illegal trade in endangered animal species and to ban firearms. That completely contradicts what the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union eventually told the House of Lords European Union Committee yesterday:
“The exit summary declarations will be required in terms of NI to GB”.
I do not know why the Prime Minister is shaking his head. That is what the Bill says. The Prime Minister should read the Bill.
Alan Brown
I agree that we cannot trust this Prime Minister when it comes to workers’ rights. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the TUC. Is he disappointed that so many Labour Back Benchers seem happy to take the Prime Minister’s word? It looks as though they will go into the Lobby and vote for the Bill.
Nick Thomas-Symonds
I have respect for all Members who wish to try to change the Bill in Committee, but that only reinforces the point that a proper Committee stage should be allowed for the Bill. As it stands, the Bill reduces Parliament to the role of observer in the next phase of the negotiations. Clause 31(3), if the Justice Secretary wishes to read it, makes it very clear that nothing would be accepted as inconsistent with the existing political declaration. As the Justice Secretary has the Bill in front of him, he will see that clause 30 also includes the trapdoor to no deal at the end of the transition period. Anyone who thinks that the Bill is a way to end no deal should read that clause and think again.
This is a flawed Bill that implements a fundamentally bad deal. It would open the door to a low-regulation, low-wage economy. This deal can only lead to a bare bones free trade agreement or to no deal at the end of next year. The Prime Minister is putting his agreement before the House and asking everyone to look away while he pushes it through. If he is so confident about his deal, why is he so afraid of scrutiny of it?
For working people, the rights and protections in our laws have been hard won. Rather than putting all that at risk by waving the Bill through, it needs to be secured for future generations. The country deserves more than this botched deal and rushed legislation. That is why we will vote against the Bill tonight.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Robert Buckland)
There comes a time in politics when we all have to look at ourselves in the mirror—me included—and ask the following question: are we up to the level of events? Are we truly going to serve the people who put us here?
I have the honour of speaking last in what I think we would all agree is the most pivotal of parliamentary debates. I suppose that, for me, there is a sort of symmetry in this, because of the long association that I have had in supporting our membership of the European Union. I was a proud remainer, someone who campaigned assiduously for membership, and for whom the result of the referendum in June 2016 came as a bitter blow.
I have just heard the word “traitor” uttered sotto voce across the Chamber. That concerns me, and it should concern us all. I do not believe that anybody in this place is a traitor. I do not believe that anybody, whatever view they might have, is somehow disloyal or dishonourable or dishonest or below the standards that we would expect in this place, because I believe that not only do we call ourselves honourable Members, we are honourable men and women. And we come here with the best of intentions: we come here in all sincerity to try and find a way through for the people we represent—to make a decision; a hard, a fast, and a specific decision at that. It is not easy, but we are here to do difficult; that is our job. We are sent here by each of our constituents to get on with it, and over the last few months the voices I hear in my constituency, as right across the country, come out loud and clear whether we were leave or remain: “For the love of God, get on with it,” is what I am being told.
I want to deal for a moment with the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), who I thought put it extremely well. He in many respects has found himself in the sort of moral dilemma that a lot of us in this Chamber have been placed in in the last three years. He resigned from the Government because of his convictions, and that is an act that speaks volumes. He put it well when he said that the best way in the circumstances—the only way—to avoid what he would regard as the problem of a no-deal Brexit is to vote for both these motions this evening. I say both these motions because the one will not work without the other.
We are left with a fixed date, a date that was not chosen by us. It was never the subject of an application that we made to extend article 50, but it was a date that was chosen by our friends in the European Union: 31 October. And 31 October was not a mere caprice plucked out of the air; it was something real and meaningful for the 27. It was in their interests; it was administratively important for them, but backed by proper reason, and therefore it is something that we should respect. For a moment let us put ourselves in the shoes of our negotiating partners. They want certainty; they want to be able to move on; and they want to know that in their negotiating partner they have somebody who they can trust and rely upon.
Jim McMahon
On that point, how does the right hon. and learned Gentleman feel our negotiating partners look on this Parliament, which was prorogued at a time when we could have been spending time on this issue? We would have had more than 21 days to debate it in that circumstance.
Robert Buckland
The hon. Gentleman, who has been here a good few years, has lived, like all of us, through this process, and the hours, the days, the months and the years that we have debated this issue amply demonstrate that every one of the 650 Members—or those who are able to take part—have had their say.
The elements of the withdrawal agreement that have been significant and different relate of course to the provisions on Northern Ireland and the future relationship, but we would be kidding ourselves if we did not admit that large elements of this agreement were elements that we have known about, we have debated and we have aired and analysed over the last few months—more than the last few months, the better part of a year.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Ind)
Before my right hon. and learned Friend goes into the detail, will he agree that we do not have to love this deal and we do not have to love the programme motion—we might even think it is a very bad deal or a very bad programme motion—but for those of us who wish to avoid the worst, it is better than the worst?
Robert Buckland
My right hon. Friend, in his nuanced way, makes the important point that in the pursuit of perfection we are in danger of losing the entire House. The majority of us in this Chamber have made it clear that the one thing we do not want is a no-deal Brexit. Through all the debates we have had and all the decisions we have made, that one thing has been clear.
Mr David Gauke (South West Hertfordshire) (Ind)
Many of us are still concerned that we may end up with a no-deal exit for Great Britain. Can my right hon. and learned Friend assure me that we will make sure, in the Bill, that Parliament has an opportunity to vote before 1 July on whether the implementation period should be extended—whether for one or two years—if it does not look like we will get in the negotiations a free trade agreement by the end of the year? Will he also assure me that the Government will abide by that vote?
Robert Buckland
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. What would happen if there were potential for an extension of the implementation period has been concerning Members right across the House. We believe that we can negotiate in the time that we have now, but we accept that Parliament has a legitimate role to play, and I can bring forward an amendment that would allow Parliament to have its say on the merits of an extension of the implementation period—
Robert Buckland
And the Government will abide by that.
Now, that is an example of representative democracy working well, because one of the things that we British pride ourselves on is our ability to compromise, to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect each other and to come to a reasonable compromise. I have done everything that I can in my political career to reflect those values, and I believe that I see many other right hon. and hon. Members who share that view.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way. I have made the argument for compromise many times, and I will vote for the Government’s deal, although I think it is rubbish, if he will vote for a people’s vote at the same time.
Robert Buckland
I have to commend the hon. Lady for her persistence, but to reopen the issue in that way would be, with the greatest of respect to my hon. Friends who support it, the ultimate cop-out for this Parliament. It is time for all of us who believe in representative democracy to accept the fact that the whole concept of parliamentary representation is itself on trial. It is on trial in a way that perhaps none of us had ever envisaged. Acknowledging the fact that we are facing unprecedented challenge is something that should make us—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. The Secretary of State is entitled to conclude his speech without being yelled at.
Robert Buckland
It is something that should make us focus even more determinedly upon the need to make decisions—however imperfect, however unpalatable, however untimely they might seem to hon. Members. The public demand nothing less than for us to make a positive move. The time for decision making is now. The time for proposing nothing, opposing everything and seeking to play old-fashioned politics is over. We have to get on with this. As somebody who spent my life believing in the concept of our membership of the European Union, that comes as bitter gall to me, but it is not about me or individuals; it is about all of us.
Lady Hermon
The Justice Secretary says that it is time for decisions. Before making a decision, I would like the Justice Secretary to give the Unionist community of Northern Ireland a complete assurance that there is nothing in the Prime Minister’s new Brexit deal that undermines the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the consent principle of the Good Friday agreement.
Robert Buckland
I am able to give the hon. Lady an unequivocal assurance. There is nothing to undermine that—nothing we do will undermine it—and she can be assured of that fact.
On that important point, I commend this Bill to the House.
Question put, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Proceedings | Time for conclusion of proceedings |
|---|---|
At today’s sitting | |
Clauses 1 to 4; new Clauses relating to Part 1; new Schedules relating to Part 1 | Three hours after the commencement of proceedings on the Motion for this Order. |
Second day | |
Clauses 21 to 23; Schedule 3; Clause 24; Clauses 29 to 34; Schedule 4; Clauses 35 and 36; new Clauses relating to any of Clauses 21 to 23, Schedule 3, Clause 24, Clauses 29 to 34, Schedule 4, Clause 35 or Clause 36; new Schedules relating to any of Clauses 21 to 23, Schedule 3, Clause 24, Clauses 29 to 34, Schedule 4, Clause 35 or Clause 36 | Six hours after the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the second day. |
Clauses 7 to 14; Schedule 1; Clause 15; Schedule 2; Clauses 16 and 17; new Clauses relating to Part 3; new Schedules relating to Part 3 | Six hours after the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the second day |
Clauses 18 to 20; Clauses 5 and 6; Clauses 25 to 28; Clauses 37 and 38; Schedule 5; Clause 39; Schedule 6; Clause 40; new Clauses relating to any of Clauses 18 to 20, Clauses 5 and 6, Clauses 25 to 28, Clauses 37 and 38, Schedule 5, Clause 39, Schedule 6 or Clause 40; new Schedules relating to any of Clauses 18 to 20, Clauses 5 and 6, Clauses 25 to 28, Clauses 37 and 38, Schedule 5, Clause 39, Schedule 6 or Clause 40 | Nine hours after the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the second day |
New Clauses relating to a further referendum in connection with the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, new Schedules relating to a further referendum in connection with the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, remaining new Clauses, remaining new Schedules, remaining proceedings on the Bill | Twelve hours after the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the second day. |
Jeremy Corbyn
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. On Saturday, this House emphatically rejected the Prime Minister’s deal. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are too hasty; I have not finished yet. Tonight the House has refused to be bounced into debating a hugely significant piece of legislation in just two days, with barely any notice and no analysis of the economic impact of this Bill. The Prime Minister is the author of his own misfortune. I make this offer to him tonight: work with us—all of us—to agree a reasonable timetable, and I suspect that this House will vote to debate, scrutinise and, I hope, amend the detail of this Bill. That would be the sensible way forward, and that is the offer I make on behalf of the Opposition tonight.
The Prime Minister
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. Let me say in response how welcome it is—even joyful—that, for the first time in this long saga, this House has accepted its responsibilities, come together and embraced a deal. I congratulate Members across the House on the scale of our collective achievement. Just a few weeks ago, hardly anybody believed that we could reopen the withdrawal agreement, let alone abolish the backstop, and certainly nobody thought that we could secure the approval of the House for a new deal. We should not overlook the significance of this moment. I pay particular tribute to those Members of the House who were sceptical and who had difficulties and doubts, but who decided to place the national interest ahead of any other consideration.
However, I must express my disappointment that the House has again voted for delay, rather than a timetable that would have guaranteed that the UK was in a position to leave the EU on 31 October with a deal. We now face further uncertainty, and the EU must now make up its mind about how to answer Parliament’s request for a delay. The first consequence is that the Government must take the only responsible course and accelerate our preparations for a no-deal outcome. Secondly, however, I will speak to EU member states about their intentions and, until they have reached a decision, we will pause this legislation.
Let me be clear: our policy remains that we should not delay and that we should leave the EU on 31 October. That is what I will say to the EU, and I will report back to the House. One way or another, we will leave the EU with this deal, to which this House has just given its assent, and I thank Members across the House for that hard-won agreement.
Ian Blackford
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I must say that I find the response of the Prime Minister quite extraordinary, because the facts of the matter are—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. The right hon. Gentleman is entitled to raise a point of order and he is entitled to be heard. Let us hear the right hon. Gentleman, and then we will expedite progress.
Ian Blackford
The fact of the matter is that this is yet another humiliating defeat this evening for the Prime Minister, who has sought to railroad through this House legislation that requires proper scrutiny. Rightly, this House has spoken with a very clear voice to tell the Prime Minister that he is not on. Furthermore, it is absolutely crystal clear what should now happen. There is legislation passed by this House, and it is the law of the land, that on the basis of not agreeing a deal, the Prime Minister is instructed—instructed, Prime Minister —to seek an extension. Go to Brussels and do as you have been instructed, and do not put yourself offside against this Parliament.
It is crystal clear that this is a Government in whom there is no confidence, and a Government who have sought to ignore the wishes of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish people. It is obvious to us that if we want to guarantee our rights as EU citizens, Scotland has to become an independent country. To that end, Mr Speaker, can you advise me about what we must do in this House and what options are open to us both in securing the extension and in protecting Scotland’s national interest?
Mr Speaker
I have a sense that the right hon. Gentleman’s question is largely rhetorical, and I say that in no disobliging spirit. I do not think the right hon. Gentleman needs my advice, and even if he does, he does not need it tonight, so we will leave it there for now.
Mr Speaker
Will the hon. Lady forgive me if I take the point of order from the Father of the House first? [Interruption.] The right hon. and learned Gentleman is being equally obliging. [Interruption.] Oh, very well, press on—Mr Kenneth Clarke.
Mr Speaker
May I ask the Father of the House: is it your first, sir? [Laughter.]
Mr Clarke
May I ask the Prime Minister and everybody else to reconsider the suggestion he made that we pause the progress of the Bill tomorrow? I congratulate him on winning approval for the deal he negotiated. I think I said in the House once that I would apologise to him and congratulate him if he actually got it, and he has achieved it, and the Second Reading vote was the approval of his deal. The argument is about how long the House is allowed to take over considering it. I cannot quite see the logic of pausing progress on the Bill when the whole House is expecting the next two days to be spent on it. That would enable us to see how quickly the House wishes to proceed and what sort of time is being looked for, and if people started filibustering—I hope they would not—it might enable the Government to get a majority for a timetable motion that was a modest adjustment to tonight’s. Three or four days more would do it.
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, the Father of the House, for his point of order. I await the development of events, but it is not unreasonable for me to say that, as of now and unless there has been any change, my understanding is that the Leader of the House intends to make a business statement—I have a draft copy—that sets out the Government’s intentions for the coming days. I say that cautiously in case the Government have changed their mind, but I do not think they have and I do not expect them to do so. We will hear from the Leader of the House ere long.
Jo Swinson
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. Twice in the last three days, the Prime Minister has failed to force his bad Brexit deal through the House without adequate scrutiny. He continues in an irresponsible vein to talk up the prospect of no deal. Is it not time to end the brinksmanship and replace it with some statesmanship; to seriously and respectfully engage with our European friends to secure an extension to article 50 to enable the House to pass legislation for a people’s vote; or, if he prefers, to allow proper scrutiny of his Bill or to call a general election? All of those things require a decent extension to article 50: he should be a statesman and go and secure it.
Nigel Dodds
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. First, on the Second Reading vote, many hon. Members—certainly in my hearing—voted for it although they were against the contents of the deal. They said that they would want to see changes to it. The House has made a wise decision to allow further time for detailed examination of some of the most important legislation that we will ever have to consider, particularly given the impact on Northern Ireland. As the Prime Minister reflects on the votes on Saturday and studies the votes tonight, I suggest that he should talk to us again about what can be done even at this late stage to ensure that we join in this great quest to get Brexit done, but as one United Kingdom.
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. May we have a clarification from the Chair that the Second Reading was passed with a significant majority? The leaders of the Liberal Democrats and the SNP keep saying that it has not been passed. Can you clarify that Second Reading was passed with a majority?
Mr Speaker
That is undeniably true. I am not sure that my clarification was required for Members, but for the benefit of those observing our proceedings the hon. Lady makes a fair point. It is important to be clear: the Second Reading of the Bill was carried, as I announced, by 329 votes to 299. It was the programme motion that was defeated by 322 to 308. That is by way of being a public service broadcast.
Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I wondered if you could clarify for me how “getting Brexit done” sits with pausing Brexit. This feels like a very churlish reaction to what is a straightforward request, which is for the House to have a short amount of time. Do those two things equate in your mind?
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her point of order. I think the fairest thing I can say to her is: it is a factual point, of which the Leader of the House and, I am sure, the Prime Minister will be aware. As a result of the fact that the programme motion was turned down—it is very encouraging that the former Government Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) is nodding vigorously—we could not proceed, I must advise the House, with the start of Committee consideration, for which there is currently no authority.
If I may say so, people are entitled to their own views about the attitude of one leader or another, but I certainly am not going to make any charge of churlishness at all. To be fair, the Prime Minister is, in pragmatic fashion, accepting the immediate implications of the result. It is literally a time to pause and consider how to proceed. I make no other point beyond that.
Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Can you confirm that the Prime Minister had no alternative other than to do what he has done tonight? The previous Labour Government passed timetable motions—Bills had to have such a motion to proceed. Therefore, the action of Members tonight to vote against the timetable motion means that we cannot continue with the business, which we could do until the changes were made by the previous Labour Government.
Mr Speaker
I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman requires my endorsement. Suffice it to say that a book could be written on the subject of the genesis of programme motions and he may well be tempted to pen it, but whether it would prove to be a bestseller is another matter.
Mr Speaker
If the right hon. and learned Gentleman will forgive me, I will come first to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), whom I have kept waiting.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Can you explain to me and to people outside, now that the Government have chosen to pause legislation and, by doing that, to extend the Brexit process—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. I accept that feelings are running high, but the right hon. Lady must be heard.
Liz Saville Roberts
The Government and people outside will appreciate that there is now more opportunity to release the economic impact assessments that we should all have sight of before we make such material decisions.
Mr Speaker
The right hon. Lady makes her own point in her own way. It requires no comment from me, but I thank her for saying what she said.
Mr Speaker
I will come to the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), but first I will call the Father of the House.
Mr Speaker
I would not be inclined to accept that without notice. What I would say to the right hon. and learned Gentleman is that it would be potentially orderly, but I have to, if he will forgive me for saying so, read the runes. I have no sense, notwithstanding the argument he has advanced, that that is the wish of the Government. The fact that the Prime Minister has just exited the Chamber seems to me rather to reinforce that view. I make no criticism at all. I am simply saying that he has left the Chamber. I do not think he has any appetite for the preference of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, which I hope he can bear stoically and with fortitude. If the Leader of the House wanted to do that, he would have said so and he has not, so he does not.
Ms Angela Eagle
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Leader of the Opposition offered the Conservative party a proper discussion on a different programme motion, which would have given us more time for the release of impact assessments and so on, and more time to discuss a very complex and important Bill. That has not been addressed. It is correct that we cannot proceed tonight, but if an agreement was reached between Front Benchers we could surely re-establish a timetable and scrutinise the Bill properly—if we did not have a Prime Minister who was behaving like a two year old and playing silly games?
Mr Speaker
I note what the hon. Lady says. The position is as I have explained. As colleagues will understand, senior figures in this place anticipate different scenarios and it is not uncommon for them to communicate those to the Chair. The Leader of the House did me the courtesy of informing me in advance of what the Government’s attitude would be in the event of a particular result. He has not departed from that view, so I am telling the House what the Government’s current intention is, about which colleagues will hear more in the business statement. That is very much a matter for the Government, and I am not trying to choke off what the hon. Lady wants; I am simply telling her that we are where we are, as things stand.
Colleagues, the orderly thing to do at this point is simply to proceed with what would be the choreography—I think I have a sense of how it is going to proceed—with, in the first instance, the money resolution, to be moved formally.
Business without Debate
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Speaker
With the leave of the House, I propose to take motions 10 to 18 together.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Exiting the European Union (Sea Fisheries)
That the Common Fisheries Policy and Animals (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (S.I., 2019, No. 1312), dated 7 October 2019, a copy of which was laid before this House on 7 October 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Agriculture)
That the draft Common Organisation of the Markets in Agricultural Products and Common Agricultural Policy (Miscellaneous Amendments etc.) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019, which were laid before this House on 25 July 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Health and Safety)
That the Railways (Safety, Access, Management and Interoperability) (Miscellaneous Amendments and Transitional Provision) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (S.I., 2019, No. 1310), dated 7 October 2019, a copy of which was laid before this House on 7 October 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Road Traffic
That the draft Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 1) Order 2019, which was laid before this House on 04 September, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
That the Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 2) Order 2019, which was laid before this House on 4 September 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
That the draft Passenger and Goods Vehicles (Tachographs) (Amendment etc.) Regulations 2019, which were laid before this House on 18 July, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Representation of the People)
That the draft European Parliamentary Elections Etc. (Repeal, Revocation, Amendment and Saving Provisions) (United Kingdom and Gibraltar) (EU Exit) (Amendment) Regulations 2019, which were laid before this House on 23 July 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Broadcasting
That the draft Small-scale Radio Multiplex and Community Digital Radio Order 2019, which was laid before this House on 20 June 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Consumer Protection)
That the draft Human Medicines and Medical Devices (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, which were laid before this House on 24 July, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.—(Jeremy Quin.)
Question agreed to.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Exiting the European Union (Financial Services)
That the draft Financial Services (Miscellaneous) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 3) Regulations 2019, which were laid before this House on 15 July, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.—(Jeremy Quin.)
The Speaker’s opinion as to the decision of the Question being challenged, the Division was deferred until tomorrow (Standing Order No. 41A).
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Legal Aid and Advice
That the draft Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (Legal Aid for Separated Children) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2019, which was laid before this House on 22 July 2019, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.—(Jeremy Quin.)
Question agreed to.
Business of the House
Ordered,
That, for the remainder of the current Session, paragraph (2)(a) of Standing Order No. 10 (Sittings in Westminster Hall) shall not apply.—(Jeremy Quin.)
Mr Speaker
We come now to petitions—[Interruption.] We will take the business statement first, which will have a bigger audience than the petitions.
Business of the House
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Jacob Rees- Mogg)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I think I am petitioning to make another statement.
Owing to the loss of the programme motion, I have to make a statement, because the Bill now stands referred to a Committee under Standing Orders 83A and 63. I mention that for the convenience of the House. I have no option but to make a business statement, as we cannot continue with the business previously set out for tomorrow. The business for the rest of the week is:
Wednesday 23 October—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on the NHS.
Thursday 24 October—Conclusion of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on the economy.
Friday 25 October—The House will not be sitting.
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
I thank the Leader of the House for making a business statement and not a point of order. He heard Her Majesty’s Opposition and will know that we stand ready to work with the Government. The Opposition Chief Whip is a very reasonable person and will be very happy to discuss a proper way to proceed through the usual channels.
This is important. It was only earlier this week that the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union was not clear on the tariffs going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain and from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. As the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds) has made clear, this is really important for the Union.
I am obviously disappointed, as are right hon. and hon. Members who have prepared for the Queen’s Speech debate. This is no way to conduct business. We have been moved around—jerked around, quite frankly—by the Government in a shambolic way. This has not been done in an orderly fashion. We now have the votes on the Queen’s Speech on Thursday. I would be grateful if the Leader of the House clarified that there will be votes on Wednesday and Thursday.
Mr Speaker
Just before I call other colleagues, I want to make something clear. I thought it emerged in the course of points of order and my responses to them, but just in case there is any doubt, the technical term for the status of the Bill is that it is in limbo. That is the technical term, advised to me by the Clerks. I refer Members to the ruling of the Chair on 10 July 2012 and to paragraph 28.58 of “Erskine May”. Any motion to enable the Bill to proceed to Committee or beyond requires notice and so will be considered on another day. One could have had an indication of intent, but there does exist a requirement for notice. That, I think, completes the picture.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I was fascinated to hear that the Bill was in limbo. Theologically speaking, it is reported that Pope Benedict XVI abolished limbo. I wonder whether the Bill is not in the heaven that is having been passed, or in the hell of having failed, but in purgatory, where it is suffering the pains of those in purgatory. [Interruption.] Original sin is beyond the immediate competence of my answer on this statement.
To reply to the right hon. Lady, discussions always take place between Whips Offices, as is well known. The difficulty was that the Opposition wanted the debate to continue past 31 October, which is the deadline for leaving the EU.
I would like to correct the right hon. Lady on the issue relating to tariffs. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union did not say anything about tariffs. It was not a tariff issue. There are no tariffs between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Forms and tariffs are completely different things. I am so sorry that the Opposition are confused, after so many years of debate on this subject, between a form and a tariff. No doubt we can provide specialist expertise to explain the difference.
The interruption of the Queen’s Speech debate has a wonderful historical tradition. We always take the First Reading of the Outlawries Bill immediately after the Queen’s Speech as a sign that the House is allowed to debate what it chooses and is not there to oblige the Crown. Perhaps more relevantly in these circumstances, there is the deadline of 31 October. We on the Government Benches are trying to meet that deadline by getting the deal through. The House has voted for that deal, but it seems to will the end but currently not the means.
Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
Given everything else, the Government must clearly have an understanding of the limit beyond which it will be not be possible to go with the Bill in respect of leaving the EU by 31 October and completing its progress. In the light of that, has my right hon. Friend kept in reserve the consideration that it may be possible for the House to sit through the weekend if necessary, and, if necessary, to sit around the clock to achieve whatever is required to meet that deadline of the 31st?
Mr Rees-Mogg
The problem—the constraint—is, of course, the fact that this is a bicameral legislature. However long we sat, the House of Lords would also have to sit, and the deadline is Thursday week. Even if we were to sit around the clock, having the hours that we were to have had today, given the time required for the House of Lords, there would still be very little time left; and after people have complained that the time is insufficient, it might be peculiar if they were then to say that an even shorter time was sufficient. I welcome the intent of my right hon. Friend’s question, but I do not think that that will work.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
I thank the Leader of the House for his short business statement. He is absolutely right: he has met his obligations according to the Standing Orders of the House by making the statement. I also thank him for not making it through a point of order, as he did on Saturday. He has done the right thing by addressing the House with a business statement on which we can question him about certain aspects of what he has said.
I listened carefully to the Leader of the House. He described the current withdrawal agreement Bill as “in limbo”. I was hearing from the Prime Minister, and I think that several journalists in the Press Gallery were being briefed today, that the Prime Minister was prepared to withdraw the Bill if the programme motion was not passed. That was a very clear statement. Will the Leader of the House therefore clarify the “limbo” that he has described? When are we likely to see the withdrawal agreement before the House again? I remind the Leader of the House that the 31st is next Thursday. The Prime Minister is committed to adhere to the Benn Act and seek an extension. I think that the Leader of the House should explain how these competing tensions will be resolved.
The Queen’s Speech debate is to return to the House. That is right, too, and I congratulate the Leader of the House. It is right for the House to consider the Queen’s Speech properly and to have an opportunity to vote on it. However, we need to know will happen beyond that. There is only one week until the Prime Minister’s self-imposed deadline, so what is going to happen?
Mr Rees-Mogg
I hate to quibble with the hon. Gentleman, but it is not a self-imposed deadline. It is a deadline that was selected by the European Union. Members may recall that the previous Government went to the European Union suggesting a deadline around June. It was rejected by the EU, which set a deadline of 31 October. In a remarkably short space of time, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister renegotiated the deal, which nearly everybody had said was impossible, and the deadline has remained fixed.
The hon. Gentleman raised the question of limbo, and how that correlates with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister’s reference to the Bill’s being withdrawn. The key thing to remember about limbo is that to enter it, one cannot still be alive, and therefore the Bill is no longer a live Bill.
Mr Speaker
Oh, we are wallowing in the realms of metaphysical abstraction, as Burke would have said, and almost certainly did, albeit not in relation to this Bill.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
May I urge my right hon. Friend to reconsider the point made by our right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith)? I think we all know that the people who voted against the programme motion tonight did not really want more time to consider the Bill; they wanted to frustrate Brexit. They wanted to block it. Nobody is fooled. Why do the Government not play them at their own game? The Father of the House, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), said that another three days would do it, so why do we not start the Committee stage tomorrow? The extra three days that seem to be required could be Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We could sit till any hour on all three days, and we could then see how much appetite there really is for extra scrutiny of the Bill. I suspect that if the Leader of the House were to do that, he would find that, actually, not much scrutiny would be required from Opposition Members.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for a characteristically good idea on how we might be able to proceed. The only difficulty is that the programme motion has been voted down, and to sit in the way my hon. Friend suggests would require another programme motion, and there is no indication that that would meet with greater satisfaction from the Opposition. The House of Lords also has to consider this Bill in due time, so I fear that his great solution is not going to be a way forward.
Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)
I had not intended to seek to intervene on this exchange, but I am so offended by the remarks of the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) that I feel inclined to do so.
Margaret Beckett
It is not the truth; it is in fact something that we are only allowed to call a terminological inexactitude—in other words, it is absolute rubbish to suggest that people who voted against this programme motion only did so to delay Brexit or because they are opposed to Brexit. Any hon. Member who understands their duties in this place should never have voted for this programme motion in the first place. I say further that the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who is a former leader of the Conservative party, is equally at fault in not understanding when the sensible thing to do is to accept with good grace the very generous and sensible offer immediately made by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition.
Finally, on the question of limbo, I rather thought one had to be pure of soul to get in, so not many people are going to end up there.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I think the original understanding of limbo—one that is no longer widely accepted—is that it was a place for the souls of the unbaptised and for those who died before salvation was brought to us at the point of the Resurrection, but I think the understanding now is that that is rather a narrow interpretation.
The issue of what motivates people to vote in this House is one that is always very difficult to settle. I have always accepted that right hon. and hon. Members in this House want what is best for the country, but think that there are different ways to do it. But we must draw conclusions from people’s actions, and I do not think it is unreasonable to conclude that people who voted against the Second Reading of this Bill and against the programme motion are not the greatest admirers of the proposals towards Brexit.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
In the exchange that the Leader of the House and I had yesterday, I said, and he agreed with me, that if people voted against the programme motion they would have blocked Brexit. They have indeed done that for a period, and that is a fact. The question in front of us all is whether they have blocked Brexit permanently, and that is something I think we should deal with. I am grateful to those Members who have taken the difficult personal decisions on behalf of their constituents to vote for Second Reading, and I urge my right hon. Friend and others on the Treasury Bench to think about ways in which we can deliver Brexit on 31 October—to get it done—while allowing the House more time to debate it, to see whether those two things can be reconciled. I note in conclusion that the Opposition Chief Whip did make an offer along those lines this afternoon, and that is something I think worthy of at least some consideration.
Mr Rees-Mogg
It is hard to see how the time could have been divided up otherwise. My right hon. Friend mentions the commitment to leave on 31 October and says that people may have voted to obstruct Brexit; they may find that all they voted for is for us to leave without a deal.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
It is a bit rich for the Leader of the House, having prorogued Parliament and broken the law to do so, now to complain about a lack of time. Having said that, he has had an offer from the Opposition to enter into negotiations to set out a timetable for proper scrutiny of this legislation. If he was listening this afternoon, he would have heard many Opposition Members say they were going to support the Prime Minister today but wanted more scrutiny of the Bill. He is arrogantly now taking those votes and saying, “We have to go on the 31st; away with all your desire to have further scrutiny.” That is not a reasonable position for the Government to take, so will he now listen to Parliament for a change, go away and speak to the usual channels to set out a timetable motion for proper scrutiny of this Bill? That is what the House is asking for.
Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman says that I prorogued Parliament, but there are two problems with that. Not only is it above and beyond my authority to have done such a thing, but had he listened to the Supreme Court’s ruling he would have discovered that Parliament was not in fact prorogued and therefore, whether I had done it or not, nothing had come of it. The Supreme Court said that the piece of paper read out proroguing Parliament was as a blank sheet of paper, so his first point is erroneous.
As for the hon. Gentleman’s second point, I do not want to be pedantic or to quibble, but we have had three and a half years—[Interruption.] Somebody has an important phone call; I am sorry to be interrupting personal business. We have been going over all this for three and a half years. We have had hours and hours of debate, and we need to come to a conclusion. The deadline for the conclusion was set by the European Union—[Interruption.] I am sure that the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) will be called by Mr Speaker if only she is patient. We have had plenty of debate, but ultimately a decision needs to be made.
Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)
We have just had the Second Reading of an extraordinarily important Bill, and Mr Speaker set a four-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches but, lo and behold, the Labour party could not put up enough speakers in the last hour. The Opposition have made an offer, and my right hon. Friend should take it up, because I do not think that they have the skills and the numbers to talk through the night, as suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House may get a pleasant surprise, proceedings may dry up much earlier than he is expecting, and we may reach the Elysian fields on 31 October.
Mr Rees-Mogg
My right hon. Friend makes an intriguing suggestion, although far be it from me to say that Opposition Members would not be able to speak at considerable length. One of the skills of many politicians is to be able to speak at considerable—some might say inordinate—length, though I note that one of the great experts in and exponents of this is in the Chamber. The eloquence of my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) knows no bounds and entertains us all greatly on Fridays.
Mr Speaker
My earliest recollection of the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) speaking in the Chamber was an occasion on which he had to wait rather longer than he wanted to ask a question. He was eventually called by Madam Speaker Boothroyd, and at the end of his question—this was only 20 years ago, so I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman remembers this—Madam Speaker turned to the right hon. Gentleman, although he was just an hon. Gentleman then, and said, “Now, Mr Paterson, I hope you are satisfied.” [Laughter.]
Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)
Since the withdrawal Bill has huge consequences for people in Northern Ireland and since the Northern Ireland Assembly is still not sitting, I wonder whether the Leader of the House could enlighten us about the steps that the Government will now take to ask all the political parties in Northern Ireland about their reaction to the fact that this Bill has received its Second Reading this evening.
Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Lady raises an important point. Everybody in the Government wishes to see the Assembly brought back together, and the consequences of not having had an Assembly have been complicated for Northern Ireland in the Brexit process. I am reluctant, however, to trespass on the territory of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland—[Interruption.] The hon. Lady tempts me, but she will get a better answer from my right hon. Friend than she will from me, so I hope she will forgive me. If it would be helpful, I will certainly seek a written response from the Northern Ireland Secretary. I reiterate what I said in my previous business statement: this Government take the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland not only seriously but as a fundamental statement of what our nation is, and we will do everything we can to support the United Kingdom.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
I hate to be a pedant, but my recollection is that the souls of the upright and pure who preceded salvation actually ended up in Dante’s first circle. The events of this evening prove to us that we are all much further down in hell already.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am reluctant to quibble with my right hon. Friend, but Dante cannot always be relied on for the theology of the Catholic Church.
Hugh Gaffney (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)
I am a new pupil, so perhaps Mr Speaker can help me. As we are now back to the Queen’s Speech, which amendments will be selected? What about amendment (b) on the TV licence?
Mr Rees-Mogg
Fortunately, the matter of selecting amendments does not fall to me. It falls to wiser heads.
Mr Speaker
Well, I do not know whether the heads are wiser, but the heads are different. It might help the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney) if I explain—the Leader of the House and many hon. Members know this, but some do not—that the selection is made on the day of the business and will be announced to the House. He cannot know it now, because it has not been made, but he will know it when he needs to know it.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
I start by saying how delighted I am that, finally, after more than three years, there is a deal that the majority in this House have supported. Many people outside the House will be confused, but it is clear that we could not have voted on the deal before the deal was agreed, and it was agreed only on Friday; on Saturday, it was sidetracked by an amendment; yesterday it was sidetracked by the rules of procedure; today the deal went through with a majority, but now the timetable has been sidetracked.
As someone who wants to see a deal, may I urge this on the Leader of the House? I do not know whether he is a Harry Potter fan, but I am. The great Hermione Granger, in challenging times, used a time turner. Can he work with all parties, especially those in Europe, to see how we can get this deal over the line as quickly as possible?
Mr Rees-Mogg
I suppose we could repeal the Act that put us on the Gregorian rather than the Julian calendar, which might buy us a few extra days.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I cannot hope to match the wit of Dante or the knowledge of Harry Potter, but might I suggest Monty Python? The injury inflicted this evening was a mere flesh wound, and if the Leader of the House is willing to bring forward a motion tomorrow with a more considered timetable for Committee, it would pass this House.
To correct the point made by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), who is no longer in his place, some of us voted for Second Reading precisely so we could get on to the next stage for more scrutiny, and we did not support the programme motion because we did not believe there was sufficient time. There is clearly good will in this House to progress this Bill to a point of conclusion, but to do so we need the appropriate time. I urge the Leader of the House to consider that this evening.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point and for his very reasonable suggestion on his motives for voting. I quite understand there is sometimes a conflict between wanting something to happen and feeling that the procedures for it are unduly truncated. I am a great believer that time in this House should be used for legislation, which is our primary purpose, and I rather like and rather have a hankering for the 19th-century timetabling, when we were able to go on at considerable length and were not reduced to four-minute speeches. However, there is a pressing deadline of 31 October, and this is where I part company with him, because I feel it is very urgent to get the Bill through by then.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
On the selection of Queen’s Speech amendments, Mr Speaker, I remember that you once very helpfully selected one in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron).
Can we interpret from what the Leader of the House is saying that it is now impossible to get the deal through this House and the other House prior to 31 October? In that case, is it effectively dead for approval before that date?
Mr Rees-Mogg
“Impossible” is a very strong word, but it is very hard to see how it is possible.
I hope my hon. Friend had an enjoyable Saturday, and that it was more enjoyable after the House had risen than before.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Point of order—[Interruption.] No, question to the Leader of the House from Ruth Smeeth.
Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
I have yet to do my first point of order, Mr Speaker. Today, many people on the Opposition Benches walked through and voted for Second Reading. All we are asking for is the opportunity to ensure that the deal, which was presented to us only last night, works for our constituents—and for my local economy. We need slightly more time. I urge the Leader of the House to find more time, so that I can do my job, scrutinise properly and make sure that I deliver Brexit in a way that works for the Potteries.
Mr Rees-Mogg
May I encourage the hon. Lady to make a point of order, first, because they are a good way of getting in when otherwise it would be disorderly and, secondly, because if she were able to make one that is a real point of order, it would be almost historic? I think there have been very few in your 10 years in the Chair, Mr Speaker—almost none. May I also congratulate her on her service to her constituents, on standing up for what they voted for and on her courage in doing so? As somebody who did, when on the Back Benches, occasionally break the whip, I know that it is not the easiest thing to do and that people do it because they believe strongly in the rightness of what they are voting for. So I thank her for that. I am not unsympathetic to the point about time, but this is simply about the deadline of 31 October, which was set by the EU. Therefore, we are compressed in the time available to get this Bill delivered, which is why I was willing to support the programme motion and felt it was reasonable in the circumstances.
Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)
Would my right hon. Friend consider it in order for the Opposition Chief Whip to tell us, given that he is sitting there, how long exactly the Opposition would like to discuss this for? Or is it all about delay?
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend and Somerset neighbour raises an intriguing prospect: that points of order should be determined by me. Should the House wish to do this, it could of course change Standing Orders and this could be delegated to the Leader of the House, but I think you might not be entirely happy with that, Mr Speaker. So I fear I cannot answer my hon. Friend in the way he might like.
Mr Speaker
Not least on account of my concern for my successor, rather than for any particular concern on my part, in the light of the announcement I made a few weeks ago, the right hon. Gentleman’s surmise is correct.
Mr Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (IGC)
This is a question to the Leader of the House, as part of the business statement. Will he listen to lots of the voices, from different perspectives on the Brexit question, who are all puzzled why he and the Prime Minister have chosen not to enter into a continuation of the Committee stage tomorrow or on Thursday? It would be perfectly in order for them to have scheduled that, by laying those motions either this evening or at the beginning of business tomorrow. There is a jovial atmosphere this evening, but a lot of people are frustrated—not least me, as I have some amendments that are first up in that Committee stage, whenever it occurs—believing it is the choice of the Leader of the House and of the Prime Minister not to be progressing this Bill tomorrow or on Thursday. They are therefore the architects of their own fate in this regard, and forever more when people ask why this Bill did not make progress before 31 October we will be able to say, “It was his own doing.”
Mr Rees-Mogg
It is always a pleasure to listen to the hon. Gentleman’s dulcet tones, which we had the joy of doing last night, at considerable length. I am sorry that his amendments will not be debated now, and that instead right hon. and hon. Members have to listen to me. Had he voted for the programme motion, he would have found that his amendments were being debated. He talks much about listening, but I think he did not listen to my opening comments about the interaction of Standing Orders on the business that we had before us today. Under Standing Order No. 83A, if a programme motion that commits a Bill to the Floor of the House is lost, that Bill is then committed to a Committee, and we would have to have another resolution to pull it out of Committee. So it is not possible just to proceed tomorrow as if nothing had happened.
Mr Speaker
I am advised by the Clerk at the Table that the Bill is not committed to a Committee; it stands in limbo. In practical terms, so far as tonight is concerned, the House should worry not because it matters not, because it does not make any practical difference. That point can always be discussed afterwards if it takes the fancy of colleagues.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)
Is my right hon. Friend not struck by the irony that those who voted against the programme motion in the hope of cancelling Brexit have in fact made a no-deal departure, which they supposedly fear, much more likely? Does he agree that a departure with a deal is more preferable? Will he introduce a programme motion tomorrow so that the House can sit for as long as it takes—all through the night, if necessary? Even if the Labour party wants to knock off early, we should be able to carry on, make sure that we get the Bill through, get out and get on with other stuff.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the point he raises, but we have already gone through this. We would need a further programme motion if we were to sit through the night. It seems unlikely that it would be possible to get a programme motion through when we have failed to get today’s programme motion through.
Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Perhaps I could offer some advice to the Leader of the House, which I hope he takes in the spirit in which it is intended. Many of us on the Opposition Benches share his frustration that we cannot proceed, get to some votes and start to see how the land lies, but the particular issue was the short amount of time given for proceedings in Committee. I do not see why we needed a whole day for Third Reading; we could have had a lot longer in Committee. The Leader of the House could, tomorrow morning, introduce a fresh programme motion that allows for longer in Committee, so that we can table amendments in a timely fashion. If he wants some assistance with a Gantt chart, I am always here. I do not think it is beyond the realms of possibility to find an amount of time that would suffice. We would vote for a programme motion tomorrow morning on that basis.
Mr Rees-Mogg
We have already lost the three hours that we would have had in Committee today. We had 12 hours set aside for Committee tomorrow, and Thursday would have been for both Report and Third Reading, not just Third Reading. It is important to have time available to consider further amendments on Report, and it would be highly unusual to truncate the Report stage so much and hand it all over to Committee.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
Given that the Prime Minister decided to obey the law and apply to the European Union for an extension, if the European Union grants an extension, will the Leader of the House commit to coming back to the House with a new programme motion so that there can be adequate consideration of the Bill?
Mr Rees-Mogg
The Prime Minister has passed on Parliament’s request for an extension; the Prime Minister has not signed that request and I do not believe it is the Prime Minister’s request. It is Parliament’s request for an extension, and one that I think is a great error.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
What would persuade the Government to consider bringing forward a new business motion?
Mr Rees-Mogg
It seems there is no point in bringing forward a new business motion, because today’s has been defeated and the time that there would have been to debate the issue has been truncated, because instead of going into Committee now, we are in fact having this business statement.
Mr Speaker
That concludes the exchanges on the business statement. I am grateful to the Leader of the House for the information that he has proffered.
Clive Efford
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek clarification of what the term “limbo” means. The Leader of the House has told us that the Bill is dead, and from that we read that it cannot be resurrected in any way for a future business statement to send it into Committee so that the House can deal with it. Can you clarify that for us?
Mr Speaker
If I may say so, the accurate characterisation is that the Bill is not dead, but it is inert. It is not on a journey. It is not progressing or moving from one place to another. It is inert, or alternatively it might be said to be static, but it is not a corpse. Is that adequate for the hon. Gentleman?
Mr Speaker
I know that the Clerk at the Table would consult her scholarly cranium on this matter, and if I had erred, she would advise me that I had done, but she has not, so I have not.
Hugh Gaffney
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I just want some clarification before the Leader of the House leaves the Chamber. He just said something very important about the Prime Minister’s signature on the letter to the EU. Can you make that point clear?
Mr Speaker
I am very happy to oblige. It is not my responsibility to explain or communicate Government actions, but I think that this matter has been covered in the media. All the Leader of the House was saying was that he did not believe that this was the Government’s request for an extension; it was Parliament’s request for an extension. The Prime Minister has sent a number of letters to the European Union. The one specifically relating to the request for the extension was not signed by the Prime Minister. I am sure that that was a conscious decision on his part. People have expressed their views, but I certainly do not wish to add to any controversy about that matter. The simple fact is that the request for the extension has been submitted. I do not want to cavil at what the Leader of the House said. It is, in a sense, Parliament’s request. I do not want to conduct an argument about that; it is not necessary. I hope that that is helpful to the hon. Gentleman. Parliament did want the extension. The Government did not want it. Parliament voted for the extension, so the Government passed it on as Parliament’s wish.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Clearly, by virtue of those who voted for the Government’s programme motion and those of us who did not but have expressed our desire to see a Committee stage, the House wishes to move to Committee stage. Can you advise me, Mr Speaker, if there is any procedure available to individual Members, or the House as a whole, that could take Committee stage forward even if the Leader of the House is resistant to doing so?
Mr Speaker
That is, at this point, hard to envisage. I will not say that there is no means by which that can be done; we have seen in recent times how the House can take ownership of matters, including of the Order Paper, and of scheduled business, including that leading to legislation. I do not say that there is no way that anything could be done, but I surmise from what has been said that, at present, the Government’s thinking is as the Leader of the House has explained, and the Opposition’s thinking is as has been outlined by the shadow Leader of the House, the supporting evidence for which is the point of order by the Leader of the Opposition and the apparent conversations between the usual channels—that is to say between the Opposition Whips Office and the Government Whips Office. I think that it is probably prudent and seemly to leave it there at this stage, though I appreciate the fertile and vivid imagination of the hon. Gentleman, which may avail the House at a later stage.
Petitions
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Ind)
It is my job to stand up for the people of Dudley, so I rise to present a petition signed by 1,500 residents demanding that Dudley Council and the developers that it is working with finally get Cavendish House demolished and get on with the redevelopment of this part of the town centre.
Cavendish House has stood empty for decades. It has been vandalised and is dangerous. It presents a terrible image of the town and is delaying and deterring investment. We want the council and the developers to get on with the demolition so that the site can be regenerated with the new shops and leisure facilities that we have been promised for so many years. I am really grateful to local residents such as Sarah and Simon Townend and Gordon Laird and to the staff and customers at businesses such as the Arcade Café and Gather for helping collect so many names for our petition. It is a privilege to present it on behalf of the people of Dudley.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The Petition of residents of Dudley,
Declares that Cavendish House tower block in Dudley should be pulled down to make way for new development and new homes; further that the former offices have been left empty since the 1990s; further that they are seen by thousands of drivers passing through Duncan Edwards Way, and have long been set aside for redevelopment; further that plans to demolish the project have been in the pipeline for years but the project has been hit by a serious of delays; further that almost 1,400 people have signed our local petition calling for this eyesore to be demolished; further notes it has been standing empty and derelict for decades; further that it presents a terrible image of Dudley and must be deterring and delaying investment in the town; further that residents are also worried that it is dangerous as residents have said that people have been getting in there; and further that residents want the council to sort it out, get it knocked down and get on with the redevelopment they have been promising me since I got elected 14 years ago.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to press upon Dudley Council’s planning committee the need to pull down Cavendish House tower block to improve the appearance of Dudley Town centre.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P002534]
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
I am delighted to present the petition of registered members of the Wycombe Islamic Mission and Mosque Trust, High Wycombe. In May, I was approached by a member of the largest High Wycombe mosque, who was rightly concerned about its governance. This evening, I present a petition on behalf of 1,095 members of the Wycombe Islamic Mission and Mosque Trust. The trust has approximately 9,000 members and is one of the largest, most important and most valued organisations in the town of High Wycombe.
I do not wish to tell members of the mosque how to run their affairs, but charitable status means that the management committee’s conduct is open to scrutiny. The petition asks the Charity Commission to oversee a general meeting of members and long overdue elections to the management committee at the earliest opportunity—perhaps, like in this House, some members fear losing. Although the details were never made public, I understand that within the last two years a retired judge gave direction to the management committee on how it should conduct itself and on the need to comply with charity law. Other informal petitions have been organised by members. Recently, 2,000 members of the trust asked the management committee to hold elections; none have been announced. There are serious allegations of improper conduct contained in the petition.
The petition states:
The petitioners therefore request the House of Commons hears their grievance, and requests that the House of Commons urges the Minister responsible for charities to instruct the Charity Commission to oversee a general meeting of members and elections to the management committee at the earliest opportunity.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of registered members of the Wycombe Islamic Mission and Mosque Trust, High Wycombe,
Declares that the Wycombe Islamic Mission and Mosque Trust holds dual status as a registered charity and charitable corporation, incorporated on 4 March 1983, the governing document is the WIMMT Mosque constitution 2001; further that under the constitution elections must be held to elect a new management committee, which have routinely been held every two years, and an annual general meeting no more than every 15 months; further that no elections have been held or pronounced since November 2015; further that the election process is being withheld unlawfully to prolong the tenure of the current management committee which expired in February 2018; further that no AGM has taken place since the current management committee took office; further that there is a lack of financial transparency, scrutiny and oversight, but the Trust had an income of over half a million pounds in the last financial year; further that a recent legal inquiry was manufactured to forcibly remove imams although the retired judge leading the inquiry exonerated the imams from wrongdoing; further that the inquiry breached the mutual trust and confidence of members and brought the Trust's reputation into disrepute; further that the Mosque constitution guides the charity in its obligations, duties and responsibilities in the propagation of the Islamic faith and activities; further that any proposed change to the membership policy requires the consent of the majority Sunni Muslim population of High Wycombe at a general meeting, putting resolutions before members prior to any change in policy; further that the current management committee did not abide by the provisions in the constitution when deciding to devise a new membership policy and which in effect revoked the membership of established members; further that several individuals of the Mosque management committee use their position to gain favour for their respective political parties and affiliations; further that such behaviour is prohibited both in the constitution and in guidance issued by the Charity Commission; and further that there are clear instances of nepotism.
The petitioners therefore request the House of Commons hears their grievance, and requests that the House of Commons urges the Minister responsible for charities to instruct the Charity Commission to oversee a general meeting of members and elections to the management committee at the earliest opportunity.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P002535]
Adjournment
Resolved, That this House do now adjourn.—(Maggie Throup.)
Draft Insolvency (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Insolvency (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. The draft regulations were laid before the House on 22 July. They supplement the Insolvency (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, which Parliament approved earlier this year, and will ensure that UK insolvency law still operates effectively should we leave the EU without a withdrawal agreement. The draft regulations particularly address a consequence of the change in the date of the UK’s departure from the European Union. They update the preparations that we have already made in case we leave the EU without a withdrawal agreement, and take into account new law that has come into effect since 29 March.
I emphasise that the Government and the UK insolvency sector agree that our co-operation with the EU in this area should continue. It is beneficial for both the UK and the EU, and reaching a deal with the EU before or after exit day remains a priority. That co-operation is underpinned by the rules in the EU insolvency regulation, which provides a framework for the mutual cross-border reciprocity of insolvency matters. Under those EU rules, once main insolvency proceedings have been opened in a single member state, the insolvency practitioner appointed to those proceedings can deal with assets throughout the EU. That is cost-efficient and effective; it gives us the best possible chance of rescuing insolvent businesses and returns as much money as possible to creditors.
In preparing to leave the EU, we must ensure that cross-border insolvencies can still be dealt with efficiently. If there is no withdrawal agreement, however, we cannot rely on the continuation of reciprocity arrangements, which is why the Government introduced the earlier regulations. That statutory instrument, which Parliament passed in January, aimed to prevent an imbalance whereby the UK has to recognise insolvency practices and court judgments originating in the EU with no guarantee of recognition from the EU of UK insolvencies, as the UK would no longer be a member state. The earlier regulations therefore remove the majority of the EU insolvency regulation from UK law.
The only part of the EU regulation that will be retained rather than revoked is the section dealing with jurisdiction when opening insolvency proceedings. The earlier regulations ensure that our courts are not restricted by EU rules in opening insolvency proceedings in the UK. We will keep the same categories of cross-border proceedings, which will help courts in EU member states to assess UK insolvency cases and may smooth the process of acceptance for UK cases under their domestic law. The earlier regulations also removed references to the EU rules from our law as it stood on 29 March. Since we cannot guarantee that UK orders will continue to receive automatic recognition in the EU, it is right that insolvencies commenced in the EU will not be automatically recognised in the UK.
The draft regulations, which the Government have introduced with the consent of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament, are needed for two reasons. First, they extend the provisions contained in the earlier regulations to the modernised Scottish insolvency rules. The new Scottish legislation came into force after 31 March, so it was not possible to amend it with the earlier regulations. To ensure that we are consistent in our approach to cross-border insolvencies throughout the UK and provide legal certainty, the draft regulations update the new Scottish rules by removing current references to EU insolvency law.
Secondly, the draft regulations deal with one of the articles of the EU insolvency regulation. Unlike the majority of the EU regulation, which has been in force since 2017, article 25 came into force on 26 June 2019. As it was not previously expected to be in force on exit day, it was not appropriate to revoke it in the earlier insolvency regulations. Article 25 relates to the EU’s legal obligations to integrate member states’ insolvency registers, so that they can be searched centrally. If the UK is not participating in the system of mutual recognition and co-operation, it would be inappropriate to incur the costs involved in a measure associated with the rest of the framework. Therefore, our second set of EU exit regulations will ensure that article 25 is revoked on 31 October should we leave without a withdrawal agreement.
The Government’s assessment is that losing automatic recognition of UK insolvencies in the EU will result in an increased cost for insolvencies in the region of £2.7 million per year. It has not been possible to estimate the additional indirect impacts on the UK insolvency sector of the loss of co-operation, or the indirect impact on the wider economies of the UK and the EU member states. However, our two EU exit instruments in this area combine to ensure that the direct impact of leaving the EU will not be exacerbated by retaining inoperable laws, which could lead only to a lack of clarity on their application, increased costs and reduced returns to creditors in insolvency situations.
The insolvency and legal services sectors were encouraged to submit their views on the policy we adopted when the Government introduced the first set of EU exit regulations. Senior insolvency professionals and R3, the insolvency trade body, all confirm their support for this approach.
Without these regulations, if we leave the EU without a withdrawal agreement, the law in Scotland will not operate effectively and article 25 of the EU insolvency regulation will continue to be part of our law. Therefore, if the regulations are not passed today, the outcome will be uncertainty for individuals and businesses dealing with insolvencies in Scotland, and for insolvency practitioners managing those cases. Failing to prepare properly can lead only to increased costs and delays, lower returns to creditors and fewer businesses being rescued.
I therefore commend these regulations to the Committee.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, Mr Pritchard, to see you in the Chair this afternoon.
We are being asked to approve the regulations, or our amendments to the regulations, which were already agreed in January; the Minister has gone through them in some detail and I have no objection to what she said. The Committee is here to apply section 8 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, in so far as it relates to the failure of retained EU law to operate efficiently. We will not oppose the measure. For the record, that is in stark contrast with the Committee that the hon. Member for Glasgow Central and I attended yesterday, where that was anything but the case. I will just put on the record that the Committee’s proceedings are an appropriate use of the powers in the Act, and I am glad that the Government have returned to that appropriate use and to the promise they made—namely, that they would not make major policy changes and they would not affect rights.
Mostly these regulations are minor technical changes, as the Minister said, to what was passed in January; I do not intend to revisit what I said then. Those changes include Scotland-only regulations, as insolvency is a devolved matter, and my understanding is that they have the support of the Scottish Government. The regulations passed in January had industry support, but can the Minister say what discussions took place with industry about the changes? The explanatory notes and the Minister in her speech referred to the consultation with the Scottish Government, but can she just catch us up on the consultation with industry on these additional minor changes?
The regulations relate to no-deal preparations. At the moment in the Chamber, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition is responding to the Second Reading debate on the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill. However, even if the Bill is passed, there is still the very real threat that no deal could happen, because—this is one of the great weaknesses of the Bill—the default position at the end of December 2020, in the event that a free trade agreement has not been negotiated by the Government, is for us to leave without a withdrawal agreement being in place; the Minister referred to that. We would leave with no deal at the end of December 2020, according to the legislation that is currently being debated in the Chamber. One of the reasons that is a real concern is because it takes many years to negotiate free trade agreements. That threat must be taken seriously.
Can the Minister confirm that the regulations and many others that have been passed in Committees such as this one, including in Committees that the Minister and I have attended, as a result of that serious weakness—one of many—in the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill, leave open the strong prospect of no deal? Will these no-deal regulations remain potentially necessary for implementation, not just on 1 November 2019 if the Bill is rejected and we leave with no deal on Halloween, but on 1 January 2021 if the Bill passes? Perhaps she can confirm that they will still apply, be relevant and be available, if needed.
Although we will not oppose the regulations, we will continue, for the reasons I have just set out, to do all we can to prevent no deal, not least to ensure that regulations, including these ones, never need to be enacted.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I will be brief. I welcome the consultation with the Scottish Government and the recognition that personal insolvency is a devolved matter, and that the regulations are necessary in the event of no deal. My wider concern is the broader economic impact of Brexit—of losing access to the single market. The Fraser of Allander Institute estimates that Brexit will cost 100,000 jobs in Scotland, which will involve some degree of insolvency. We must be realistic about that.
I note that there is no impact assessment, because the Government estimate that it is under £2.7 million per year, as was laid out by Lord Duncan of Springbank when the matter was discussed in the House of Lords. Could the Minister give further detail on how that figure was arrived at?
The SNP will not oppose the regulations. They seem necessary, as the hon. Member for Sefton Central said, unlike the delegated legislation that we faced yesterday. This is a far more appropriate use of statutory instruments. I am content to let this one go.
Kelly Tolhurst
I thank the hon. Member for Sefton Central. Part of the joy of my work has been standing opposite him in Committee numerous times over the past 12 months. He is probably unhappy with that, but I thank him for his comments on the regulations. I will answer a couple of his points.
On consulting particular stakeholders about the regulations, there was no formal consultation, but the Insolvency Service regularly engages with and meets all stakeholders in that area, particularly R3, one of the insolvency practitioners, which fed in its comments. There has been no formal consultation, but those organisations have had many opportunities to feed in comments and speak to the Insolvency Service.
On the hon. Gentleman’s particular points on no deal, he will know that there is a Bill on the Floor of the House today, which states that we will be able to agree a free trade agreement by the end of December 2020. That agreement is the will not only of the UK, but of the EU. The Prime Minister has made a commitment with the European Union to deliver that by December 2020. I might be going off the subject slightly here, but I encourage the hon. Member for Sefton Central to support the Prime Minister and the deal today so that we can deliver mutual co-operation on insolvency rules going forward. That will absolutely prevent no deal.
I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow Central for her comments. I also thank the Scottish Government and Parliament for their co-operation and their work with us in this area. She is correct on the impact assessment. It was £2.7 million and regarded as de minimis, but the cost has developed from the costs related to establishing insolvencies in other EU states, which would have additional costs if we were not aiming to have an agreement. That is where the impact assessment has come from.
To sum up, the changes proposed by the regulations ensure clarity and legal consistency across the United Kingdom for people using the insolvency regime. The regulations also ensure that the United Kingdom is not bound by the obligations of the EU insolvency regulation when the UK will no longer benefit from that regime. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Waste and Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Waste and Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019.
I am delighted to be serving under your auspices today, Mr Robertson. This statutory instrument, laid before the House on 15 July, is one of a number of statutory instruments with the purpose of ensuring the continued operability of our environmental law as the UK leaves the European Union. Like other such instruments, it does not make policy changes, and has no effect beyond making sure that current environmental protections continue to be effective.
The regulations extend and apply solely to Northern Ireland. They concern devolved areas of policy that would normally be dealt with by a devolved Administration at Stormont. In the absence of the Northern Ireland Assembly, it is necessary that we consider this instrument in this House. That is unfortunate, but if Parliament did not deal with these regulations it would not be possible to make them, which would leave inoperable and inconsistent provisions in Northern Ireland’s environmental legislation. While there is no Northern Ireland Executive at the moment, the Northern Ireland civil service continues to operate, and officials from the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland are here today to help answer any questions that members of the Committee may have. They are very welcome.
The regulations are made under section 8 of, and schedule 7(21) to, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. That Act retains EU-derived legislation in UK law. Section 8 of the Act enables regulations such as these to be made to address deficiencies in EU-derived legislation that arise from the UK leaving the European Union.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend confirm that this instrument will not mean any diminution in standards? Will she also say whether it prevents us from improving standards over and above those currently in place for the European Union as a whole?
Rebecca Pow
My hon. Friend is as astute as ever, and I thank him for his intervention. The instrument will not result in any lowering of environmental standards, but in those standards being maintained. He will be interested to hear that later, I will talk about something called “best available techniques”, which is a technical term; we are going to be putting in our own system for that. Hopefully, more information will be revealed as I go through my speech, but there will be no diminution of standards at all.
Similar legislative updates to those contained in these regulations were made for England and Wales on 3 July through the Environment and Rural Affairs (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, which amended the Waste (Miscellaneous Amendments) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 and the Waste (Miscellaneous Amendments) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019. As with other regulations made under the withdrawal Act, these regulations have been drafted on the basis of leaving the EU without an agreement. It is, of course, the Government’s preference that there will be an agreed basis for leaving the EU. However, it is prudent to ensure that we preserve our environmental protections upon leaving the EU in all eventualities.
The draft Waste and Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 correct operability amendments made by three other Northern Ireland European Union exit instruments, and amend one piece of Northern Ireland primary legislation. Part 2 of the instrument amends the Waste and Contaminated Land (Northern Ireland) Order 1997, and part 3 amends the three Northern Ireland EU exit SIs in order to correct some earlier operability changes made to primary and subordinate waste legislation in Northern Ireland. This is considered necessary to ensure that a consistent approach is taken to addressing operability issues in Northern Ireland waste legislation.
The particular operability issues all concern how article 16 of the waste framework directive will be applied in domestic law once the UK exits the European Union. To summarise, article 16 encourages member states to put in place infrastructure to deal with their own waste. The amendments ensure that that stipulation is appropriately reflected in domestic law. They do so by requiring the United Kingdom to move towards the aim of becoming self-sufficient in waste disposal and recovery.
The amendments also ensure that the relevant domestic legislation in Northern Ireland no longer refers to “best available techniques” where that could be interpreted by reference to EU definitions and processes, which will no longer be valid when we are no longer EU members.
The amendments are technical in nature and, as I have said, do not alter policy. Crucially, there is no reduction in the environmental standards or obligations to which Northern Ireland is currently subject.
I want to acknowledge at this point, Mr Chairman, that the issue of environmental standards has been contested during consideration of the instrument by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. In reporting its consideration, the Committee published comments by Green Alliance to the effect that the removal of references to “best available techniques” in Northern Ireland legislation could lower environmental standards. That is absolutely not the case.
Rebecca Pow
The UK has committed to maintaining environmental standards and to ensuring that the current best available technique conclusion implementing decisions, which set out the relevant requirements and emission limit levels for installations—just in case anyone was wondering what these best available techniques were, they refer to the emission limit levels for installations—will continue to have effect in UK law after the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Best available techniques for waste treatment have been set out and issued under Commission implementing decision (EU) 2018/1147, in accordance with the industrial emissions directive. That decision, as amended, has been adopted as part of retained EU law and, therefore, the conclusions set out within it will continue to apply post the UK’s exit from the European Union.
The Government have committed to put in place a process for determining future UK best available technique conclusions for industrial emissions post the UK’s exit from the European Union. That is being developed with the devolved Administrations and competent authorities across the UK. Legislative changes may be required to reflect the agreed process in due course. I hope that assures my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield that this is all under way, and that standards will indeed be addressed and upheld.
The corrections and amendments to remove the requirement to take best available techniques into account in the context of article 16.1 of the waste framework directive ensure that the relevant domestic legislation and retained EU law do not commit the United Kingdom to comply with future amendments to best available technique arrangements and emission limits that may be produced by the European Commission. That is, of course, the crux of the matter.
Just to clarify, as it is a tad complex: amendments have been made through UK legislation either to remove or update references in respect of best available techniques, in order to ensure the operability of the relevant provisions, as the process of establishing and agreeing best available techniques is driven by the European Commission under the industrial emissions directive. Once the UK exits the European Union, it will no longer be a member state and will, therefore, no longer be part of the process of developing and agreeing future EU best available technique requirements. Rather, the UK will take its own approach to the development of future best available technique requirements to be met by UK industry. That could also take into consideration developments that are ongoing in the EU.
In respect of the amendment to the Waste and Contaminated Land (Northern Ireland) Order 1997, the reference to best available techniques in schedule 3, which was directly copied from article 16 of the waste framework directive, has been omitted because the term is not defined or used elsewhere in the order. Furthermore, there is already a requirement to take best available techniques into account in the context of establishing an adequate network of waste disposal installations and installations for the recovery of mixed municipal waste from households in another piece of Northern Ireland legislation, the Waste Management Licensing Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2003, which has been updated to ensure operability post the UK’s exit from the European Union.
In conclusion, for the purposes of addressing the instrument before us, if we did not address those deficiencies, the result could be legal uncertainty and ambiguity around the meaning of Northern Ireland’s environmental laws. This instrument ensures legal certainty in Northern Ireland as we approach our exit from the EU and ensures that we maintain environmental standards and protections across the UK. I commend it to the Committee.
Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I will not try to pretend that the eyes of the world are on us here in this room; I am sure that some or all of the hon. Members here would have preferred to be in the Chamber. [Hon. Members: “No!”] However, I am thrilled and slightly surprised to see that the hon. Member for Lichfield is perfectly capable of being in two places at the same time. I have a great deal of respect for that.
I am delighted to speak on the Waste and Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019. Let us be very careful that we do not muddle today’s SI with the Waste (Miscellaneous Amendments) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 or the Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, because, of course, those are the amendments that we made in those regulations, and these are the amendments that we are making to the amendments that we made, which we are amending here today. Indeed, let us also be very careful in future not to muddle the Waste and Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 with the waste and environmental protection (amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU exit) Regulations 2020, which we could very well be dealing with in three or four months’ time.
I am not just trying to be funny or to waste hon. Members’ time. The fact is that we are here amending amendments that were previously made in these three previous amending SIs, and one piece of Northern Ireland primary legislation that got away and failed to be amended at the time when the other amendments were being made. I say here and now that I am in no way casting any aspersions whatever on the DEFRA staff and others who have had to make such strenuous efforts over the past year to carry out a near-impossible job; but, however hard we try, we are not going to be able to get all the regulations right for leaving the European Union.
Our 46 years of regulatory alignment, 46 years of developing the most comprehensive and effective protections in the world for food safety, animal welfare, environmental protection and waste management, and 46 years of seamless, safe and trouble-free trade cannot be undone quickly or without extreme difficulty. I hope that hon. Members facing these detailed and technical SIs, which are attempting—sometimes unsuccessfully—to untangle the threads of the legislative fabric that we have woven alongside our European partners, will consider quietly and honestly whether they really think that what we are doing is in the best interests of the people of this country.
With the greatest respect to the Minister, who has attempted to explain away the change to the wording on taking into account the “best available techniques”, and her careful answer to the hon. Member for Lichfield, I am afraid I still do not understand why it is necessary to remove the words from the Waste and Contaminated Land (Northern Ireland) Order 1997. I am sure that the Minister would not want any best available techniques not to be taken into account. It would have been very helpful if the explanation had been given in writing, in the explanatory memorandum. I will be interested to see that explanation in writing in the future. I can quite understand why the Minister believes that the words are not necessary; what I cannot understand is why she believes it is necessary to remove the words.
The other matter that I have still not understood is why we need to move towards the aim of becoming something rather than aiming to become it, or indeed moving towards it. Perhaps the Minister will explain the significance of those changes, and also explain why we will not go the whole hog and consider the possibility of seeking to move towards the aim of becoming something. Most people would want to know whether we were actually going to achieve our aims and not have all this additional hedging added in.
I hope we do not have to hold many more of these amendment SI Committees. On that point, I confidently expect all hon. Members to agree with me, but I fear we have much of this to come.
Rebecca Pow
I thank the shadow Minister for his very clear points about how there have been a great many amendments. I am sure none of us wants to see any muddling of amendments, because these are really serious bits of legislation that affect business in a fundamental way. However, we can take heart that the technicality was spotted and we have made the changes, which shows that our scrutiny systems work. We have a Scrutiny Committee in the House of Lords and a similar one in the Commons. This legislation has been passed by them with a microscope and they are now happy with the changes that we have made. I hope that that sets the hon. Gentleman’s mind at rest.
It is important that some areas have been identified during the laying of this legislation. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the volume of legislation that has progressed over the past 12 to 18 months—and the timescales involved in producing it—has been on an unprecedented scale. Every effort has been made to ensure that the legislation that comes before Parliament does not contain errors, and processes are in place, as I said, with the Scrutiny Committees and so on to correct them, because it is important that they are corrected. Although they might sound confusing to the ordinary person out there on the street, to those for whom the regulations apply they are absolutely crucial.
We had a reference to the best available techniques being removed from the Waste and Contaminated Land (Northern Ireland) Order 1997. I thought I had made it clear in my speech why that had changed. In respect of the amendment to that order, the reference to the best available techniques was directly copied from article 16 of the waste framework directive, and it has been omitted because the term is not defined or used elsewhere in the order. It is an absolute technicality. Furthermore, there is already a requirement to take the best available techniques into account in the context of establishing an adequate network of waste disposal installations and installations for the recovery of mixed municipal waste from households in another piece of Northern Ireland legislation, the Waste Management Licensing Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2003. Those regulations have been amended by previous EU exit instruments—the Environment (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2018 and the Environmental Protection (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019—to ensure operability post the UK’s exit from the European Union, so I hope I have cleared that up.
The shadow Minister also mentioned standards and the change in respect of the reference to moving towards the aim of becoming self-sufficient in waste disposal and the recovery of waste, which are consistent with the current requirement on member states, again in article 16 of the waste framework direction in EU legislation. The corrections that these amendments make maintain the current ambition and objectives relating to becoming self-sufficient in waste disposal and the recovery of waste. That is the wording used in the EU directive. The previous amendments were not consistent with the current approach. I hope that clears up those points; it is slightly complicated.
Rebecca Pow
I thank everyone on the Committee, particularly our colleagues from Northern Ireland, for their help and input. Just in case hon. Members have any queries, I assure them that these regulations will have no effect on other things connected with Northern Ireland, such as the peace process, the Good Friday agreement and border security. These regulations make corrections and minor technical amendments to address shortcomings in the retained EU environmental law in Northern Ireland arising from the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, it is to everyone’s benefit to maintain the integrity of environmental protection rules here and—particularly in relation to these regulations—in Northern Ireland. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Petition
Freewheelers’ use of bus lanes
Written Statements
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
ENABLE Funding Scheme
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)
ENABLE Funding is a scheme administered by the British Business Bank which provides senior funding (effectively at commercial terms) to delivery partners and is designed to increase funding diversification for leasing and asset finance providers and peer-to-peer lenders, with the overall purpose of increasing the supply of debt to underlying small and medium-sized enterprises.
Since the scheme began in 2014, senior secured funding has been provided to various delivery partners and their receivable portfolios have been ‘warehoused’ in a special purpose entity. The aggregate sum of certain receivable portfolios reached a desired critical mass whereby a capital markets refinancing (or securitisation) can proceed, repaying the funding. The transaction is expected to complete before the end of the financial year 2019-20.
As part of the transaction, a credit enhancement in the form of a capped second loss guarantee will be agreed. The guarantee issued by the Department is capped at £66 million and the ‘second loss’ element means that the participating delivery partners will fund and suffer an agreed amount up to the first loss threshold should defaults in the portfolio occur.
The guarantee is not expected to last for more than seven years and in practice will likely be much shorter. The beneficiary is the securitisation vehicle (a newly incorporated entity) which will purchase the facilities as part of the transaction. The Department will receive a commercial fee in return for the guarantee.
As a matter of record, I will be laying a departmental minute today explaining the procedure followed and containing a description of the liability undertaken.
[HCWS29]
ECOFIN
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sajid Javid)
A meeting of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) was held in Luxembourg on 10 October 2019. The UK was represented by Mark Bowman (director general, International Finance, HM Treasury). The Council discussed the following:
Budgetary instrument for convergence and competitiveness for the euro area
The European Commission presented the governance framework on the budgetary instrument for convergence and competitiveness for the euro area.
Current financial services legislative proposals
The Finnish presidency provided an update on current legislative proposals in the field of financial services.
European Court of Auditors’ annual report
The President of the Court of Auditors presented the auditors’ report on the implementation of the budget of the European Union for the 2018 financial year.
The European financial architecture for development
The chair of the high-level group of wise persons on the European financial architecture for development presented the main findings of their report to the Council. This was followed by an exchange of views.
Implementation of the anti-money laundering (AML) action plan
The Council held an exchange of views on the progress made in implementing the AML action plan to consider the future strategic priorities in this area.
Anti-money laundering directive: policy towards “high-risk third countries”
The Council held an exchange of views on the policy towards AML-related “high-risk third countries”.
European semester 2019 - lessons learnt
The Council held an exchange of views on lessons learnt from the European semester 2019.
Preparation of the G20 meeting of Finance Ministers and central bank governors and of the IMF annual meetings
The Council approved the EU’s G20 terms of reference and international monetary and financial committee statement, ahead of the annual meetings in Washington DC.
Coalition of Finance Ministers for climate action
The Finnish presidency presented the state of play of the coalition of Finance Ministers for climate action.
Appointment of a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank
The Council adopted a recommendation to the European Council on the appointment of a new member of the executive board of the European Central Bank.
Capital markets union
The Commission informed the Council on its plans on the capital markets union and the presidency outlined the next steps.
Status of the implementation of financial services legislation
The Council took stock of the status of the implementation of financial services legislation.
[HCWS30]
Manchester Arena Attack
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Priti Patel)
I am announcing today the establishment by the Home Office of an inquiry, under the Inquiries Act 2005, to investigate the deaths of John Atkinson, Courtney Boyle, Kelly Brewster, Georgina Callander, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Liam Curry, Wendy Fawell, Martyn Hett, Alison Howe, Megan Hurley, Nell Jones, Michelle Kiss, Angelika Klis, Marcin Klis, Sorrell Leczkowski, Lisa Lees, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Chloe Rutherford, Philip Tron and Jane Carolyn Tweddle in the horrific attack at Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017.
The inquiry will be chaired by the honourable Sir John Saunders.
Sir John Saunders is a retired High Court judge who was nominated by the Lord Chief Justice to lead the investigation and inquest into the deaths at Manchester Arena. In accordance with section 3(1) of the Act, this inquiry will be undertaken by Sir John alone as Chair.
I am establishing an inquiry after careful consideration of advice from Sir John that this is necessary to permit all relevant evidence to be heard. This is an important step in ensuring that the families of those who lost their lives in this terrible attack get the answers that they need.
The inquiry will have the same scope as the current inquest, which will be adjourned after the establishment of the inquiry.
I will place a copy of the terms of reference for the inquiry in the Libraries of both Houses.
The inquiry’s investigations will now be a matter for the chair. As the sponsoring Department the Home Office will provide support and ensure that the inquiry has the resources that it needs.
[HCWS28]
International Labour Organisation Recommendation 205
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
The 106th session of the International Labour Conference 2017 adopted recommendation 205 concerning employment and decent work for peace and resilience. International Labour Organisation (ILO) recommendations, adopted following negotiation among ILO member state Governments and business and union representatives, serve as non-binding guidelines. The Government welcome this recommendation and recognise its importance in its global context. It acts as a guide for world of work-related measures to prevent and respond to the effects of crises on economies and societies. The recommendation focuses on recovery and reconstruction in post-conflict and disaster situations. This recommendation will not have any impact on the UK as it is consistent with UK Government policies.
The constitution of the International Labour Organisation requires that the Government bring the recommendation before Parliament. I will place an explanatory memorandum and the text of the recommendation in the Libraries of both Houses later today.
[HCWS27]
House of Lords
Introduction: Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay
Introduction: Baroness Sanderson of Welton
Crime: Rape
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of Cradley
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to change the law in respect of the offence of rape.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)
My Lords, we are committed to ensuring that the law is fit for purpose and that the offence of rape is well understood. The decline in the number of rape cases reaching court is a matter of concern. The Government are committed to a cross-government review of the criminal justice system’s response to rape. If barriers to justice are uncovered, we will take action.
Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Lab)
My Lords, how can it be right that young girls aged 13 to 15 who were groomed, exploited or manipulated into having underage sex cannot get justice for the crimes against them because the abuse they suffered took place before 1 May 2004? The one-year time limit to commence proceedings for the offence of unlawful sexual intercourse, set by the old Sexual Offences Act 1956, is protecting countless perpetrators who should otherwise still be prosecuted for abusing underage girls. I believe, as do many others, that legislation can put this right. Will the Minister commit the Government to investigating and closing this loophole?
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, I can understand the noble Baroness’s concern about this issue. That is why we are taking forward a quite urgent cross-government review in relation to rape. Where we consider that there are gaps in the law and these are identified, we intend to take action.
Lord Beecham (Lab)
My Lords, the number of convictions for rape fell by 26% between 2017-18 and 2018-19, while the proportion of reported cases being prosecuted declined to a mere 1.4%, the lowest on record. How does the Minister account for these figures? What steps will the Government take to ensure that the relevant departments—the Ministry of Justice and Home Office and, perhaps, the Department of Health working with the victims—address this deplorable failure in the justice system?
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, I fear that the drop in the number of rape cases being referred to trial is even greater than the noble Lord suggests. Current figures indicate that approximately half the number of cases is reaching court, from a peak in 2015. That is a matter of real and material concern and is why we have set up a cross-government working group—a sub-group of the Criminal Justice Board—to bring forward an action plan as soon as possible. We hope to have that plan in place by the spring of 2020.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, whether or not the Government’s review leads to a change in the law on rape, does the noble and learned Lord nevertheless agree that there is much more to be done to support and counsel victims at every stage of the criminal process, particularly in collecting and disclosing personal data, and in supporting victims giving their evidence, through to verdict and thereafter? Would such comprehensive support not encourage more victims to report rape and support prosecutions?
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, we recognise the significant importance of support for those who make complaints of all sexual offences, and rape in particular. It is necessary to look at taking forward further the scheme for the giving of evidence under Section 28. It is also appropriate to have in mind the use and application of Section 41 in relation to the potential for examining complainants about their sexual history. These matters have been under fairly constant review since Dame Vera Baird’s study in 2017, followed by the CPS study the following year and, more recently, in work done by the Criminal Bar Association. We do recognise the need for support and consideration in these cases.
Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)
My Lords, I have been involved professionally in a number of rape cases. Will the House accept the distinction between the small number of cases where the issue is identification and the much larger number where the issue is consent? The problem is that juries are reluctant to convict in those cases. Are the Government satisfied that the problem of non-disclosure of evidence has been solved? Will they provide resources for the CPS to upgrade the pay of prosecutors so that only the best counsel is available and able to prosecute in these very serious cases?
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, the issue of consent is clearly a challenging matter. We consider that the present law encompassed within Section 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 is fit for purpose. There is guidance as to how that should be approached, and we believe that it strikes an appropriate balance between complainers and those who are complained against. As for the actual prosecution of these cases, we consider that that is carried on in a responsible way and that we have addressed the issues of disclosure which caused such disquiet only a year ago in a number of cases. Indeed, as the noble and learned Lord may be aware, the present Attorney-General instructed an examination of issues of disclosure in order to ensure that, going forward, that should not create a problem for these prosecutions.
Baroness Afshar (CB)
My Lords, there are minority communities that import brides from abroad and, in the name of marriage, proceed to rape women who do not know the language or the law, do not know who to go to and certainly cannot go to the kin group around them. Are there any provisions for a specialist group to deal with imported brides?
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, a number of support groups are available to deal with the sorts of cases that the noble Baroness has outlined. It is a particularly insidious form of sexual crime and one that is sometimes difficult to identify, partly because of issues of language and partly because of issues of social acceptability in the community in which such a person may find herself. As I said, there are support groups and we encourage their use in that context.
Baroness Kingsmill (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that it might be helpful if children—and I repeat: children—were taught at an early age about the issues around sexual encounters and consent? Boys, in particular, need to understand a bit more clearly what consent actually means in these circumstances. That might make sexual crimes such as rape a little less common.
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, of course we have taken forward matters regarding sexual relationships with schools and with young people. It is important that they should be educated in these areas; I quite accept that.
Crime: Police Numbers
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the relationship between the number of police officers and the level and types of crimes committed.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, many factors impact on crime levels. More reporting of hidden crimes, recording improvements and some genuine increases in offending have all contributed to recent increases in recorded crime. We also know that increases in fraud, cybercrime and high-harm offences have intensified pressure on police resources.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, the previous Prime Minister and the previous Home Secretary seemed to suggest that there was no link between the level of crime and the number of police officers, but the actions of the present Prime Minister and the present Home Secretary suggest that they agree with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police that there is such a link. Who should I believe?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
As I explained to the noble Lord, these things are multifactorial. The increased pressure on police, the increased demand on police, the changing nature of crime and certainly some of the issues we have seen in the last couple of years have placed unprecedented pressure on police. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, often mentions the efficiency and effectiveness of the police, as well as the resources and capabilities that we support them in having.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, there is documented evidence from the College of Policing that stop and search is effective only up to a certain level, after which increases produce no drop in crime. Certainly in knife crime hotspots, the amount of stop and search is above that effective level. Why are the Government making it easier for the police to engage in stop and search without any reasonable suspicion? Does the Minister accept that excessive stop and search can be counterproductive? I speak as someone who was involved as a police sergeant in the 1981 Brixton riots.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
It is important that police officers have good relationships with their communities so that there is an element of trust in the police and what they do. As we have discussed before, it is also important that stop and search is intelligence-led rather than just being indiscriminate in certain parts of London and other areas of the country, as the noble Lord talked about.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, the Minister referred to several factors that are relevant in these matters. Will she accept that, if the Government keep their word and employ some 20,000 additional police officers, they will consult closely with local police commissioners to ensure that the needs of the local areas are taken into account in coming to allocation decisions?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, there would be no point in doing it if we were not committed to the needs of local people. Local areas have their own specific requirements on intervention from the police, so I agree that communication between the police and the Government is important, but PCCs should also be free to deploy the types of police officers that they feel are necessary for their local areas.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
Are Home Office Ministers aware of the enormous pressures that police feel are upon them as a result of their numbers reducing over the last few years, as fewer and fewer policemen are expected to deal with more and more issues? If the Minister is not aware of that, can she give some indication to the House of how many individual chief constables feel that they are understaffed, so that some specific way can be found to fill up the obvious deficiency?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Pressure on the police is one of the major factors in the announcement by this and the previous Home Secretary on the ambition to recruit 20,000 police officers. The noble Lord is absolutely right that, as crime goes up, different crimes emerge. It is very important that the police have the resources and capabilities at hand to tackle it.
Lord Cormack (Con)
Does my noble friend accept that there is widespread concern at the number of offences that are not investigated? Will she assure the House that as we build up the numbers of police we will also build up the numbers of crimes that are thoroughly and properly investigated?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The police will prioritise, and it is important that crimes are investigated. Locally, it is up to police to ensure that they are.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)
My Lords, the previous Home Secretary indicated that he would increase stop and search, saying that we needed to do so to reduce crime. If that is the case, how do the Government square the circle of their talking about reducing stop and search?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
As I said to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, some of the indiscriminate, random nature of stop and search in the past has been replaced by a move to a much more intelligence-led stop and search, so that people—particularly young people—do not feel that they will be stopped every time they leave the house because of the colour of their skin, as the noble Baroness has said to me in the past. When they go out, people need to know that the police are stopping them because there is an intelligence reason for doing so.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, of course this is about not just the number of police but what they do. East Lancashire 25 years ago was one of the pioneers of modern, community neighbourhood policing in Lancashire. That is now a pale shadow of what it used to be, as there is only half the number of officers and PCSOs. In such areas, will the increase in police which the Government are promising allow us to go back to the kind of effective community policing we used to have? Nowadays the crime levels are going up again.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The Government and the Home Secretary have been clear that they want the police to invest in front-line, much more visible policing that deals with communities in a much closer way than perhaps was previously imagined. The answer is yes.
Counterterrorism: Martyn’s Law
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Harris of Haringey
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what consideration they have given, as part of the Protect workstream of the CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy, to the introduction of a so-called “Martyn’s Law” in order to place a duty on large public venues to assess the risk of an attack and put appropriate measures in place.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register and beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, first, I commend Figen Murray and the campaign team for their efforts to improve security and safety in memory of her son Martyn. The Government have discussed the proposals in the campaign with Figen Murray and others campaigning for Martyn’s law. We continue to consider where improvements can be made to ensure the safety and security of the public in crowded places. That includes considering whether it would be appropriate to legislate on protective security and preparedness measures.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that Answer. Martyn Hett was one of the 22 people who went for a night out in Manchester Arena and never came home. Many people will find it extraordinary that, given we already have so many regulations that sit on places of public entertainment and so on, it is not a legal requirement for such venues to carry out sensible, appropriate and proportionate security checks on those attending them. Will the Government give a firm commitment that they will move forward on this?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I know that the Security Minister met Martyn’s mum on 13 September, and whether legislation is needed is certainly one of the things that the Government are considering. I totally concur with the noble Lord that a lot of regulations are in place, but one thinks of some of the events over the last few years, particularly the shocking event in Manchester—I was there when the first bomb went off and I will never forget that night, particularly as I thought of the children of friends and family. Certainly the Government are seriously considering it.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, while I have a great respect for the views expressed by the noble Lord, may I ask my noble friend to be very cautious about this suggestion? The truth is that all large public venues—for that matter, any venue—are at risk from terrorist attack. The assessment of risk depends primarily on the information and facts known largely to the police and the security services, and is difficult for the organisers to assess themselves. The danger of going down this road is that there will be an awful lot of back-guarding litigation cost and disproportionate expense. I would be very cautious.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I understand my noble friend’s point. However, take as an example two types of venue: the Parliamentary Estate, and the mitigating measures that the parliamentary authorities have put in around the estate to make your Lordships’ House and the other House safer following the London attacks; and venues where people might go to listen to music, and so on. The Government have a long-standing work programme to provide the owners and operators of these crowded places with high-quality advice and guidance. Therefore, when I say to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, that we are considering it, I mean that we need to look at all the various things that are in place and come up with the right solution.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, the Manchester Arena bomb was detonated outside one of the entrances. Crowds outside venues arguably present an easier target for terrorists. Does the Minister agree that legislation is necessary because security measures should include the build-up of large numbers outside venues, potentially in public spaces, as well as the security of those inside the venues?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, you cannot think about a crowded venue without thinking about the people outside. I sometimes find that when I am leaving this building in a car, we simply cannot get out. It is quite frightening to be stuck trying to get out of a venue. When we talk about venues, we are talking about both the outside and the inside and what people do when they are stuck trying to get in or out.
Lord Selkirk of Douglas (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that the increased use of CCTV, when appropriate, can lead to deterrence and substantial reduction of crime?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
In a retrospective way, CCTV can lead to the capturing of criminals and terrorists and could be a deterrent for people engaging in criminal activity at a venue. Live facial recognition, which I know is a controversial subject, could help police in live time to catch people who are on a watch list.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, in 2009, we produced a policy document on security in crowded places which made a lot of use of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, advising venues on exactly what measures should be taken and laying a certain responsibility on them. Do I take it from what I have heard that that work has not been progressed? I understand that the number of security officers has been reduced, but is there now no responsibility at all on people to implement measures advised by those security officers?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I understand that that is not the case: not only is free advice provided to owners and operators of crowded places on how to protect against and prepare for terrorist attacks but, in the light of attacks, refreshed specialist protective security advice has also been issued. I do not think that that has stopped at all, but I will double check for the noble Lord.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, encouraged by the Answer that my noble friend gave to the noble Lord, Lord Harris, should not Parliament be setting an example by laying plans for the enclosure of Parliament Square, which itself is a large public venue, so that we could offer better protection to the thousands of staff who come here every day and the millions of people who visit every year?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My noble friend makes a good point. That is all considered in the round because, as my noble friend said, Parliament is full not just of politicians but of the people who work here and the thousands and thousands of people who visit every week of every year. Yes, we have a duty to protect them.
Post Offices: Cash Withdrawal Services
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on rural communities of the decision by Barclays Bank to end cash withdrawal services from the Post Office.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
I beg leave to ask the Question in my name on the Order Paper and declare my interest as president of the Rural Coalition.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Northern Ireland Office (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)
My Lords, the Government are disappointed by the withdrawal of Barclays from the renegotiated banking framework. None the less, the new banking framework will enable customers to access their cash from 27 high street banks. The Government will continue to ensure that communities receive support and have choice about how they manage their finances.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
I thank the Minister for his reply. Rural communities rely on access to finance, but in many rural areas where there is poor broadband or weak mobile signal, online banking is impossible. This is a fundamental issue for our rural areas. What representations have Her Majesty’s Government made to Barclays Bank, and what will we do if other banks decide to follow its lead?
Lord Duncan of Springbank
The right reverend Prelate asks an important point: does this set a precedent? I certainly hope not. I would like to think that customers affected will reflect carefully on whether they should continue banking with Barclays. I am fully aware of the issues faced by those in the rural communities of which he speaks.
Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)
My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that other countries, including France, the Netherlands and New Zealand, have saved much of their rural post office network by supporting their role as deliverers of financial services? Is he further aware that there are now more post offices in rural England than all the banks put together? In some areas of rural England, only post offices are serving the financial needs of local traders. Will the Government please offer some financial or fiscal incentive for Post Office Counters Ltd and all the banks to work together to ensure that the future of their local traders and communities is safe?
Lord Duncan of Springbank
The noble Lord is correct. Since 2010 we have invested £2.3 billion in the Post Office network, stabilising the number of banks. There was a 27% decrease in the 10 years before 2014. The decrease since then has been only 1%—the money is making a difference.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the idea of changing a bank is a bit more daunting than he has suggested? Particularly if you are struggling on a daily basis to stay out of the red, the idea of going to a new bank can be intimidating. It seems that some banks are interested only in big cashless customers who have large deposits and not really anybody else. Will the Minister raise these concerns with Barclays Bank and ask it to think again? The banks are making life difficult, not only for people in rural communities but for those in inner cities and the peripheral schemes where paying cash machine charges is extortionate.
Lord Duncan of Springbank
The noble Baroness and the right reverend Prelate asked what representation we have made. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has spoken to Barclays in words of only one syllable, I am afraid. She has made this point very clear to them: this behaviour is not acceptable. This is not about corporate banking; this is about rural communities and, sometimes, these are the most important aspects of rural communities.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, I understand that some of the major banks are making it extremely difficult for small organisations to retain their bank accounts when, for instance, they change their bank mandate. Can the Minister tell the House whether the banks have a responsibility to serve their communities in this way, or will these accounts be treated in the same cavalier way that Barclays has treated them in rural communities? If they are, where will these organisations go for their banking?
Lord Duncan of Springbank
The noble Baroness puts her finger right on it. Banks are not just about serving customers; they are about serving communities as well. When small organisations are unable to secure that banking, they will struggle. If she has specific examples, I welcome them being raised with me and I will raise each of them directly with the individual bank concerned.
Lord Trefgarne (Con)
My Lords, would it be possible for the Prime Minister to write to the chairman of Barclays Bank on this matter—perhaps with his signature at the bottom of the letter this time?
Lord Duncan of Springbank
My noble friend asks a very good question. I will certainly have that discussion—and you never know.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, does this Question not also raise the problem about access to cash more generally? I am sure the Minister is familiar with the Access to Cash review. I wonder whether the department is in a position yet to respond to that. In that excellent review were six recommendations, which focused on the fact that new fintech is often designed for mass markets and does not reach out to the poor, those who live in rural communities and the vulnerable. Of the recommendations, the fifth and most important was for a clear government policy on cash, supported by a joined-up regulatory approach that treats cash as a utility, which I think is what the noble Lord was saying at the end. Is this in progress?
Lord Duncan of Springbank
I can assure the noble Lord that this is, indeed, in progress.
Viscount Brookeborough (CB)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that we inquired into this subject in our report on financial exclusion a couple of years ago? When faced with the question of closing banks, the banks virtually unanimously said, “We consult widely”. We did not find one single branch that had been left open as a result of consultation. They are merely ticking boxes. They then faced us with the fact that the post offices would take on their business, and now they are withdrawing it. As much as we condemn it here, we have to do more than that. The banks are letting communities down and it is no good simply condemning them. Will the Government not take some action that forces them to be part of our communities?
Lord Duncan of Springbank
The noble Viscount is right: a consultation matters only if its results are taken forward. I will reflect carefully on what he has said. I believe there is an obligation that should fall on banks to respect their customers and treat them with the decency they deserve.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, while we can deprecate the actions of certain banks in this sense, should we not also congratulate those commercial and retail outlets, such as petrol stations and others, that are installing ATMs and providing these services in rural areas as well as in urban ones? I think particularly of the Co-op and other owners of garages around the country, which are doing just that.
Lord Duncan of Springbank
My noble friend is correct. Banking is changing and we need to reflect on how our future banking needs will be met: perhaps not through the traditional means of marble-fronted buildings but in a much more diverse way, both in reality and online. We need to consider how banking will look in five, 10, 15 and 20 years’ time.
Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Unconscionable Conduct in Commerce Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Unconscionable Conduct in Commerce Bill [HL] 2019-19 View all Unconscionable Conduct in Commerce Bill [HL] 2019-19 Debates Read Hansard Text
Criminal Records Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Immigration Detention Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Emissions Reduction (Local Authorities in London) Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2019
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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International Relations and Defence Committee
The Senior Deputy Speaker
Queen’s Speech
(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Anelay of St Johns
That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty as follows:
“Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament”.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, the Queen’s Speech will deliver EU exit alongside an ambitious programme of domestic reform that delivers real change to the people of this country. It is my pleasure to update noble Lords on the Government’s plans for the next Session for the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education.
I turn first to the Department of Health and Social Care. In September, the Government announced the health infrastructure plan, the biggest and boldest hospital building programme in a generation. Six new hospital schemes will start immediately, and another 21 schemes have been given the green light to develop their plans. It was also announced in the Queen’s Speech that new laws will be taken forward to help implement the NHS long-term plan in England. The Government have already committed to a multi-year funding settlement that will see a £33.9 billion per annum increase in the NHS budget by 2023-24.
In September the NHS published a set of recommendations for legislation changes that would enable our health service to go faster and further in realising the ambitions set out in the long-term plan: to improve integration, reduce bureaucracy and promote collaboration. We are considering the recommendations made by the NHS thoroughly and we will bring forward detailed proposals shortly. In due course we will publish draft legislation that will accelerate the long-term plan for the NHS, transforming patient care and future-proofing our NHS.
Legislation will also be taken forward to establish the health service safety investigations body. This will be the world’s first such body, with powers to investigate incidents that occur during the provision of NHS services that have or may have implications for the safety of patients. Drawing on the approaches used in other safety-critical sectors, investigations by this new body will be independent and professionally led. This will transform the way that patient safety incidents in the NHS are investigated.
A medicines and medical devices Bill will capitalise on opportunities to ensure that our NHS and patients can have faster access to innovative medicines while supporting the growth of our domestic sector. The Bill will give powers to remove unnecessary bureaucracy for the lowest-risk clinical trials, encouraging the rapid introduction of new medicines, and it will ensure patient safety by implementing a scheme to combat counterfeit medicines entering supply chains and a registration scheme for online sellers. This will ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of the global life sciences industry after Brexit, giving patients faster access to innovative medicines and supporting the growth of our domestic sector.
We will also bring forward substantive proposals to fix the crisis in adult social care, giving people the dignity and security they deserve. Putting social care on a sustainable footing is one of the biggest long-term challenges facing society. The Government have given local authorities access to up to £3.9 billion more in dedicated funding for adult social care this year and made available a further £410 million for adults’ and children’s services. In the recent spending round, the Government announced that councils will be provided with access to an additional £1 billion next year for adults’ and children’s social care. The Government will consult on a 2% precept that will enable councils to access a further £500 million for adult social care. This funding will support local authorities to meet rising demand and will continue to stabilise the social care system.
We will continue to work to modernise and reform the Mental Health Act to ensure that people get the support they need and have a much greater say in their care. In 2017 we commissioned the independent review of the Mental Health Act to look at rising rates of detention, the disproportionate number of people from black and minority-ethnic groups detained under the Act and processes that are out of step with a modern mental health care system. The findings made it clear that we need to modernise the Mental Health Act to ensure that patients’ views are respected and that patients are not detained any more than is absolutely necessary. By the end of this year we will publish a White Paper setting out our response. This will pave the way for reform of the Mental Health Act and will tackle issues addressed by the review. We will ensure that people subject to the Act receive better care and have a much greater say in that care. Patient choice and autonomy will be improved—for example, by enabling patients to set out their preferences around care and treatment in advance. The process of detention, care and treatment while detained will be reformed, including by providing patients with the ability to challenge detention.
The Government also announced new legislation from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. This includes new legislation that will help accelerate the delivery of fast, reliable and secure broadband networks to millions of homes. We will roll out gigabit-capable broadband across the UK to achieve nationwide coverage as soon as possible, so that people can reap the huge benefits of the fastest, most secure and most resilient internet connections. Faster speeds will boost productivity, drive innovation in our public services and give people the fast connectivity they need to reap the benefits of the digital revolution.
The legislation will create a cheaper, faster, light-touch tribunal process for telecoms companies to obtain interim code rights or access rights for a period of up to 18 months. This will mean that they can install broadband connections where the landlord has failed to respond to repeated requests for access. Amendments to the Building Act 1984 will require all new-build developments to have the infrastructure to support gigabit-capable connections. There will be a requirement for developers to work with broadband companies to install gigabit-capable connections in virtually all new-build developments, up to a cost cap. As well as this, the Government have recently pledged £5 billion to support the rollout of gigabit-capable broadband in the hardest-to-reach 20% of the country.
The Government also announced that Ministers will continue to develop proposals to improve internet safety. Britain is leading the world in developing a comprehensive regulatory regime to keep people safe online, protect children and other vulnerable users and ensure that there are no safe spaces for terrorists online. The Online Harms White Paper published in April set out the Government’s plan for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online.
The proposals as set out in the White Paper include a new duty of care on companies towards their users, with an independent regulator to oversee this framework. We want to keep people safe online but to do so in a proportionate way, ensuring that freedom of expression is upheld and promoted online and that businesses do not face undue burdens. We are seeking to do this by ensuring that companies have the right processes and systems in place to fulfil their obligations, rather than penalising them for individual instances of unacceptable content. A public consultation on this has closed and we are analysing the responses and considering the issues raised. We are working closely with a variety of stakeholders, including technology companies and civil society groups, to understand their views.
Turning to the Department for Education, we will ensure that all young people have access to excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work. We are giving schools a multibillion-pound boost, investing a total of £14 billion over three years, so that the annual core schools budget is £7.1 billion higher by 2022-23. The IFS has said that this investment will restore schools funding to previous levels in real terms per pupil, also by 2022-23. We will level up minimum per pupil funding for primary schools to £4,000 and for secondary schools to £5,000, while making sure per pupil funding for all schools can rise at least with inflation.
We are also spending around £3.5 billion on early education entitlements this year alone, and next year we are planning to spend more than £3.6 billion. Our focus in this area is on delivering positive results. A record proportion of children are starting year one with a good level of development. More than 1.4 million children are taking advantage of funded early education in 2019. Over 850,000 disadvantaged two year-olds have benefited from a 15 hours early education place since the programme began.
We also have a world-class university sector. We are home to nearly half of the top 10 universities in the world. Since 2012, total income for universities in England has increased by around £6 billion and we have frozen the maximum tuition fees rate and increased the threshold for repayments, now worth up to £425 a year for graduates.
Looking ahead, T-levels will represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform technical education in this country, put it on a par with the best in the world and offer young people a real choice of high-quality training that is equal in esteem to traditional academic routes. We are on track for the first teaching of three T-levels in 2020; a further seven will be rolled out in 2021, and all 25 courses by 2023.
Finally, I would like to talk about the work the Government are doing on employment and pensions, in particular the Pensions Schemes Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to support pension saving in the 21st century and to help people plan for the future. It provides a framework for the establishment, operation and regulation of collective money purchase schemes, commonly known as collective defined contribution pensions. These schemes will provide more options for employers and offer members a target benefit level. The Bill will protect people’s savings for later life by strengthening the powers of the Pensions Regulator to tackle irresponsible management of private pension schemes. This will include introducing new criminal offences, with the most serious carrying a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment and a civil penalty of up to £1 million. It will also create a legislative framework for the introduction of pensions dashboards. With record numbers of people saving for retirement, it is more important than ever that they can easily access information about their pensions. Pensions dashboards will mean that for the first time, people will be able to view online in one place all their pension information.
As the Prime Minister said last week, this is a programme that will set our country on a new upwards trajectory. At its heart is a new vision for Britain, a vision of a country happy and confident about its future, a vision of the country that we all love. The mission of this Government is nothing less than to make our country the greatest place on earth, the greatest place to live, work and do business, and this Queen’s Speech will set us firmly on that course.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that introduction. She need not worry about repeating herself; I do that all too often—and I write my own speeches, so she has my sympathy. I am really looking forward to hearing speeches from around the House, but it is a disappointment that we will not get to hear the valedictory by the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton. I simply want to say for the record how much we on this side, especially my colleagues in the health team, have valued her contribution to the House, nursing education and the NHS more broadly. She will be greatly missed.
It feels slightly strange and unreal to be here discussing the details of Bills when out there, the Government only have eyes for Brexit. Indeed, the Prime Minister is champing at the bit to dissolve the Parliament which Her Majesty opened only last week with this gracious Speech. However, here we are, so we must do our job. The Minister has ably set out the Government’s vision for the future of Britain. As she said, the Prime Minister claims it is an ambitious programme which has at its heart a new vision for Britain and that the Government want to make the UK the greatest place to live, work and do business. This cannot be the greatest country to live in unless it is a great place for all our people to live in. We are interdependent, and the true flourishing of any of us depends on the flourishing of all of us, so my test of this speech and this programme is whether it can deliver on that vision.
The welfare state embodies a vision of Britain as a country where we take care of each other. We all pay into it and for it, because we all need it at some point. Some will need it more, but we do not know who that is going to be or whether it might be us. It supports those raising the next generation. It helps all of us at key life stages or in times of need—in pregnancy, sickness, unemployment or bereavement. It gives extra help to those who need it most: those with long-term illnesses or disabilities, or who care for others. It helps make work pay, and it supports us all in retirement. However, our system is increasingly losing its way. The past decade has seen massive cuts to benefits, damaging reforms, especially of disability benefits, and the awfulness that is universal credit. It has seen the demonisation of claimants and an explosion in benefit sanctions, often for the most minor infractions, which have combined to drive people into poverty and to take away their dignity. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet, dependent on food banks or even sending their kids to school hungry.
What, then, does the Queen’s Speech have to say about that situation? As we heard, there is one DWP Bill, the Pension Schemes Bill. We are in broad agreement with the stated aims of the Bill and we will crawl over the detail. My noble friends Lord McKenzie of Luton and Lady Drake will speak more about pensions later, but that is it: there is nothing on social security and the word “poverty” is mentioned nowhere, even though 14 million of our citizens—4 million of them children—are living in poverty. In-work poverty is on the rise and most poor children now live in working households.
What did Ministers think was going to happen when they set out to cut £37 billion from our social security system? The benefit freeze alone will have taken £4.4 billion from our poorest families by the time it ends next year. I was horrified recently to hear the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions refuse to rule out extending the freeze still further. To do that would be to deliberately and knowingly drive more people into poverty and deeper poverty, so I hope the Minister can reassure us that that will not happen. I trust that she will not say that that is a matter for the Budget, because while Ministers have been quite happy to trail tax cuts—there is always money for tax cuts—it is strange that there is never as much money when it comes to benefits for the poorest.
Labour has committed to a £3 billion programme to reverse the worst of the cuts, including the disgraceful two-child limit, and to begin to unpick the disasters of universal credit. A Labour Government would seek to change the culture and create a system dedicated to dignity, universalism and ending poverty. That is our vision of a country where everyone can flourish. Will the Minister tell us what the Government’s vision is?
Our welfare state pools risk across our population and across lifetimes. It is the companion service to the NHS, which also works on the basis that we pool our risk because any of us can get sick. It is because of that underlying vision that the NHS is more than just a public service: it embodies how we as a nation see ourselves as an interdependent community. I am sorry to say, however, that our NHS is struggling and there was not much comfort in the Queen’s Speech. Most of the funding announcements had previously been announced and most of the proposals—for example, for a long-term plan, reforming the Mental Health Act and addressing social care—are very much in the future. Right now, across the NHS, services are missing financial and performance targets. People are waiting ever longer for treatment and a shortage of staff threatens the quality of patient care. Where is the urgent concrete action to deal with these problems?
Meanwhile, social care is in crisis: adult social care is badly failing those who rely on it, with high levels of unmet need and providers struggling to deliver the quality of care that vulnerable people need and have a right to expect. However, the funding announcement on social care had previously been announced and £500 million has to be raised by councils themselves, even though those in the industry had made it clear that that was, in their words, a “short-term sticking plaster”. Without more funding or a detailed plan as to how we get there, older and disabled people will continue to be left without the care they need, and carers will increasingly buckle under the strain.
Labour has set out its vision for a national care service, but we do not know what the Government’s vision is. The Prime Minister promised us that he had a plan to fix the crisis once and for all, but I see no plan, just endless consultation. One has to assume that the ever-delayed Green Paper has perhaps finally bitten the dust. If so, we are left with no proposals and no legislative timetable for a social care Bill in this Parliament. I hope the Minister can contradict me because, if not, that simply is not good enough.
Mental Health was too often addressed in similarly broad terms. It is now almost a year since the independent review of the Mental Health Act was published, but we still do not have a White Paper. Ministers announced a mental health Bill in December 2018 but we still do not have one. There are urgent problems: mental health beds are closing; the mental health estate is crumbling; the CQC has recently reported chronic staff shortages and deteriorating services; children and young people are waiting more than a year for mental health services and many have been turned away because they were not yet bad enough. Can the Minister tell us when will we see some action? My noble friend Lady Wheeler will say more about social care in her contribution.
I am afraid that that pattern of revisiting old promises with slightly vague offers of new ones permeates the Queen’s Speech. In education, again, we are short on commitments to new legislation or policy. Even previous ministerial commitments that need legislation have not made their way into the Queen’s Speech. For example, Ministers said they would introduce a schools’ level-funding formula “as soon as possible” but where is it?
Only a few weeks ago the Secretary of State said that he would,
“put the school uniform guidance on a statutory footing”,
and will do so when a suitable opportunity arises. School uniform costs are rocketing and something is needed, but where is the legislation? Where is the guidance? Furthermore, despite specifically consulting on primary legislation to regulate home education, there is no sign of it in the Queen’s Speech. Can the Minister tell us why and when it will be brought forward? My noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie will talk more about education across the spread in his contribution.
The DCMS is the final area covered today but the key announcements on broadband rollout and online harms were covered in part by my noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara on Thursday and my colleagues will pick that up later, so I will not dwell further on it here. However, I want to note the widespread disappointment that Ministers did not use the Queen’s Speech to commit to reverse the cuts to BBC funding for the over-75s licence fee. That should never have been dumped on the BBC in the first place and I urge the Government to review it. Labour will; will the Minister please do likewise?
We have looked at this programme through the lens of some of our most important public services and the welfare state as a safety net for all of us. Does that vision stand up to scrutiny? I do not think that it does. It is not enough just to declare that you want to make Britain great again. If we want a country where all our people can flourish and where they can fulfil their potential and contribute to the flourishing of the nation, government must will the means as well as the end.
We do not need another decade of cutting taxes for the better-off while slashing benefits for the poorest, of letting our most important public services lurch from crisis to crisis and of abandoning vulnerable people to the care of friends and family. We need a new era characterised by mutual care and by a determination to tackle inequality, protect the vulnerable and give every child the best possible start in life, wherever they live and however unwisely they chose their parents. That is the vision that I want to see and I urge the Government to follow that instead.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I want to confine my remarks to the area of education, of which the Queen’s Speech says basically, “Motherhood and apple pie”. Could anyone have cause to disagree with the statement that all young people will,
“have access to an excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work”?
Perhaps the Minister will shed some light on the actual Bills that the Government will bring forward to make that happen. I hope that it will not be a further narrowing of the curriculum—we have seen how that stifles creative talent—and that it is not the further expansion of unaccountable free schools, when many parts of the country are urgently in need of building new schools to provide for much needed school places. Can we hope that the important Augar report on 16 to 18 year-olds will be translated into a Bill? After all, it was very close to the heart of the former Prime Minister. Can we also hope that the Government will bring forward changes to the EBacc?
By narrowing the curriculum, we have seen creative subjects decline in the state system year on year while flourishing in the independent and private schools sector. This year, we have seen GCSE entries decrease even further in design and technology, drama, media/TV studies and music at a time when the creative industries have become hugely important to our economy. Employers are consistently clear that the biggest drivers of success for young people are attitudes and attributes such as resilience, enthusiasm, and creativity. As the Edge Foundation says, young people need,
“a truly broad and balanced curriculum, linked directly to the real world and focused explicitly on developing the wide range of skills required to succeed in the twenty-first century”.
It has always fascinated me how Governments of the day and so-called spin doctors manipulate certain situations to persuade the media to follow a particular news agenda. Do your Lordships remember when Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, told us repeatedly how badly as a country we were performing in the international league tables in maths, English and science? They are called the PISA tables—the Programme for International Student Assessment. Mr Gove used the PISA tables constantly to show how badly we were performing against our overseas competitors. Finland and Singapore were heralded as shining examples. Our failure in the PISA tables became the raison d’être for Mr Gove’s cataclysmic changes in education policy. So what about looking at the PISA tables, 10 years on, to see how we are performing? Singapore still heads the tables in maths, science and reading, and Finland is still among the top European countries. In fact, 14 European countries outperform us in maths and 13 in reading. Over that 10-year period, the UK saw schools drop in all those subjects. Need I say more? I do not think we will hear much from the Government about the PISA tables any more.
Never mind our failure in the international tables, figures released by the Department for Education reveal that, this summer, 35.6% of pupils did not get grade 4 or above in GCSE English and maths, while half—57%—failed to get a grade 5, which is considered a strong pass. That 35.6% of pupils did not achieve a grade 4 might not mean anything to noble Lords, but it means that 190,000 young people were judged to have fallen short after 12 years of teaching. At the other end of the education system, the Department for Education also revealed figures that show that over a quarter—28.2%—of children are already falling behind in their education by the age of five.
Time is always tight in these debates, and I want to quickly mention two other issues that are close to my heart. Children in care and children who have struggled with schools and schooling are often placed in what is called alternative provision. These are the most vulnerable people in our society, and they need all the support and protection that we can possibly give them. Yet a large number of these pupils are put in unregistered schools which, because they are unregistered, are not subject to inspection and scrutiny. In many of them, the most unacceptable educational practices take place, including for example a lack of proper child protection procedures. Why are we allowing this to happen? Why, for example, are local authorities placing as many as 2,600 pupils in these unregistered schools and paying for them to go there? Why is the Department for Education unable to say how many unregistered providers there are? And why do the Government not listen when their own chief inspector of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, warns that inspectors and the Department for Education do not currently have the powers to shut down unregistered schools, even when they are breaking the law? Does the Minister agree that we should give them those powers?
Another area that I have been concerned about for a few years is essay mills and contract cheating. This is when students pay for their essay or dissertation to be written by someone else. It is a flourishing, multi-million-pound industry that preys on the vulnerability of students. The problem is growing year by year and affecting the academic integrity of our higher education system. When I put down an amendment during the passage of the Higher Education and Research Bill, I was assured by the then Minister, Jo Johnson, that the Government would try to deal with this problem by working with universities and the National Union of Students, and that if they failed, they would consider bringing in legislation. They have failed. The problem is getting bigger and bigger every year, with some 50,000 students using essay mills and contract cheating. More than 40 university vice-chancellors have written to the Education Secretary asking for essay mills to be banned. Will the Minister now give an assurance that these actions will be taken?
We all want all our children and young people to have the best possible education, and none should be left behind. When bringing forward legislation, I hope the Government will consider the important points that all your Lordships make in this debate.
Baroness Campbell of Surbiton (CB)
My Lords, I propose to speak about social care for disabled and older people, which of course impacts on their health and well-being. This area has been deeply neglected in recent years. We are, sadly, looking at a series of failures in this sector: failure to invest in older and disabled people’s participation in, and contributions to, families and communities; failure to make decisions about how to secure long-term funding; and failure to create a positive narrative around the fact that we are living longer—I know I do. The result is poor-quality and inadequate support services which we would not want for ourselves or those we love.
Users of care and support services are deeply fed up with successive Governments’ “all talk and no action” approach to social care reform, and the general reference to social care in the Queen’s Speech adds little to restore public trust. It is not acceptable in a modern society, and as one of the largest economies in the world, to limit social care to life-and-limb services. This is about all of us: our families and ourselves, not mythical “others”.
While we need the Government finally to act on ensuring sufficient investment in social care, which is so important to the health and well-being of our society, we must equally look beyond government to bring about the transformative change necessary to reshape care and support. Many people and groups are trying to take action to make things a great deal better. Their common aim—our common aim—is summed up by Social Care Future, a network of people receiving, providing and commissioning social care. As it says:
“We all want to live in the place we call home with the people and things that we love, in communities where we look out for one another, doing the things that matter to us. That’s the #socialcarefuture we seek”,
not life-and-limb services.
Government financial investment to achieve this is critical, but it has to be done differently. Currently, it is targeted at propping up creaking services that most of us fear having to use. As noble Lords know, my area of greatest knowledge is disabled people, who account for 50% of social care expenditure, yet they say this does not give them what they want or need to live and participate effectively in the community. This group is completely unable to accumulate wealth to pay for their own care, yet Governments continue to raid their meagre benefits and entitlements, which they need to survive, for this purpose. This is wholly unfair, counterproductive and highly questionable financially.
Only person-centred support to live as others do, funded through central taxation, will break the cycle of fear and inaction. There is great public support for this. I and others are proposing new ways to invest in support for people of all ages. We must move away from institutional practices by shifting power to people and communities. We must recognise the case for realistic investment in a fundamental right to independent living, as argued for by the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance, a growing movement of disabled people’s organisations.
This year, the Independent Living Strategy Group, which I am privileged to chair, will embark on an independent inquiry into current support for disabled people, with recommendations for progressive change. This will underpin a Private Member’s Bill which I hope to table in the near future. I intend to call it the “access to living Bill”, because, after all, that is what everybody wants and deserves. They just want a life: they do not want a service and they do not want to live by handout to survive. They want a life and they want to participate. I will look for support for the Bill from the Government and from across the House, because I believe that this is the new future that we want for older and disabled people.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, in these debates. I shall to try to draw on her remarks as I make mine. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register of Members’ interests.
I welcome the proposals in the Queen’s Speech. It is refreshing to be devoting a day to these crucial areas of domestic policy. Of course, Brexit hangs over this debate. Be one a remainer or a Brexiteer—thinking back to the debates that we had in this very Chamber on Saturday—one lesson from the referendum is that millions of people in this country feel left behind and do not feel that they have participated in the economic growth of the past decades. Regardless of whether one thinks a sensible response to that is to vote for Brexit, there is a message for all of us in the importance of the domestic policy issues that we are focusing on today.
I want to begin briefly on education. The Minister referred to technical education and T-levels, one of the notorious weaknesses of our education system. I very much hope that T-levels are a success. There are, however, some significant doubts about how well they will do. They appear to depend on unrealistic expectations of employer participation and contribution. There are already stories around that if T-levels do not secure the level of support we hope, one reaction from Ministers will be to try to close down the alternatives such as BTECs. It would be marvellous if we had an assurance from the Front Bench that existing provision—which is popular and which young people go for—will not be an unexpected victim of any problems that may face T-levels.
It is also important that people have the opportunity to participate in university education—again, I welcome what the Minister said on that. Going to university is a widespread aspiration. There is a narrative around at the moment that too many people go, but at every stage of the growth of participation in higher education, from 5% to 50%, we have had this narrative. If too many people go, it is a social problem concentrated in some rather unusual parts of the country. It is an acute problem in Winchester and Guildford, but, fortunately, in Hull and Bolton they are successfully resisting the dangers of going to university. The Government have committed to spread access to university with some bold ambitions for increasing participation from disadvantaged groups. This raises an interesting challenge. Are these extra students to go at the expense of the middle-class students from advantaged areas who are already going? If so, what steps are Ministers taking to reduce this excess rate of applications from some of our most affluent areas and most prestigious schools? Or does it mean in reality that more people in total will be going to university in future? Will the Minister confirm that one estimate is that simply achieving the Government’s own objectives for more participation from disadvantaged backgrounds, together with demographic change, would mean 300,000 more students by 2030?
I want briefly to touch on welfare and employment. The Government have a fantastic record of increasing employment. There is of course a striking contrast between the generosity of benefits and welfare for pensioners, protected by their triple lock, and the freeze in the value of working-age benefits. The working-age population does not have an advocate as eloquent as the next speaker in this debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. Will the Government look at the way that benefits for working-age people work, in particular universal credit? When universal credit was designed, the preoccupation was with workless households, and it was designed to incentivise the first person in the household to go into work. The good news is that the number of workless households has fallen, but the problem is poverty and low incomes in families where someone is working. Here, universal credit has exactly the wrong effect: it penalises the second earner and people who increase their hours. A reform of the work allowance would help tackle that problem.
Finally, I very much welcome the pensions Bill. A particular proposal in it—the regime for collective DC pensions—is an excellent compromise between the generous, old-fashioned final salary schemes, where all the risk was borne by the employer and the pension scheme, and the pure defined contribution scheme, where individuals find themselves taking all the risk, with no sharing across fellow workers or other generations. I support this excellent initiative. The evidence from the design work that has been done on the Post Office CDC scheme—the most ambitious proposal—is that it is important for these schemes to be generationally fair. The danger is that the rights of existing pensioners are protected and the adjustment is all borne by younger workers. The regulatory regime set out in this legislation needs to tackle that problem.
Overall, I welcome the Government’s proposals in this Queen’s Speech. I have not had time to reflect on the social care proposals, apart perhaps from taking another lesson from the Brexit debate: just get on with it.
Baroness Bakewell (Lab)
My Lords, I regret the cursory reference in the gracious Speech to the social care needs of the old in this country. The Minister’s statement this afternoon has been confined to sums of money, some of which have already been announced. It was money that she spoke of; there was no substantial commitment to make changes to the system at a time when so much needs to be done. I will make two points which apply to the core issues of the care of the seriously old.
First, when I served as the Voice of Older People between 2008 and 2010, I received many letters asking for help with a problem concerning residential retirement homes and villages: many elderly people had come to rely on the expertise, availability and friendship of the wardens appointed to their care. These wardens were being phased out in favour of electronic alarms, buttons and telephone responses. Years later I sat on this House’s committee looking into AI and its potential. It became clear that artificial intelligence and robotic systems would increasingly offer an efficient and economical way of caring for the isolated old. I wish to issue a warning: old people want and need human contact; it helps them fight depression and loneliness in a way that machines cannot. I ask that future provision, while making strategic use of mechanics, has written safeguards about sustaining human contact with the old and isolated.
My second point is on a larger scale and concerns the business model that underpins the provision of residential care homes across the country: this needs a major rethink. I can only hope that the repeated delay of the long-promised Green Paper is because someone somewhere has woken up to the fact that the system is broken. The well-being and sense of security of frail, old people is at the mercy of the private equity-style business model, with the risk of companies carrying heavy debt burdens and paying extremely high interest rates.
The care home market, as noble Lords will know, is currently dominated by four major care providers: HC-One, Four Seasons, Care UK and Barchester. Between them, they operate some 900 of the country’s 11,000 care homes. Some 95% of the country’s care beds are provided by the independent sector, catering for self-funders and the local authority-supported. Recent austerity cuts to local council funding and the introduction of the living wage have added to pressure on all these companies. Between 2015 and 2019 the big four declared losses totalling £900 million. In their 2017 published accounts their total debt was £2.2 million—I am quoting figures from their own statements as reported by Opus Restructuring. Noble Lords will remember that Southern Cross collapsed in 2011. Currently all four companies are up for sale. A deal for the sale of Barchester collapsed in July this year and Four Seasons put two of its top companies into administration in April this year. Now I am not a banker, and for all I know this is a really healthy state of affairs in the City, but it is not a safe, reliable model for the ongoing care of our older people.
Let us consider it from their point of view. The need for a care home often hits a family very suddenly: the death of a married partner may leave the children looking to provide for the survivor as soon as possible; a frail old person living alone may sustain a sudden injury or a sudden deterioration in health. They need to find somewhere quickly and to meet the complex financial arrangements that have to be made. There is now evidence that companies prefer to set up care homes in the country’s most affluent areas, where there will be more self-funders in their potential market. The market will thus fail to supply the needs of the poorer old, and sudden changes in company finances can leave old residents suddenly bereft and bewildered. Family decisions made quickly in the shadow of bereavement or illness can be the wrong choices, but making complaints or seeking redress is not easy when you are dependent on the staff of the care home. I hope the Minister will address the issue of embedding consumer law in the regulatory regimes of care homes.
Growing old is not an option we can exercise: the alternative is worse. No sector in our society is crying out for reform more than our care of the elderly—and, incidentally, their dedicated and underpaid care workers. Will the Government address these concerns with the greatest urgency, and can they give us a timescale?
Baroness Janke (LD)
It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. As a former council leader, I am very familiar with some of the issues she raised here today, but I shall confine my remarks to the worsening conditions of the least well off in our country. They deserve consideration, although sadly they are not a priority of the Government in the gracious Speech. There is ample evidence that conditions are getting worse for the poorest, whether in the form of research and reports, or in the daily experiences of children, families and individuals. Reports from the UN rapporteur, the Joseph Rowntree Trust, the Children’s Commissioner, the Child Poverty Action Group and a host of others provide shaming testimony in a country that once led the world in the social welfare of its citizens.
The gracious Speech makes reference to unlocking the full potential of children, yet we hear that teachers are buying food, clothing and equipment out of their own pockets for children who are too ashamed to come to school because their families cannot afford clothes and basic needs. The number of children attending food banks in the last year has doubled. Some 4.1 million children are in poverty, and 70% of them are from families where at least one parent works. Single parents, of whom 90% are women, are twice as likely to be in poverty as married couples. Half the children in one-parent families are in poverty. Furthermore, as far as housing is concerned, there has been a surge in homelessness, which was up by 320,000 in November 2017. Rough sleeping has shot up by 15% in a year; this is because of the paring back of housing benefit and the freezing of local housing allowance.
Nearly 50% of those in poverty—6.9 million—are from families where someone has a disability. On this I support the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and some of the examples she gave us. The crisis in PIP assessments whereby 75% of appeals are upheld requires attention. Even if the Government were concerned only with finance it would be sensible to look at a better way of doing this; in terms of the suffering it inflicts on people who already have to face financial penalties in various forms, it is just unforgivable. Families with disabilities are projected to lose £11,000 a year by 2021-22, more than a third of their income.
Indications also show that the worst off and most vulnerable will suffer more under Brexit. I understand from talking to those involved that very little assessment of this has been done, yet already the depreciation of the pound, rising prices and inflation are making things very difficult for those on fixed income. Unless the full uprating of benefits and low incomes takes place, there will be a crisis and the poorest and most vulnerable will not be protected. Indebtedness has already reached pre-2008 levels, yet little appears to have been done in terms of emergency support.
The gracious Speech states:
“My government will bring forward measures to protect individuals, families and their homes”.
The Government really need to look at the evidence of how they are protecting families and their homes. The two-child limit and the four-year benefits freeze both directly affect children. If what people are saying about the effect of Brexit is right, emergency payments would be indispensable, but they are going to be lost. In the past they have prevented families falling into destitution; they need to be reinstated. The sanctions imposed by the Government are a source of destitution and debt and are particularly damaging to people with disabilities or health conditions such as heart disease.
Payments to young people of £250 per month are not enough to live on for those who do not have supportive homes. Split payments need to be made so that abused women are not kept under the control of their abuser. As the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has already mentioned, the disincentives to work, the effect of sanctions and flexible working need to be thoroughly investigated and action needs to be taken.
There is ample evidence of the worsening lives of the poor and vulnerable. Our priorities must be to build an effective social safety net nationally and locally, to address the issues that lead to low pay and insecure employment and to ensure that measures are in place for the least well-off, the least protected and the most vulnerable so that they do not slip through the holes of an insufficient safety net and drift into destitution and poverty.
The Lord Bishop of London
My Lords, many noble Lords will know that I have a background in health, and I continue to be a great supporter of the National Health Service, so they will not be surprised when I address my comments to health and social care. In doing so, I recognise the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, to nursing and to this House.
I thank the Government for their work to support and strengthen the National Health Service, its workforce and its resources. However, increased investment and reform does not guarantee getting to the root of the problem. Our health and social care issue is what you might call a “village problem”. Our flourishing, mentally, physically and emotionally, occurs best in community. More than that, as Sir Michael Marmot’s research from the Institute of Health Equity indicated, our economic, social and emotional circumstances all play a part in our health and well-being.
As a Christian, I believe that every human being is created in the image of God. We are not made in isolation. We belong together in creation, which should be cherished and not simply used and consumed. This is the starting point for the Church of England’s engagement in society, nation and the world. We are most human when we know ourselves to be dependent on each other. It is therefore no surprise that when communities mobilise and environments are improved, it benefits everyone and reduces the strain on our National Health Service. Here lies, in part, the power of social prescribing. Churches have an integral part to play. The Church is a builder of and a presence in communities, and is well placed to support people as they journey through life, and in fact towards death.
Within the diocese of London, the work of the Posh Club run by St Paul’s in West Hackney is just one example. A weekly cabaret-style party for the over-60s, it combats isolation and loneliness in the community. It provides a unique way to experience connection, laughter and physical activity. Father Niall Weir, rector of St Paul’s, says:
“If there was a Posh Club in every town in the UK, I’m certain the numbers of elderly on GP waiting lists would go down hugely”.
In other words, this kind of community partnership can potentially be used to ease some of the unsustainable pressure on our National Health Service. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what steps are being taken to ensure the deployment and distribution of social prescribing link workers, as outlined in the NHS Long Term Plan, to ensure that there is a level playing field right across all parts of this country.
What of the social care system? Some 1.3 million children—10% of all children—in England have needed a social worker in the past six years, and their prospects are not always good. For example, just 17% of them get GCSEs in maths and English. The social and economic cost of failing to help children is immense. In addition, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, the elderly are being burdened with the huge cost of their care homes, while parents struggle to pay for essential care services for their disabled children.
A great deal of thinking has been undertaken about how we might best improve adult social care funding. The Church of England has been consistent in its advocacy of integrating health and social care to ensure the most efficient and effective use of people and resources; we need to see effective integration taking place on the ground in all the communities of this country. The King’s Fund has pointed out that the NHS long-term plan is fundamentally flawed precisely because it isolates the NHS from both social care and public health. Once again, this is not merely a social care problem but a village problem.
While we are waiting for the Green Paper on reform of social care to be released, we still have the Dilnot report, published almost a decade ago. It had cross-party consensus and tackled the very issues that we still face today. It understood the value of community and the importance of shared responsibility. What plans do the Government have to revisit the Dilnot report and its recommendations?
Although I welcome the Government’s commitment to reforming the Mental Health Act, and despite the commitment made five years ago to closing the gap and the crisis care concordat, there continue to be alarming disparities in minority ethnic mental health provision. I welcome the change in legislation, but it needs to be supported by policies and practices that increase cultural competence among professionals and are developed in partnership with minority ethnic communities.
In conclusion, I remind noble Lords that health and social care depend on the wider collaboration of the community as well as internal change. To tackle the deep-seated inequalities that we face in this sector, we need to work together in partnership. Although I welcome the Government’s commitment to do more, I hope that the Minister will bear in mind the role of communities in delivering positive health outcomes and say something about how that can be done.
Lord Wakeham (Con)
My Lords, first, I say to the right reverend Prelate how much we appreciated her speech today and on other occasions. It takes me back 25 years, to when I was Leader of the House and invited the then Archbishop of Canterbury to have dinner with me, because I thought the Bishops were very good at saying Prayers but never made much of a contribution afterwards. I felt that many of them had a lot of useful things to say, if only we could persuade them to do it. I must say that it is vastly different today, and the right reverend Prelate is a fine example of someone who has something to say worth listening to.
Tonight, I shall raise the issue of standards in our universities and say something about my concern about the associated issue of grade inflation and the awarding of degrees. There is nothing about this in the Queen’s Speech, but I think I have found out why, and I shall come to that in a minute. First, I should declare my interest. I was for 15 years chancellor of a university, and I have awarded degrees to a considerable number of noble Lords over the years. One was in his place a few minutes ago, but I cannot see any just at the moment. If I have missed someone, I am frightfully sorry.
Looking back over those years, the occasion I always remember was, during the Olympic Games, awarding an honorary degree to Roger Bannister. He had to confess that for many years his wife thought he had run four miles in one minute, and he had to explain to her that he had run only one mile in four minutes.
The issue of grade inflation is certainly not unknown to either the Government or universities. There are many published examples of the results of awarded degrees showing a marked increase in recent years. For instance, 27% of all graduates last year obtained a first-class degree, up from 16% a few years ago. There has been a big increase in the percentage of students obtaining upper degrees. One quite well-known university seems to pride itself that 50% of its graduates get first-class degrees. Standards are vital, not just for the universities but for wider society and our place in the world. Of course, students and their families are frightfully keen, but employers also want to know that the degrees potential employees hold are of value and the appropriate standard.
The position is far from being all bad. As the Minister said, four of our universities are among the 10 best in the world. Many universities are of a high standard, but some, if only a few, are letting standards down and that is of great concern. The previous Secretary of State called for an end to grade inflation and said that,
“the OfS should directly challenge institutions where they find clear evidence”,
of it. The Economic Affairs Select Committee of this House, which I had the honour of chairing some years ago, said in a recent report that it was,
“concerned that the replacement of nearly all grant funding by tuition fees, coupled with the removal of the cap on student numbers, has incentivised universities to attract prospective students onto full-time undergraduate degrees”,
when perhaps they should not be. It went to say:
“This may also explain the striking increase in grade inflation”.
Professor Buckingham, president of Universities UK and an outstanding vice-chancellor of the university of which I used to be chancellor, is clear that there is a problem. She said in her presidential address that universities are concerned to protect the value of their degrees and must take action to grip the issue of grade inflation. The consensus is clear that the increase in first and upper second-class degrees cannot be attributed entirely to students’ higher academic performance but is, in the eyes of some, a doubtful means of reputational enhancement.
I was going to say that the response of the Government to all this is not as adequate as it ought to be but, like the US cavalry, help came at the last minute. Four days before the Queen’s Speech, Universities UK issued a substantial initiative with comprehensive proposals to protect the value of degrees and to achieve transparent, consistent and fair academic values. If this is followed through, it is a very sensible way forward, so I very much welcome the initiative and look forward to being kept fully informed of its progress. It does not let the Government off the hook, but I expect the Government to keep a very watchful eye on it.
Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)
My Lords, children and health have been mentioned in some very eloquent speeches already. I want to talk about young people’s health, particularly early inequalities in health due to many of the factors expressed so eloquently by my noble friend Lady Sherlock.
The gracious Speech did not refer to the needs of children directly, but it referred to domestic abuse, which affects children and who may be victims in their own right. This will no doubt be considered as we go through the Bill. I am reminded that over the past three years or so we have not considered issues such as children and the elderly; we have been talking about Brexit considerations. I regret this and we should now emphasise issues such as the health and well-being of children and the elderly. We must re-address our priorities and examine what, as a nation, we should urgently consider important, such as children and the elderly.
This is a crisis for young people’s health. Decreasing funding for children’s services and a rising demand and legal requirements to provide statutory services has meant that there is a gap between what local authorities need to spend and the resources available. This is calculated to be £3.1 billion by 2024-25. Between 2010-11 and 2017-18, central government funding for children’s services fell by 29%. The most deprived areas suffered a fall of 37%, compared to 21% in less deprived areas. This makes no sense at all, as pointed out by many in the children’s voluntary sector. It affects social mobility, so emphasised by the Government in recent years, and is an economic nonsense. Early intervention in child health and well-being has been shown to save millions of pounds in the long term.
The Private Member’s Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on the welfare of future generations is a welcome intervention, which calls for long-term sustainable thinking. Will the Government look at the success of Wales when we consider this Bill?
I shall now refer to an excellent report from the Association for Young People’s Health, of which I am a patron. The report gives key data for young people aged between 10 and 24 in the UK. Sadly, the message is that inequalities are disturbing and on the increase. The gap in health between rich and poor is already apparent in young people aged between 10 and 24. In some cases, health inequalities are widening. Of course, the 10-to-24 age group covers a time of huge change, when many influences coincide. For example, there are the transitions from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from education to employment, and from reliance on family to—we hope—being independent and peer group interaction becoming more significant. For some young people, without sustained support, life is difficult and leads to vulnerability, including the dangers of poor mental health and anti-social behaviour. I am aware that the Government have promised a greater focus on mental health.
Let me give some examples of the impacts of deprivation. Severe obesity rates for 10 to 11 year-olds in the most deprived areas of England are four times greater than those in the least deprived. That gap rose from 8.5% in 2006-07 to 13.5% in 2017-18. Young people living in the poorest areas are twice as likely to be admitted to hospital with asthma and have much worse diabetic control. There are also inequalities in smoking rates, under-18 conception rates, mental ill-health prevalence and rates of road traffic injuries.
Information on health has consistently pointed out inequalities in health related to income, education and where people live. The problem is that the situation is becoming worse. We need to examine the social determinants of health, such as those pointed out by my noble friend Lady Sherlock. I support Action for Children’s call for a national childhood strategy. I called for a young people’s strategy in another debate and will follow this up with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, as recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. Will the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care also examine the urgent need for such a strategy? Will they call for a cross-government approach to this? Only by combining forces will we serve our children and young people well.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, I want to focus the attention of the House on an industry that brings £127 billion a year to the UK economy, attracts £24 billion of spending in the UK from abroad, contributes a further £7 billion a year in tax and provides 3 million jobs in the UK. That industry is tourism. It is therefore regrettable once again to see no mention of the industry in the Queen’s Speech, especially since urgent reform of regulation around failed airlines is now needed.
The tourism industry has great potential and I want to set out some specific proposals to harness that potential. Hospitality is, by definition, both international and hierarchical. It provides jobs all over the world, the majority of which are entry level. We therefore want to see the Government work with industry to help young people, in particular, by doing two things. First, we want them to use access-level jobs, say in a McDonald’s or a Burger King, as a gateway to international placements in those businesses, enabling young people without the means to “go travelling” to work for the company in another country. With a guaranteed job to go to and an income, they would have the opportunity to learn a language and experience living in another part of the world—an opportunity they would never otherwise have.
Secondly, there should be clear ladders and pathways for young people working in the industry to progress. Someone decanting chips into cardboard containers today should have the chance to become a chef tomorrow, if they wish. Someone cleaning bedrooms in a hotel today should have the opportunity to learn about the economics of the business and to progress into management. Initiatives like these could be life changing for those people who benefit, but it will take a concerted effort by government to get the big companies engaged in the agenda. The tourism sector deal is welcome, but it does not go anything like far enough. What is needed is a real partnership between business and the state.
UK tourism brings great benefits to host communities and for many places in Britain it is the very life-blood of the economy, but it comes with challenges. Populations increase exponentially during the summer season, placing a strain on local infrastructure. Some seaside towns with an excess of cheap property have become home to the very difficult HMO market. On the other side of the coin, some local housing markets are distorted by second home ownership and short-term lets. Both increase property purchase prices and put local rents beyond the reach of people who grew up in the area.
I therefore urge the Minister to consider three proposals: first, creating a planning use class for second homes so that young people can remain living locally and contribute to the local economy; secondly, allowing councils—as the Scottish Government are allowing in Edinburgh—to introduce a tourist levy on hotel rooms, with the money raised being ring-fenced for the benefit of the visitor economy; thirdly, and most substantively, legislating for councils to run a statutory registration scheme for all guest accommodation, which would permit both control over the number of short-term lets in a given place and a revolution in consumer safety.
It might have gone unnoticed that Airbnb, a principal player in the guest accommodation market, is trying to play both poacher and gamekeeper by launching a “voluntary” registration scheme of its own. This will allow the good players to opt in, leaving the bad ones free to opt out. By proposing this, Airbnb has acknowledged the problem but is avoiding a genuine solution; what we urgently need is a mandatory scheme administered by councils and funded by fees from the accommodation platforms. Registration and spot inspections would drag up standards, ensuring, for example, that every property marketed to the public has a working smoke alarm. The fact that it is legal to let properties without a smoke detector is nothing short of a scandal and a tragedy waiting to happen.
It is time to upgrade the status of tourism within the Government themselves by reorganising DCMS as a department for tourism, culture, communications and sport. That would give the industry, which has had 15 tourism Ministers in 20 years, a consistent senior voice at the Cabinet table, speaking up for this vital sector of our economy. I urge the Minister to consider all of these proposals as a package which would work together and show clearly that tourism in the UK is thriving and that our country is open for business.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. I have of course been deprived of being able to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, on her valedictory speech, but nevertheless I would like to put on the record some points because I think that she might have been amused by what I have to say about her.
I never referred to the noble Baroness as “Baroness Emerton” or “Audrey”—I always called her matron. I think she enjoyed the idea that I, as a perhaps one-time senior doctor, was petrified of matron, as I always was. She is a formidable lady and was referred to as such by the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, on the day she made her maiden speech. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, that three nurses spoke that day: the noble Baronesses, Lady Emerton and Lady Cox, and Lady McFarlane of Llandaff—three formidable ladies, you might say. We all know that the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, has contributed an enormous amount, quite forcefully, and has championed the causes she felt strongly about—particularly the health service and, within it, the important role that nurses play. I was interested to see that her motto is “Pro fide, pro utilitate hominum”—quite appropriate for a nurse, you might say. A more appropriate motto for her might have been “Cibum non est mecum”. I hope my Latin from a long time ago makes the point. For noble Lords who cannot translate: “Don’t mess with me”.
The Queen’s Speech said:
“Measures will be brought forward to support and strengthen the National Health Service”,
and its workforce. Furthermore, it said that legislation will be brought forward to establish,
“an independent body to investigate serious healthcare incidents”.
It also said:
“My Government will bring forward proposals to reform adult social care”.
It has been said enough already that there is, as yet, no Green Paper on reforming adult social care; we all await that.
Furthermore, the Speech said that:
“My Government is committed to establishing the United Kingdom as a world leader in scientific capability”,
and that there will be,
“a more open visa system”,
to encourage and recruit talented individuals from overseas to support our science. We have no workforce strategy as such. We have repeated comments that we are recruiting more nurses or doctors, or that we have more places for medical students or nurses. But the challenge of the NHS and social care workforce is far too great to be dealt with by those policies. I do not criticise the Government; I just say that more needs to be done.
The report following the House of Lords inquiry, The Long-term Sustainability of the NHS and Adult Social Care, made the point that the greatest challenge the NHS faces for its sustainability is its workforce. We need to do more about it. Let me give a small example. I thought the Government would bring in legislation to regulate health professionals following their July report, Promoting Professionalism, Reforming Regulation, but that did not happen. The legislation that governs the UK’s medical regulation is not fit for purpose. Noble Lords might be shocked to hear me to say that, but it is true. It is the regulation that followed the Medical Act 1983. It does not allow the flexibility to easily put on the registers GPs and specialists, particularly fully trained senior people. It has no flexibility and legislation is needed to change that. The General Medical Council is very open to this and wishes it would be done, but it is not in the Queen’s Speech.
Making specialist and GP registration more flexible could make it more accessible to doctors to join both registers and would go some way to dealing with the workforce required. We are trying to recruit more doctors because we are short of psychiatrists—as we heard yesterday—geriatricians, radiologists and many others. There is an enormous shortage of nurses, too. Change here would be helpful, and I hope the Government will bring in legislation through another Bill; otherwise, I will be minded to put forward an amendment at some stage to do this.
I now come to the science side. Two-fifths of the UK’s academic workforce in science and technology are from overseas, and 50% of postgraduate researchers are overseas staff, so we need to make sure our visa system is more flexible.
Finally, I will have a lot to say about the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill when it comes to Second Reading. All I will say at this stage is that I wish we had not started it in this place.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patel. We enjoyed his deferential tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, and I shall pick up in a moment what he and other noble Lords have said about social care. My noble friend who is replying to this debate has a long frontier to patrol, so perhaps I can make her task easier by saying that I want no mention in her wind-up speech.
I want to make three brief points on health. First, the Department of Health has set a great example to every other government department in that, since 2010, it has had only three Secretaries of State. Contrast that with the eight Secretaries of State at DCMS, seven Secretaries of State at both DWP and Justice over the same period, or indeed the nine Housing Ministers over nine years.
Why is this important? It takes time for a Secretary of State to build an effective team of Ministers; to understand and, at times, change the culture of a department; to build relationships with the external stakeholders, often crucial to the success of the department; to build a relationship with the parliamentarians and Select Committees who are holding that department to account; and to build a political base for support for reform. You simply cannot do that if there is a constant churn at the top of a department. No other organisation— commercial or voluntary—would tolerate that instability, and nor should a government department which spends billions of pounds, employs thousands of people and provides key services to the country. So, if Ministers cannot match the excellent continuity of service of Her Majesty the Queen, perhaps Prime Ministers should strive for greater stability, such as we have seen in health.
My second point concerns the balance between curative medicine on the one hand and preventive medicine on the other. Like other noble Lords, I welcome the commitment to extra funding for the NHS. The CQC report last week, State of Care, underlines the pressure on A&E and the staff shortages—the justification for the extra resources—and I welcome the Bills in the Queen’s Speech.
However, we are now reaching the point of diminishing returns from investment in curative medicine. The major improvements that we all want to see in the nation’s health will come from lifestyle changes and public health measures. My noble friend the Minister, in the department in a previous capacity, was responsible for public health and took some commendable decisions, which I applaud. I hope that she escapes my fate when I was Public Health Minister in 1981 and Dennis Thatcher persuaded his wife to transfer me to another department because of my aggressive stance towards the tobacco companies.
Against that imperative of focusing on public health to achieve real improvements, noble Lords will understand my alarm at reading in the Telegraph on 3 July during the leadership contest for my party:
“Boris Johnson will end the ‘continuing creep of the nanny state’ if he becomes prime minister, starting with a review of so-called ‘sin taxes’ on sugary, salty and fatty foods”.
It went on to say:
“The former foreign secretary wants to reverse the interventionist policies pursued by Theresa May and David Cameron in favour of a more liberal agenda”.
I assume that he has subsequently relented, as he now refers to himself as a one-nation Tory leading a one-nation Government. As a former chairman of One Nation in another place, I am delighted that he is now one of us. However, one-nation Conservatism embraces a benign paternalism that is prepared to take public health measures in the national interest. We are suspicious of neoliberalism, with its overreliance on the free market with minimum state intervention, as implied in the quotation to which I referred.
Noble Lords may recall the cries of “nanny state” whenever people make this speech. I remember hearing it when we debated the compulsory wearing of seat belts—which was introduced by a Conservative Government—with crash helmets for motorcyclists, with health warnings on cigarettes and with the banning of smoking in public places. No one would now go back on those reforms, which have saved countless lives and reduced demands on the NHS.
However, we need to build on them, giving adequate resources to Public Health England and to local authorities for their public health responsibilities. Making England smoke free by 2030, which is the objective of the prevention Green Paper, will require introducing measures so far turned down, some of them based on the polluter pays principle.
Tackling tooth decay will involve revisiting the regime for introducing fluoride. Tackling obesity, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, will involve more radical measures than those so far introduced, such as a sugar tax. We should look again at minimum prices for alcohol, where the initial response in Scotland has been positive. So, although it is controversial, I want to see more emphasis on preventive medicine and a willingness to take decisions that may initially be unpopular with the right-wing press but that are right for the nation.
My final point is about social care for the elderly, and this is not a happy story. The Queen’s Speech says:
“My Government will bring forward proposals to reform adult social care in England to ensure dignity in old age”.
Noble Lords may ask where they have heard those words before. In 1997, the then Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, said that the arrangements for long-term care of older people were so unsatisfactory that they,
“cannot be allowed to continue for much longer”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/12/1997; col. 496.]
The Queen’s Speech in December 2000 said:
“The legislation will also take forward my Government’s response to the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the Elderly”.
That was the Sutherland commission. Nothing happened. At the end of their time in office, the Labour Government were back where they started with the July 2009 Green Paper Shaping the Future of Care Together. The coalition agreement echoed what Labour said in 1997:
“We will establish a commission on long-term care, to report within a year”.
The Dilnot commission, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, suffered the same fate as Sutherland. The Queen’s Speech in 2017 said:
“My Ministers will work to improve social care and will bring forward proposals for consultation”.
They are still awaited.
This makes the negotiations with the EU positively streamlined—and in this case we are negotiating with ourselves. I recognise that in the fag end of this Parliament we are unlikely to make progress, but at least let us have the promised Green Paper, narrowing the range of options and building a consensus, so that when we next debate the Queen’s Speech we can welcome measures, rather than proposals, to ensure dignity in old age.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, I am focusing on health and social care. My noble friend Lady Sherlock’s excellent speech made clear the context in which the Government’s recent rush to show their concern and commitment to the NHS needs to be seen. There have been swingeing cuts since 2010—just to remind ourselves how long this Government have been in office—staff vacancies in key areas such as GPs, nursing, psychiatrists and vital specialities such as radiography are at a record high, and there is still no specific funding allocated to implement the NHS staffing plan, which was finally published earlier this year after a two-year wait. There are some 4.4 million people on NHS waiting lists, nearly 65,000 people have been left stranded on hospital trolleys for four hours or longer, and thousands are waiting in anguish and distress for cancer treatment. Five out of eight of the cancer waiting-time targets were missed in August, including the 62-day waiting-time target which has not been met since December 2015.
The CQC’s state of care report warns of a perfect storm across health and social care, where people cannot access the services they need or where care is provided too late, pushing the NHS and social care nearer and nearer to the tipping point it warned of last year.
We know that two definite health Bills are promised. One is on patient safety investigations and the other is on medicines and medical devices, to try to pick up the pieces after we fall out of EU regulation on clinical trials and access to medicines post Brexit, and to develop new ways of regulating personalised medicine and medical AI. We welcome both Bills and will work constructively with the Government and noble Lords across the House to ensure the vital improvements to patient safety and the access to innovative treatments that are so urgently needed.
We are also promised new laws, although the timescale is unspecified, following last month’s proposal from NHS England for an NHS integrated care Bill, in its words,
“to free up different parts of the NHS to work together and with partners more easily”,
but in reality to dismantle the heavy, laden and bureaucratic structures set up under the Government’s flagship Health and Social Care Act 2012, which have proved such a huge and costly disaster for the NHS. We currently have the ludicrous situation of authorities across the country desperately working around the 2012 Act to try to build the integrated primary and acute care and multispeciality community systems across local authorities and NHS and community settings which implement the NHS long-term plan. Can the Minister tell the House what work has been done with NHS England to develop legislative proposals on a new statutory framework? What is the proposed timescale for the Bill? Is she confident that the work currently being undertaken through CCGs on integrated care system, PACs and MCPs will proceed effectively within the legal and statutory authority contained in the 2012 Act?
I remind the House, too, that it was this Act that abolished the National Patient Safety Agency, against strident opposition from noble Lords across the House. From an initial reading of the Bill, many of the functions of the proposed new Health Service Safety Investigations Body were undertaken successfully by the NPSA. Does the Minister accept that abolishing that body has proved to be yet another damaging retrograde step under the 2012 Act?
On social care, we have had shameful and inexcusable inaction and delay since the Government abandoned the Care Act and the Dilnot provisions for capping the costs of care in 2016, despite strong cross-party support. Successive Prime Ministers and Health Ministers have all given hollow pledges about “getting on with the job” and have told us that a Green Paper is “imminent”. Now Boris Johnson has promised to fix it all, “once and for all” with the “clear plan” that he has prepared. But we now see that there has been no preparation: he has nothing new to offer. Indeed, recent press reports have revealed that No. 10 is still mulling over all the familiar options, including going back to the care cap and free personal care to match Labour’s long-standing commitments on this.
Meanwhile, the social care crisis continues to get worse. Age UK estimates that more than 1 million older people have died in the past two years either waiting for a care package or having been turned down; nearly 1.3 million have developed an unmet need for basic care support such as washing, dressing or going to the toilet. Macmillan research shows that 8% of people living with cancer who have a critical or substantial need and who should qualify for council support receive no practical help at all, with 60% of their carers experiencing stress, anxiety or depression.
The Alzheimer’s Society estimates that, over the past 26 months, there have been more than 500,000 delayed transfers of care for people affected by dementia; nearly 3 billion hours of unpaid care have been provided; and, at any one point, more than 120,000 people with dementia in England receive no help from social care or family carers. Where is the PM’s “clear plan”? Does this mean the Green Paper has actually been drafted? What is holding it up? The recent IPPR report showed that free personal care would treble the number of older people with access to state-funded care, improve their health and well-being and save billions of pounds in hospital costs.
Your Lordships’ economic committee produced an excellent report on what it recognised as the “national scandal” of social care, advocating free personal care for the over-65s. Surely this is one of the first steps to solving the care crisis. What plans are there in place to fulfil Mr Johnson’s pledge to provide older people with the dignity and security they deserve and prevent them from having to sell their homes to meet crippling care costs? In the Minister’s response, I hope she will not simply repeat the Government’s stock answer that we have heard today on so-called extra funding. The King’s Fund, Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation have independently identified both the huge scale of government and local authority social care cuts and the £2.5 billion investment needed just to keep the system afloat in the short term. Emergency cash injections do not address the chronic underfunding of local services, change the eligibility criteria or help people plan for their future care needs.
Finally, on a more positive note, we welcome the pledge to continue the work on the reform of the Mental Health Act following the excellent review last year. However, we are very disappointed not to see a detailed timetable for the actual Bill that has been promised. The CQC State of Care report is again a sharp reality check on the deteriorating state of mental health care. Can the Minister explain why the Government’s NHS capital announcements so far have failed to mention or include urgent funding for mental health hospitals and trusts, which the review has made clear are the worst estate in the NHS?
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, I have recently had cause to be very grateful to the NHS and its dedicated staff. However, a service that leaves a vulnerable elderly patient in A&E waiting seven hours to see a doctor and, on two other occasions, waiting in A&E for a bed in a ward for 12 hours and overnight is a service that is either inadequately resourced or inadequately staffed, and probably both. Patients are well named in the health service of today.
The health service relies on a thriving economy to provide its funding. This Government have played fast and loose with the prospects for our health service by their relentless pursuit of the hardest of hard exits from the European Union, within which our economy has thrived for more than 40 years. Brexit has already cost our economy £70 billion. It has also hit NHS staffing hard, with many well-trained and well-motivated staff either going home or not coming here at all.
Why are so many A&E departments not reaching the target of seeing 95% of patients within four hours? It is not because the staff are not working hard. Clearly the reasons are complex, and demographics play a part. There are people who go to A&E who could have used other services. Here, I stress that all three visits I mentioned earlier were made after all other sources of help had been tried.
However, two elements of the problem are outside A&E. One is delayed transfers of care, meaning that beds are occupied by patients who would be much better off at home with support or in social care. The second lies in primary care. Therefore, when I heard the Prime Minister’s headline-grabbing claim that his Government will build 40 new hospitals, I looked at it very closely and found that it is really only six new hospitals and a bit of seed corn money for the rest. More importantly, I realise that this unelected Prime Minister has no idea what the problem really is if he thinks that the solution is six new hospitals.
Patients who cannot get to see their GP will go where the lights are on, and that is A&E. It is very common for patients to have to wait three weeks to see their GP, and that is unacceptable. In many parts of the country, there are not enough GPs. In some places, this problem has been tackled by GP practices taking on other professionals to lighten the load on the doctor. This is an enlightened approach but it requires forward planning, funding and suitable premises. In the case of my local primary care services, that is not happening. There are no suitable premises for a modern all-service primary care facility, and that can make it hard to attract GPs. Therefore, to move to an efficient primary care service and reduce the pressure on A&E, we need funding and planning, but we are unlikely to get that from a Government intent on damaging our economy and promising not to increase taxes. Of course, the best course is to avoid damaging our economy and our health service by remaining in the EU.
The other way to reduce pressure on our health services is to prevent ill health, and I absolutely agree with the gist of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I welcome the focus on prevention in the NHS Five Year Forward View. However, I would like to mention a preventable cause of illness which the noble Lord, Lord Young, did not mention and which is linked to another of the Government’s stated objectives—that is, action on climate change.
Outside this building for the past two weeks, thousands of citizens have demanded urgent action on the climate change crisis. They did so while breathing air that has 50% more of the most dangerous small particulates than the WHO recommended maximum. In London, the average level of PM2.5 is 15 micrograms per cubic metre, while the WHO recommended limit is 10. Polluted air kills about 40,000 people a year. It causes respiratory and cardiovascular illness and affects the brain development of babies and young children. There is evidence that older people who breathe polluted air have a steeper reduction in cognition with advancing age compared with clean air breathers. Research from the University of Warwick shows a significant reduction in memory, equivalent to ageing 10 years, in those who breathe polluted air. Polluted air therefore attacks our thinking power as well as our health.
Tackling climate change from the health perspective is also the right thing to do for the planet. It is bad for your health and tackling it is the healthy option, but the forthcoming Environment Bill needs to go further. It promises legally binding limits on air pollution but we have not been told what those will be. Actually, we already have them within the EU but have continually failed to reach them. What is required, as called for by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Air Pollution, is much more than painting the number plates of electric cars green; it is a phased reduction in the legal limit for PM2.5 to 15 by 2020, 12 by 2025 and 10 by 2030. This would provide the incentive to government and local councils to reduce car use and speed up the introduction of non-polluting electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, while bringing forward the phasing out of those powered by fossil fuels to 2030. We need radical action on charging and refill infrastructure. This would help the UK meet its climate change commitments, which it is otherwise unlikely to do.
The proposed office of environmental protection also falls short. We need an independent body capable of rigorous scrutiny, with powers to investigate and gain access to data and the ability to monitor and force compliance and take Ministers to court if they fail to address these issues. We need these things for our health’s sake and our planet’s sake. So will the Government support the Private Members’ Bills introduced today by my noble friend Lord Tope and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb? That would be a step in the right direction.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this debate and reminding your Lordships of the elements of the Queen’s Speech relating to healthcare provision and the science sector in our country. I remind noble Lords of my interests as professor of surgery at University College London and chairman of UCLPartners. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.
I would like to pick up on some points made by my noble friend Lord Patel. I reiterate the tremendous regard and respect that all Members of this House, and I in particular, have for my noble friend Lady Emerton. She has made a remarkable contribution to your Lordships’ House and is one of its kindest and most thoughtful Members. It has been a great pleasure and privilege to come to know her since I was fortunate enough to join the House.
The Queen’s Speech rightly identified Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to healthcare and the NHS. Clearly, safety is vital and the Government should be congratulated on introducing legislation to establish the health service safety investigations body. However, there are a number of potential concerns. A number of other organisations in the broad structure for the delivery of healthcare and other regulators already have a safety responsibility—NHS trusts, professional regulators, the Care Quality Commission, NHS Improvement and so on. All these bodies have statutory responsibilities. How will Her Majesty’s Government ensure that there is not regulatory overreach, which can have a detrimental effect on openness and transparency and impede the objective of ensuring that safety is at the heart of healthcare delivery? It is a very important question. Further regulation without consideration of what is already available could be very harmful.
There is also a clear commitment to ensuring that the additional funding already identified for the provision of healthcare in the NHS is appropriately applied. In this regard, are Her Majesty’s Government satisfied that the current landscape and the disposition of NHS England and NHS Improvement are appropriate, or do they present something of an impediment to the establishment of proper integrated care? This must ensure that the community base, rather than hospitals, is the focus for the management of chronic diseases, and that we have a system that facilitates the appropriate management of patients with established disease and ensures that prevention is at the heart of our ongoing healthcare strategy.
The adoption of innovation is also absolutely critical. The landscape, populated by many bodies, is particularly defined by the academic health science centres and health science networks. Are Her Majesty’s Government content that that structure is appropriate to facilitating the adoption of innovation at pace and scale, or is it necessary to look at those particular designations, and indeed other elements of the system, to ensure that they are better co-ordinated to deliver the adoption of innovation? Innovation will be critical to the sustainability of our NHS; we need innovation not only in novel therapies, medical devices and technologies but in how we develop the workforce to respond to the challenges of the next two decades.
We are also particularly privileged in our country to have a unique ecosystem defined by the National Health Service, our universities—we have four of the top 10 in the world for biosciences and life sciences—a remarkable pharma industry sector and, of course, a biotech and medtech sector. Those sectors commercially provide some £63.5 billion of turnover to the UK economy, employ more than 200,000 people and represent some 5,000 companies. That is of huge importance, not only for ensuring that innovation is established quickly, discovered and brought to bear to manage the diseases of our fellow citizens, but for its economic contribution. This has been well recognised by recent Governments, who have shown important commitments to this area.
However, in a report published in September, the Institute for Public Policy Research identified that whereas in 2011 our country enjoyed 10.5% of global spending on life sciences R&D, that figure fell to just 7% in 2016, despite an important commitment by the Government. The circumstances around Brexit have caused further uncertainty in the life sciences sector. It is a matter of deep regret that there might be further delay in delivering Brexit.
The implications of this are substantial for this important part of our economy, but they are also vital because if we fail to sustain the pace of innovation in life sciences, we will not deliver an NHS that can provide the most important benefits for our fellow citizens. That NHS will not be able to contribute to the growth of the economy and to increased wealth creation in our country because patients and individuals will be less healthy and less economically productive, and the broader benefits of this important sector will be lost to our country.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, who always speaks with great authority and wisdom on health, and on scientific research and innovation, which are key to our future and the whole health service. I normally burden your Lordships with my views on international and overseas affairs and the shifting world order, having had the privilege to be the first chair of your Lordships’ Committee on International Relations. I chose to intervene instead on this present set of topics for three reasons.
We are living on an angry planet, to pinch a heading from the Times leader this morning. From Chile to Hong Kong, Lebanon to Venezuela, every part of the Middle East, every European capital to our own streets, e-enabled protest, organised on an unprecedented scale and driven through communications technology that is constantly changing rapidly, has become the norm. This anger affects all the issues we are discussing.
Oddly, there is little or nothing in the gracious Speech about turbulent outside world events, except of course the eternal Brexit, despite their major impact on our lives and issues here at home. In particular it is a great pity—indeed, I find it rather shocking—that there is no mention of the Commonwealth in the gracious Speech, considering its central importance to the UK’s future world role, our internal and domestic cohesion, our care systems and many of our public services, and the importance to Her Majesty personally of the modern Commonwealth network. To have included a reference would have been no more than good manners, but manners, courtesy and vision seem all to be victims of the present Brexit debate.
My second reason for seeking to speak today is that the internal good health of our democracy and society, aspects of which we are discussing, is essential to our external impact and influence, and safeguarding of our world interests. The inner health of our society is currently, as several speeches have emphasised, not as good as it should be. We really cannot go around pressing on other countries our Westminster model, our welfare state model, our elderly care model or our education model if they do not work well here. As my noble friend Lord Dobbs said in a brilliant speech at the beginning of our debate on the humble Address,
“if we are to offer lessons to others, we must relearn those lessons ourselves”.—[Official Report, 14/10/19; col. 9.]
A third reason for my intervening today is that it had passed through my mind that our situation, both nationally and internationally, would be rather different this week from last week and the gracious Speech, which now seems rather a long time ago. I thought that, by now, the deal would be settled. Foolish me. I should have realised that frustration is the name of the game, and I am afraid that it is going to go on. I read that Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg wants it settled in three days. It occurs to me that we should perhaps consult the Bible to learn about getting things done in three days.
The issue that I want briefly to discuss out of today’s list is pensions, workers’ benefits and employment. I extend that to savings, workers’ benefits and rights and security generally. These have all come into the Brexit debate, especially workers’ rights: there is a constant fear, vocalised much by the Opposition, that they will be watered down if we are outside the European Union. In an interview on the “Today” programme this morning, Nick Robinson reached a new low in ignorance combined with interruptive boorishness with Mr Jenrick, the Housing Secretary. The subject was rights and benefits. I also watched a much more polite and effective Andrew Marr on this issue. Neither Robinson nor Marr have grasped the difference between the big business, corporatist type of legislation for workers, mostly coming from the EU, and the small-business-friendly social and employment legislation that we need and which is far better suited to both workers and business in the digital age. In the digital age and a service-dominated economy, we can do far better for working people, employer-employee relations and secure retirement than the old corporatist model, which is shaped largely by big companies’ lobbies, philosophies and pressures in Brussels. It is not a question of watering down but of a different and far better deal for millions of workers in the highly disruptive age we are living in, which will become more disruptive still. We must break away from the heavy, big-business, corporatist approach of the old EU.
The pensions system is very much part of this story. I welcome the new safeguards, as have some of my colleagues, but I fear that pensions reform of this kind does not go half far enough for what is needed in a modern and unified society. We talk about an economy which works for everyone, but it is simply not happening and my own political party needs, as do all major parties, to redesign its stances from the bottom up to meet these fundamentally democratic needs: a genuine sharing of capital ownership and the security and dignity that go with it, on a scale not hitherto contemplated. We cannot build a party of the future on out-of-date and out-of-relevance ideologies from the past.
We will thrive only as an open nation committed to and interwoven with an utterly interdependent world. We must have our own modernised and flexible welfare and support arrangements for a disruptive and dangerous world which is being totally transformed. The gracious Speech had ambitions, but it seems drafted with too little of this in mind. We have to up our game if we are to meet the colossal challenges coming fast towards us.
Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)
My Lords, the Minister in opening quoted from the gracious Speech, stating that Ministers would,
“ensure that all young people have access to an excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work”.
This is a worthy aim, but given government policy, it is unlikely to be achieved. I expected the Minister to tell us that funding for schools would increase as a result of spending round pledges. She told us about the budget for early years, too, and for universities, but further education, as so often, did not even get a mention.
The position in further education is dire: its funding has been slashed by £3.3 billion since 2010. At least in the spending round the Government have recognised that FE colleges do need more money, but an extra £400 million is a paltry sum against the magnitude of the cuts. The Chancellor said that he had attended an FE college and knows how important they are. That is good news—he is one of the few Tory politicians who has done so—but come on, Mr Javid, that sum will not be nearly enough for FE to unlock the full potential of young people and prepare them for the world of work.
Before I discuss FE colleges’ resources, I will comment on the curriculum for 16 to 19 year-olds across school sixth forms and colleges. In this country, we have a disastrously overspecialised learning environment for young people taking school-leaving examinations at 18. No other education system has anything like the specialisation associated with A-levels. Like the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I will mention Mr Gove. As Secretary of State for Education, he took a step backwards when he returned to the three-subject A-level norm, dropping AS-levels which have encouraged the study of four subjects in the first year of the sixth form. If only he had made the progressive step of going in the other direction, towards five subjects at AS-level, followed by four at A-level. Even this approach is some way from the hugely preferable international baccalaureate, which allows the study of six subjects. The universities must share some of the blame, because their conservatism in sticking rigidly to offers of three A-levels has discouraged a broader range of subjects.
Many people lament the dramatic decline in the study of foreign languages. In a world where English has become the global language, it is harder to motivate young people who have English as their mother tongue to study them after the age of 16. They are also unlikely to be chosen when competing with a range of science subjects and mathematics, or with English and the humanities, when students are so constrained in their choices. The three-subject straitjacket also means that many able young people are not studying the important subject of mathematics after 16; many others are studying no humanities subjects either. We are forcing young people into a horribly unbalanced education at a time in their lives when they should be learning more broadly. I challenge the Government to do something about this, and I hope to hear about it in the Minister’s reply.
I turn to further education colleges which, as well as providing A-level programmes, are the vitally important institutions for the development of vocational skills for 16 to 19 year-olds—as well as for adults, which I will not touch on today. Many people welcomed the Government’s industrial strategy and their wish to tackle our low levels of productivity with more emphasis on skills training. How are we going to make any inroads into this problem if we starve the institutions with a central role in developing these skills? After cuts averaging 30% per annum between 2009 and 2019, the Institute for Fiscal Studies called FE the “biggest loser” in the austerity programme, and so it was.
To cite another important commentator, the Children’s Commissioner’s recent report showed that, by 2020, real-terms spending per 16 to 18 year-old will drop to the level it was 30 years ago. This means that we are spending the same amount per student aged 16 to 19 as we were in 1990, despite rising costs. It must be remembered that the spending review increase for FE is for one year only, in 2020-21, whereas the schools have a three-year settlement. Why should there be a difference? Why is the promised extra funding for FE so small? I ask this against a background where 16 to 18 year-olds in England get an average of 15 hours of contact time a week, compared with 25 for students of that age in other OECD countries. This amounts to 600 fewer hours over a standard two-year course—hardly the way to improve our relative productivity position and, thereby, our competitive success.
There is also a failure to meet another government priority: to promote greater social mobility. Many of the most disadvantaged young people do not stay at school after 16, and many will never gain a university place. FE colleges can have a vital role in providing a route to the skills needed for a rewarding career and to becoming socially mobile.
In conclusion, funding is a fundamental challenge in FE, as the Augar committee made clear. Will the Government now make a firm commitment to the sector of £5,000 per student per annum? Only then will FE teachers receive the pay they deserve and students get the quality of education and training that they need.
Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, the great Freddie Trueman once played in a match against Oxford University. The young student coming out to face him was immaculate in his whites and absolutely perfect in his approach to the delivery to come. Trueman bowled and hit the middle stump; the wicket went clattering down. The young man adjusted his cap, walked past Trueman and said: “A damn fine ball, Trueman”. “Aye; it was wasted on thee”, said Freddie. I feel a bit like that speaking today, because this gracious Speech is a sham. The Times gave it away the day after the Speech, with its headline:
“Queen’s Speech sets out PM’s election manifesto”.
We are playing charades while the real battle takes place down the Corridor in another place. Even this afternoon, the Prime Minister, acting like Violet Elizabeth Bott, is threatening to pull the Brexit Bill if he does not get his way. The Government’s media claque grows ever more hysterical as Parliament resists being bounced into agreeing to a Brexit which is light years away from what was put to the country in 2016. I understand the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, to get on with things, but this decision will have an adverse impact on the prosperity and well-being of the people of this country for decades to come. It has been presented to the country with all the integrity of a second-hand car salesman trying to flog a car with a dodgy milometer and no logbook. To make the first priority of the Government, in the first line of the gracious Speech,
“to secure the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 31 October”,
is no way to deal with the deep divisions Brexit has caused. On these Benches we will continue to argue for a people’s vote, with a clear choice between the Johnson deal and remain.
Noble Lords’ contributions today have been of high quality, exposing the gaps in this election manifesto in disguise. I will refer to one or two of these. The online harms Bill was not directly mentioned in the gracious Speech, but a parallel statement assured us that a draft Bill will be published shortly and be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, which I welcome. In the meantime, I urge the Government to reconsider their decision not to provide immediate protection for children from online pornography. I was astounded to see in last Sunday’s Observer an article quite out of the blue and with no explanation, with the headline:
“Farewell the ‘porn block’—a PR exercise and lousy policy”.
That did no justice to the work that has been done by my noble friends Lady Benjamin and Lord Clement-Jones, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others. It is a strange article for the Observer. There has also been an ambiguous attitude on the Labour Benches. I look forward to a clear statement of Labour’s policy on protecting children from porn. There is a real risk that we will talk for years while the danger is immediate. I urge this House to do what we can while we can, then get on with the pre-legislative scrutiny.
The gracious Speech, because it is designed to give some red meat to the Tory law and order campaign, has lots of promises of tougher and longer sentences in the fight against crime. But there is no mention of the strategy espoused by Michael Gove when he received the report on prison education by Dame Sally Coates in 2016, and endorsed by David Gauke less than a year ago, which determined to,
“put offenders on a path to employment as soon as they set foot in prison”.
The approach mirrors the attempt by my successor as chairman of the Youth Justice Board, Charlie Taylor, to run an education-led facility for young offenders. I make this reference because I believe that within our education policy rest a lot of the solutions to the problems facing the criminal justice system.
There is no mention in the gracious Speech of the need to extend the powers of the Freedom of Information Act to cover private companies carrying out outsourced public functions, as recommended by the Information Commissioner. Likewise, the gracious Speech is silent on the ongoing failure of the Conservative Party to carry out the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry into our press. The recent treatment of Ben Stokes, Gareth Thomas and the Duchess of Sussex is clear evidence that the press is still up to its bad old ways.
Finally, and returning in a way to education and to the theme that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, mentioned, we have to set in train the education and training to allow all our citizens, but particularly our young people, to be able to handle new technologies and new ways of receiving and giving information. I very much welcome the announcement today of the House’s Democracy and Digital Technologies Select Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, but here again there is a real, live and present danger to our democracy. What worries me about the point the noble Lord, Lord Howell, made is that although we may say that small is beautiful, the power is still in the hands of the big corporations and they are misusing that power.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord McNally, I too have found myself having to change what I had intended to say today, following an announcement by the Secretary of State for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport last week that the Government no longer intend to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017. The profundity of this announcement and its political implications for the Government have not yet made their presence felt, for the simple reason that the announcement was made, probably on purpose, in the epicentre of the Brexit storm. The simple political reality, however, that the Government cannot escape, and the consequences of which they cannot circumvent, is that the 2015 Conservative manifesto stated, on page 35, that,
“we will stop children’s exposure to harmful sexualised content online, by requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material”.
That was a simple, profound, high-profile manifesto commitment that brought hope to parents up and down the country and to children’s charities. You simply cannot make this kind of commitment, introduce the legislation, appoint a regulator, ask the industry to prepare for the law change and then suddenly make a U-turn and not expect serious political consequences.
The Government may have to face an election, and therefore they may want to think again too. The actions of the Secretary of State suggest that even seminal Conservative manifesto commitments cannot be trusted, so I gently ask the Minister why anyone should believe what they say after some of the events of last week. How will we know that key commitments will not subsequently be swept away because the Government claim to have better plans?
On the subject of better plans, one of my difficulties is that the Government have not really said what these better plans are, other than that they will find expression in the context of their work on online harms, further to the White Paper. This is particularly problematic because, although I have spoken to children’s charities and parents, no one has been able to tell me of a better way to prevent children accessing pornographic websites than through the introduction of statutory age verification enforced by a regulator IP blocking non-compliant sites. Moreover, no one can imagine a more efficient way of facilitating children’s access to pornographic content online from the day that statutory age verification would have come in than abandoning this commitment so that it does not come into force.
Hopes had been expressed that the online harms White Paper process might extend that protection to social media but, let us be clear, nothing can take the place of statutory age verification in relation to pornographic websites. The best way to deal with pornographic websites is not necessarily the best way to deal with pornography on social media platforms, yet the Government seem to be using a rather crude one-size-fits-all logic to justify not introducing the most effective mechanism for protecting children from pornographic websites, in favour of some vague commitment to an undefined mechanism that can address everything. All this is simply not credible. In the world of online safety, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. I am pleased, of course, that the Government want to do more to prevent children accessing pornography through social media platforms, but they should not use this as an excuse to justify jettisoning the most effective and efficacious way of protecting children from pornographic websites—statutory age verification—especially having made it a manifesto commitment.
I wonder whether whoever came up with this idea actually reminded the Prime Minister that they were recommending that the Conservative Party renege on a headline manifesto commitment—better, surely, to have never made that promise than to make it, introduce the legislation, prepare industry and then change their mind.
I also think the Government should think very carefully about how it looks to have people vote for a manifesto containing a simple, clear commitment to introduce statutory age verification and to then subsequently go back to them and say, “We know you voted for this but now we have a better idea”. In the context of Brexit, where they are saying that the political class should take care to respect how people have voted and not come back and tell them that they know better, they should apply the same logic to themselves.
The other consideration in all this which should not be overlooked is Britain’s influence in the world. The Government were leading the way in this space and multiple jurisdictions were watching with the greatest interest, including within the EU. If the Government recover their nerve, Britain will still have the opportunity to play a key role in setting global standards on statutory age verification. It seems bizarre that we should invest millions in developing world-leading legislation and technology and then, through an apparent loss of nerve—and with no moral compass as far as honouring manifesto commitments is concerned—turn our backs on a great opportunity for Britain to help protect children, not just in the UK but across the world. I very strongly suggest that if the Government do not want to alienate parents up and down the country, they should rapidly reconsider their strategy and lay the BBFC age verification guidance before Parliament as soon as possible.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, please let us try to keep to six minutes; otherwise, when we come to the wind-up speeches, they will be galloping, rather than being able to give noble Lords the answers they want.
Lord Lingfield (Con)
My Lords, I welcome entirely the aspiration in the Queen’s Speech that,
“all young people have access to an excellent education … preparing them for the world of work”.
I will speak briefly today about the education and training of those who are not in the youngest quartile and who need as much investment in their needs as students in their teens and early 20s. I remind your Lordships of my registered interest as chairman of the Chartered Institution for Further Education.
Adult learners can belong to a number of different groups: those who did not do well at school but now wish to make up for time lost; those who have decided, or been forced by redundancy, to seek a different career and need to be retrained; those who wish to be trained at a higher level in their present skills to help with promotion in their employment; and those who want simply to acquire new accomplishments. One criterion is nearly always present across these groups: that they are very well motivated to learn.
Yet it appears that we have been failing these adult learners for a very long time. During the past 10 years adult enrolments have diminished from 5 million to under 2 million annually, a fall of 62%. For those taking IT qualifications, for instance, the drop is a huge 89%. It would seem from these figures that many would-be adult learners can no longer find the courses they require from further education. Yet the Education and Skills Funding Agency tells us that there has been a national underspend in the adult skills budget in the last few years of £63 million in 2016-17 and £76 million in 2017-18. This is money allocated and available for adult education but unspent. Clearly, there is something wrong.
One obvious problem was that caused by the funding agency’s changes in recent years to the funding criteria. These changes in effect reduced the number of people who are eligible for courses. For example, those aged 24 and above could be funded for only level 1 or 2 courses, whereas we know that level 3 courses have the biggest impact on individual progress and therefore on national productivity. An inflexibility in the system has meant that, although funding has in principle been earmarked for adult education, the rules have often made it impossible to access for a large number of people. Thus many who would like to take those level 3 qualifications to improve their skills or chances of employment have increasingly had to pay for them themselves, which many find impossible, or take on a student loan, which can be very worrying for those on a low wage.
Hence, I welcome this year’s policy of devolving the adult skills budget to six combined authority areas and Greater London. This started to take effect on 1 August and can be operative for courses that began last month. It means that colleges of further education in those areas can be permitted to fund level 3 courses for adult learners, including those at work, if they judge that this will improve the local economy and lead to more jobs. I want especially to mention the forward-looking work of the West Midlands Combined Authority, which has already carried out a special consultation with colleges in its area to ensure that the right criteria exist for funding and that many more individuals are able to access funded level 3 courses and above to aid them in making progress in their careers.
The combined authority areas have about a third of all further education colleges and account for about half of the adult skills budget. For the other two-thirds of the country’s FE providers, government funding policy is still far too restrictive and can allow would-be adult students to be trapped in low-level jobs from which they cannot break free because they cannot afford to pay for the qualifications which would allow them to do so. Hence, it is imperative that the experiences of colleges and their adult learners in the combined authority areas are studied very carefully in the next year and that every effort is made to devolve more resources to individual vocational colleges and providers outside those areas in future. This could establish a far less rigid regime which trusts the professionals involved to know what is best for their students and to produce funded courses for them, suited to their needs and those of local employers.
It is absolutely essential that we get this right if we are to develop here in the United Kingdom the flexible, skilled and well-trained workforce we shall need to meet the productivity challenges that the next years will certainly bring to this country. I hope my noble friend will be able to reassure me on some of these issues.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I declare my membership of the GMC, trusteeship of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and presidency of GS1, the barcoding association. I too pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton; she was an undoubted tour de force over decades of leading the nursing profession. I particular remember her kindness in attending the badge-giving honours at the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, which I chaired; she came and spent about three or four hours with the nurses before travelling on to a meeting in Leeds. She is an extraordinary woman who gave so much to our health service.
The Queen’s Speech promised a Bill on the long-term plan, which I suppose is really a cover for getting rid of the calamitous Health and Social Care Act 2012. Any of us should welcome that, but the problem is that it does not answer the much more substantive question of how we will fund and develop a sustainable health and social care system over the next three decades.
The NHS has done wonderfully well in meeting many of the challenges it has faced over the last nearly 70 years or so, but no one can be in any doubt that, with the growing number of older people with comorbidities and the kind of good pressure that new technology and invention bring, the health service is struggling hugely. The CQC’s annual State of Care report, published only last week, shows that there is huge pressure on all health and care services. Waiting times for treatments are going up, and I fear that we will return to the bad old pre-1997 days unless we take decisive action. We have the wholly unstable adult social care market, which noble Lords have already referred to, and there seems to be general agreement that about 1.4 million people who ought to be receiving care at the moment are not.
The question is how we will respond to this issue. The Government’s immediate response is their own long-term plan, a new five-year settlement of around 3.4% growth per annum. That is of course welcome, in contrast to the years of austerity; when the demand was going up, adult social care was being reduced in real terms and for five years the health service received its lowest ever funding level since its foundation. Obviously, 3.4% real-terms growth is a great improvement on that. The problem, as anyone reading the IFS report on public finance going ahead will know, is that this is a temporary blip—we will return to austerity.
The report of the Long-Term Sustainability of the NHS Committee, excellently chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, was very clear that we cannot go on having this short-term upfunding followed by reductions without any serious attempt to solve the real problem of funding health and social care over the next 20 or 30 years. There are no easy answers: it is pretty clear that the public and the political class as a whole will not see any change in the basic premise of a publicly funded service free at the point of use as far the NHS is concerned; it is also clear that public opinion does not favour any increase in charges. One way or another we have to persuade the public to pay more money through taxes to get us back to a sustainable growth figure.
The only possible way that we can do this is through some kind of hypothecated health and social care tax. It is probably not popular with the Treasury, or with many noble Lords. National insurance is the obvious way to do it; the UK take for national insurance roughly equals the amount we spend on health and social care in England, so it is probably the easiest way to do it. There would have to be changes—as my noble friend reminded me just now, the fact that many of us do not pay national insurance any more while still earning is clearly unacceptable. However, we have to think radically about whether we seriously want to go on funding our health service and whether we want a sustainable, excellent health service.
The committee of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, did not quite recommend a hypothecated tax, although I think that perhaps it was trying to get there. However, it recommended that we set up an OBR for health and social care as well. That is an excellent idea: an independent body giving advice on the long-term funding needs of the health and social care system, alongside workforce projections and demographic challenges. If you put the two together, that would be about the only hope we have of maintaining an excellent health and social care system in the future. The alternative is a long period of austerity with a little bit of growth, no certainty and a continuation of some of the pressures we see at the moment.
Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, children should not be able to see pornography. Sadly, there was no mention of this in the Queen’s Speech, but the Government need to act now to ensure this. It should be added to the same category as the introduction of seat belts and banning smoking, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham.
I have been campaigning for over eight years to try to prevent childhoods being damaged by pornographic content. Eventually, in 2017, the Digital Economy Act was successfully passed to impose age verification controls to prevent children stumbling across and accessing pornography online. Last month, on 5 September, I wrote to the Secretary of State, Nicky Morgan, asking her to confirm the Government’s commitment to bringing in this legislation as early as possible. I never received a reply. But, shockingly, last week in her Written Statement she said that there would be no commencement order for this regime because of the “objective of coherence”, and that it would all be dealt with under online harms at some unknown date. That day was used to bury bad news, and I wept thinking of the consequences.
I have had concerns about the many delays in bringing in this legislation, such as the Government not notifying the European Commission of the BBFC’s guidance on age verification arrangements, which was an avoidable and unforgivable blunder. Interestingly, I was also told in confidence back in January that there were those in influential positions who did not want this legislation to happen. But I had faith in the Government that they would not let our children down.
By the Government’s own statistics, every month that passes, 1.4 million children access pornography. Therefore, every month this regime is delayed, millions more children will stumble across pornography. We are talking about violent sexual content, gang rape, real and close-up images of sexual acts, all just one click away because there are no age restrictions. The results of this cause children as young as four to be excluded from nursery school because of their sexual actions towards other children. Recently, a father contacted me to tell me how traumatised his eight year-old daughter, who loves horse-riding, was, after she typed in the word “stallion”.
Pornographic content is traumatic for children to watch and can directly impact on their adult relationships, including their understanding of consent and their long-term mental health. How can this Government justify any delay in preventing children facing this trauma on the grounds of “coherence”? Any new legislation is years away. But even if it was months, why wait? I visit Rye Hill prison in Rugby, which houses over 680 sex offenders. Many tell me that they wish they had never seen pornography as children. It has destroyed their lives.
All the child protection charities believed that this legislation is vitally important. Yet the Minister Matt Warman in the other place suggested that the NSPCC supported this decision. I cannot understand this claim, and I believe it should be withdrawn. I have here a letter sent on 2 October by John Carr, secretary to the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, which includes Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society and the NSPCC, asking the Secretary of State to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act “without further delay”. Let us not forget that the Digital Economy Act has provision for a review 12 to 18 months after entry into force. That is the time to consider “coherence”: to look at whether social media could and should be included once the regime has had the chance to be operational and to protect our children from this appalling content.
The world is watching us, and this decision potentially has ramifications far wider than the UK. We had the chance to change things for the next generation of children so that their first concept of sex is not at the age of seven, stumbling across images of violent sex acts on their computers. The argument that children are clever enough to get round the age gate is ludicrous. We are not talking about 15 year-old computer wizards but about six and seven year-olds inadvertently accessing porn. In addition, the idea that, as an alternative to age verification, we should teach children about porn at such a tender age is completely outrageous. The notion that the privacy of adult visitors to porn sites will be compromised is misleading and untrue. Personal data will not be shared with porn sites.
I therefore plead with the Minister to speak to the Secretary of State and ask her, as a moral duty, to reconsider her decision so we can see this ground-breaking child protection standard in place in the UK by the end of the year. Childhood lasts a lifetime, so let us ensure that all children’s innocence is protected for as long as possible.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, I am very pleased to participate in this debate, which underlines the need for action to be taken to maintain our health provisions and to keep them—despite sometimes expressing to the contrary—among the best in the world. I speak as a founder lawyer member of the multidisciplinary Mental Health Act Commission, so I hope that noble Lords will understand if I concentrate on the issue of mental health this evening.
One in four of us will suffer at some time in our lives from some form of mental illness. I do not believe that that statistic is properly understood or appreciated. Other types of illness are easier to accept, and sympathy is more likely to be extended. Proportionally, the percentage of health spending on mental health is only 10%, despite a clear need for greater and more comprehensive resources in that sector. The needs are extensive but are still unmet.
Back in 1983, one of the aims of the new commission was to protect patients’ human rights and examine the legality of detention in appropriate cases. However, we were also obliged to suggest improvements in the system. As a result of our work, which dealt mainly with previously detained patients, we wanted to make sure that when they rejoined the wider community, proper social care and support was available for them. We were also charged with providing a report every two years, and in initial and successive reports we were obliged to point out the inadequacy of the social care in the community situation. That was over 30 years ago, and successive reports and comments that have taken place in the interim have suggested that we have not done nearly enough to put things right.
Since then, society’s attitudes towards those with mental illness have undoubtedly improved, but there remains a level of stigma, at worst, and disinterest, at least, in the subject. Luckily, we now have a much broader understanding of what mental illness may be. Many acknowledged conditions do not appear to fit within the strict category or interpretation but which are either close to it or have the effect of contributing adversely to the mental health of an individual. Obsessive compulsive disorders, depression, anxiety through stress and PTSD are clear examples. The mental health of those who are autistic is also often overlooked. The incidence of mental illness in this group is substantial. All this requires a more individual approach tailored to specific needs. This should include not only sharp-edge treatment and resource but, in appropriate cases, obtaining suitable employment, where discrimination and other obstacles are in the way.
I therefore hope that the Government’s promise of 1,000 more staff—which, if one divides that across the country, I suggest is still inadequate—and the £2.3 billion of extra investment proposed in mental health will be not only implemented but used in a really effective way, and in such a way that the individual needs of more people can be sympathetically and effectively met, along with a greater understanding of mental health issues, which I think we all agree as necessary.
Lord Ribeiro (Con)
My Lords, I add my appreciation to that of others for the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, to your Lordships’ House. She has been not only a spokesman for nursing but a stalwart in maintaining standards in the profession. We will miss her wise counsel in our proceedings.
The humble Address refers to new laws to establish an independent body to investigate serious healthcare incidents—no, not health service incidents, as in the new Bill. I will come back to that later.
Sir Bernard Jenkin MP, chairman of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, stated:
“There is an acute need for the Government to follow through on its commitment to turn the NHS in England into a learning organisation; an organisation where staff can feel safe to identify mistakes and incidents without fearing the finger of blame”.
The Bill achieves that objective, but its remit needs to be wider. The Joint Committee’s report, in its recommendations 4 and 5, was clear that the legislation should be called the healthcare safety investigation Bill, and consequently should establish the healthcare safety investigation body—the HSIB—in statute. Indeed, it was originally referred to as such. The committee wished the remit of the HSIB to be extended to the provision of all healthcare in England, which of course includes the private sector. The Government in their response agreed to look at that in both the title and the extent of the remit of the new body to investigate independently funded healthcare in England.
I make that point because, in the recent Sellu case, in which a surgeon was sent to prison on gross negligence manslaughter charges and later exonerated on appeal, there was evidence that the root-cause analysis of the surgeon’s work at the Clementine Churchill Hospital, a private hospital, which showed evidence of system failures, was effectively buried and not made available at the original trial. Extending the legislation to the private sector would prevent such failures in future and ensure equal standards between the NHS and the private sector. Can my noble friend confirm whether that recommendation will be accepted? If it is not accepted now, will an answer be provided during next week’s debate on the Bill?
Another area of concern in the Bill relates to the safe space, an approach used for many years by the air accident and other transport safety investigation bodies, which has contributed to improved safety in those industries. This approach has been challenged by coroners and other groups but is strongly supported by the Joint Committee. I am sure we will discuss this at length on the Bill, but assurances from the Government at this stage would be welcome and would give participants in the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch confidence that information they share candidly will be investigated and protected. I declare an interest as chairman of the Confidential Reporting System for Surgery. We have supported the work of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch, and look forward to working collaboratively with the new body in future.
Another area of the Queen’s speech relates to shortages in the workforce and the need for more investment. Nowhere is this more urgently required than in mental health—we have heard much about that already today. It is encouraging to read of the pilot scheme to recruit 1,000 additional staff as part of the £2.3 billion extra investment in mental health in the NHS long-term plan. However, Sir Simon Wessely, previous president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in his independent review stressed the need for capital spending to restore the fabric and conditions of many of our institutions. I hope that will be part of the £1 billion boost to NHS capital spending promised for 2020-21.
Lord Layard (Lab)
My Lords, the first question one should ask about any Queen’s Speech is: what is the overall objective of government policy? Is it the nation’s wealth? Is it the well-being of the citizens? What is it? To have coherent government, you must have an overall objective against which to measure policy. More and more people worldwide are demanding that the objective should be human experience—the well-being of the people—and I agree with that.
How does the Queen’s Speech stack up against the objective of well-being? Not well, I fear. To see this, let me compare the Speech with a recent report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. The report addressed the key issue of what priorities for public spending would be if it were targeted at the well-being of the people—at the things that people really worry about. It concluded that the top four priorities were: better mental health services, which many noble Lords have said; secondly, child well-being and schools; thirdly, further education and apprenticeships—the transition to work; and, fourthly, social care. Of those four objectives, none of the first three appears in the Queen’s Speech, although they are things that parents—and all adults—are crying out for positive action on. Instead, the Speech is full of punishments of all kinds and the new strategy for the nation’s physical infrastructure. Those are the main priorities in the domestic part of the Speech.
What about the social infrastructure of our country? Over the past 10 years, we have closed hundreds of children’s centres, youth clubs and community centres. We have produced a crisis in child mental health. What is the sense of spending what new money we have on, for example, building high-speed rail, before we have rectified the desperate shortcomings of our social infrastructure? Many argue that the top priority must be physical infrastructure because that is what the market is willing to fund, because it gives a financial return, but so does social infrastructure. I shall give some examples from the field of mental health.
The NHS programme for improving access to psychological therapies has been found, within two years, to save more in reduced welfare benefits and reduced physical healthcare expenditure than the total amount spent on the programme. The net cost of the programme is zero. Similarly, if you are worried about adolescent knife crime, a proven method is to train the parents of badly behaved youngsters when the youngsters are aged five to seven. This training has been shown to reduce anti-social behaviour 10 years later by well over half, and it costs very little. Remarkably, we used to have such training. We had 4,000 people trained as parent trainers but, under the coalition Government, those services were cut as part of the general cut to social infrastructure. Those people are still there and are ready for re-employment—if only we put our next available money into that kind of provision.
As has been said, we have to upgrade and accelerate the general rollout of mental health services in schools, and the teaching of life skills in the school curriculum. These are key to producing a happier generation of children, and a generation that causes less trouble to adults. What is so depressing about the Speech is its almost totally punitive approach to any kind of behavioural problem. The word “rehabilitation” appears once and “prevention” never appears, yet there are good psychological treatments and preventive programmes for all kinds of behavioural problems, such as domestic violence, which is rising in priority, and family conflict. Only small sums of money are needed to make major inroads into these problems. How much more important to do this than to build yet another bit of high-cost physical infrastructure.
On further education, I had high hopes of the Government because they said it would be a priority. Very little money has been provided so far—only one year of it—and no programme has been announced for how to deliver the universal rights to level 3, which the Augar report recommends, which in turn requires that we remove the cap on further education, just as we have removed the cap on university and higher education. All these deficiencies come from there being no clear overall objective of government policy to influence priorities. The time has come for every political party to commit to the objective of well-being and to support that with a social infrastructure strategy. I very much hope that the next Queen’s Speech will do just that.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, yesterday my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter covered a range of aspects of arts and creative industry policy, so I will focus on digital policy during today’s debate—but I hope my noble friend will have the benefit of a reply to her questions from the Minister at the end.
Digital technology and communication are now prevalent throughout our society and economy and are having a profound impact on all our lives, but it is clear that major differences with this Government of timing and priority for action are now emerging for many aspects of digital policy. This is the case above all on age verification. The Secretary of State has announced a huge delay in a policy which we debated in this House at length. I strongly agree with my noble friends and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe: this is a truly shocking and unfortunate decision. All the adult sites were preparing to install these robust mechanisms. What is the Government’s real aim? Is it to let these adult sites off the hook? Have they somehow decided that age verification is not workable? If that is not the case, when should we expect the introduction of this crucial policy? How will this impact on the anticipated age-appropriate design code when age verification is used as the default protection mechanism? How will the Government respond to the obligations of the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which will enter into force in September 2020? The Government need to urgently reconsider this matter.
As regards online harms, it is widely agreed that tech companies should no longer be able to avoid responsibility for content on their sites. We agree that a statutory duty of care, properly framed, can protect the safety of the user and, at the same time, respect the right to free speech, allowing for a flexible but secure environment for users. The task of regulation in this area should fall to Ofcom. With its clout, experience of drawing up codes in sensitive areas affecting freedom of expression, understanding of how technology and content converge and experience of co-operating with other regulators, it is the most sensible choice. Given the complexity of the issues, and the need for clear definitions, we welcome the prospect of pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill setting out the new regulatory provisions. Indeed, on these Benches, we suggested it. How do the Government intend that this is carried out? When can we expect the draft Bill, and will it designate Ofcom as the regulator so that it can start preparations?
Competition regulation for the digital industries needs to be substantially strengthened so that the importance of data as an asset is recognised and we prevent data monopolies that form barriers to innovation. We need to build on the recommendations in the Furman review, which recommended a new digital markets unit to ensure that we are abreast of these issues. When is the Government’s response to that report going to emerge? With which regulator will the new unit sit? Have the Government made a decision?
Online gaming and e-sports are becoming immensely popular hobbies for individuals of all ages, especially for our younger generation. They provide a positive outlet for creativity and a level of global communication the likes of which have not been possible for the generations before them. But we must also consider the negative consequences of new forms of online gambling for young people, such as loot boxing. What are Government doing in response to the loot box phenomenon? How are they responding to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s recent recommendation for a ban on these for children? Will they carry out a review of their impact?
In recent days, live facial recognition technology has been described as potentially Orwellian by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and deeply concerning by the Information Commissioner. The Home Office’s own Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group has questioned the accuracy of live facial recognition technology and noted its potential for biased outputs and biased decision-making. The Science and Technology Select Committee recommended an immediate moratorium on its use,
“until concerns over the technology’s effectiveness and potential bias have been fully resolved”.
In this light, will the Government support my Private Member’s Bill, shortly to be introduced, enforcing a moratorium on this technology—pending a review—to assess the right form of regulation?
Even more prevalent than this technology is the use of algorithms in decision-making by public bodies. One in three councils is now using computer algorithms to make decisions about benefit claims, despite evidence emerging that some systems are unreliable. Are we not endangering public trust in artificial intelligence in a major way? When will this Government regulate this kind of decision-making by algorithm?
Fear and lack of trust in technology are very strongly related to the future of jobs and skills. AI in particular will have significant implications for the way in which society lives and works. The future.now initiative, recently launched by the Lord Mayor, Peter Estlin, recognises that there are some 17.3 million people in the UK without the necessary skills for work—but, despite this, the Government’s national retraining scheme is only at pilot stage. What can the Minister tell us about the rollout of the national retraining scheme?
In terms of the skills we should be nurturing, as a number of noble Lords have said, it is very clear that these should be not just tech skills, such as maths and coding, but social and creative skills. Are the Government taking on board the recommendations of the Durham commission, which so cogently set out the case for creative skills?
Above all, the black cloud of Brexit looms over the thriving tech and digital sector. What can the Government tell us about their preparations to seek data adequacy, which is so important for the tech and digital industries?
Baroness Greengross (CB)
My Lords, in my brief speaking time, I will focus on three important issues: first, the Government’s proposals to reform adult social care; secondly, the NHS long-term plan, prioritising prevention in an ageing world; and, thirdly, the Domestic Abuse Bill.
While I welcome the additional funding that the Government have announced for social care, what legislation can this House expect to scrutinise in this Session—or, perhaps I should say, the next Session of Parliament? Over the past 25 years, we have seen a lot of policy reports on how to reform adult social care but little substantive action. The problem has not gone away and will not do so until it is solved, which is why I hesitate to recommend another report to the Minister. She will no doubt be aware that, in July this year, the Intergenerational Fairness Forum, which I chair, published a cross-party report, Sustainable Funding for Social Care & Intergenerational Fairness. It put forward a range of recommendations seeking to build consensus through the prism of intergenerational fairness. In brief, the report recommended a Dilnot-style funding system built on a national pooling of risk, with a means-tested threshold for personal contributions and a cap on overall care costs. This would be partly paid for by a 1% social care insurance contribution for those aged over 40 until they retire and the replacement of higher-rate pension tax relief with a new, flat-rate relief below 40%, along with other tax and benefit changes to meet the existing, unmet demands for care. I hope that the Minister will consider these suggestions.
On the NHS long-term plan and prevention, I welcome the commitment to strengthen our NHS by addressing workforce shortages and improving service delivery, building on the set of recommendations published by the NHS last month. According to projections by the Nuffield Trust released this year, there is a current shortage of one in 12 NHS staff. Strengthening the NHS is especially important in the context of an ageing society, as recognised by the Government’s healthy ageing challenge. We know that there are currently 10 million people aged 65 and above living in the UK; that number is expected almost to double, to 19 million, by 2050. This means that we will see greater strain on health services still, and a growing number of limiting co-morbidities that require more costly and complicated secondary and tertiary care services. To ensure the future sustainability of our NHS, and to support people to lead longer, healthier and more productive lives, the prevention of ill health is crucial.
Therefore, I welcome the fact that,
“The Long Term Plan sets out how Government will improve the prevention, detection, treatment and recovery from major diseases, including cancer, heart attacks and strokes”.
However, the ambition should go further and be global, which is why the International Longevity Centre UK has launched an international programme of work, entitled “Prevention in an ageing world”. It is estimated that, in 2017 alone, 27.1 million years were lived with disability due to largely preventable diseases; that number is projected to increase by 17% in the next 25 years if we do not prioritise the prevention of ill health right across the life course. It was therefore welcome that the G20 leaders’ summit in Osaka this summer—and the G20 Health Ministers only last week—pledged to promote prevention across the life course. I hope that the Minister can help ensure that the UK positions itself as a world leader in the prevention of disease.
On the Domestic Abuse Bill, I am largely pleased that the legislation has now been carried over from the last Session, and I look forward to this House’s scrutiny of the Bill when it reaches us. However, I am concerned that the Government did not accept the recommendations of the Joint Committee, which considered the draft Bill, regarding the definitions of the “same household” criterion and “personally connected”. We may also wish to clarify further how abuse by carers is covered by the Bill, because domestic abuse is more than just abuse by a spouse. Depending on what amendments the other place makes to the Bill, I suggest to the Minister that we may wish to amend the Bill particularly in this respect.
Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)
My Lords, given that the Queen’s Speech was little more than a poorly disguised election gimmick, it is surprising that there were no new proposals for legislation or policy on education, never mind higher education. To recap: the Government have failed to respond to the Augar review, published in May 2019, or to bring forward their own proposals for a sustainable model for HE funding. The Conservative-led coalition Government trebled tuition fees, overseeing a system in which the average student now graduates £50,000-plus in debt, while students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds graduate with an average debt of some £57,000. The system urgently needs to be reformed. Labour has committed to scrapping university tuition fees so that education is genuinely free for all and students do not face the prospect of a lifetime of student debt simply for seeking a decent education.
On HE funding, this is all the Government have to say:
“We are committed to making sure that higher education funding reflects a sustainable model that supports high quality provision, maintaining our world-leading reputation for higher education and delivering value for money for both students and the taxpayer”.
In a nod to parental concerns about what good value looks like, they added:
“We want to ensure we deliver better value for students in post-18 education, have more options that offer the right education for each individual, and provide the best access for disadvantaged young people”.
As part of a search for the safety of the long grass, they added finally:
“We are undertaking a review of post-18 education to ensure we have a joined-up education system that is accessible to all”.
Who can argue with much of that? However, it is clear that the current funding system is not working for students, nor for those in FE and HE providers.
Meanwhile, universities are struggling to manage the impact of successive real-term cuts in their budgets. In the face of wage inflation and increasing pension contributions, not only does this have an impact on teaching, vital services and staffing, as costs outpace income, but it also makes forward investment planning more difficult, storing up problems for future generations and for students themselves. The system urgently needs to be reformed, yet the Queen’s Speech made no reference to the Augar review—no doubt in fear of raising expectations that cannot be met, as I said.
At the time, the previous Education Secretary promised that the Government would,
“come forward with the conclusion of the review at the end of the year, at the spending review. That has always been the plan”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/6/19; col. 58.]
In the absence of the Government’s response to the Augar review, will the Minister set out a timetable for bringing forward proposals? Surely we have waited long enough. Universities need us to end the uncertainty, not least because our universities have to compete for students in a global market to ensure funding.
On widening participation, the Government say that they want to,
“provide the best access for disadvantaged young people”.
However, their decision to abolish grants worth £3,500 and replace them with additional loans that will have to be repaid was a mistake—a mistake that has left some of the poorest students saddled with a lifetime of debt. The Queen’s Speech was an ideal opportunity for the Government to announce the reinstatement of grants and a policy that would have been warmly welcomed across the House. It is therefore disappointing to see such a glaring omission at a time when income disparities are rising and are at their widest ever. In visiting universities over the past few months, I have been impressed by the steps that many of them are taking to change their demographic and widen participation. Birmingham is a particularly good example, with its dedicated support to students from hard-to-reach communities. Why are the Government not making this happen as standard?
Immigration policy is also an area of concern for the higher education sector, given that universities are dependent on overseas students for financial support and because of the tie-ups on international research projects. The Government’s Queen’s Speech pledged to introduce,
“a more accessible visa system to attract global scientific and research talent”.
This rings a bit hollow. It is worth reminding ourselves that 12% of the world’s international students attend UK universities and, as other Peers have noted, four of the top 10 global universities are here in the UK. We welcome the Government’s policy on work-study visas offering international students a two-year visa after graduation, up from the absurd situation they inherited under Theresa May. Can the Minister advise us of when the new system will come into play? Will it apply to entrants starting in 2020 or for students who are currently here, and how has this change been promoted? Given that the restrictions on post-study work visas was blamed for a drop in international student enrolments, communicating the U-turn will be key to reversing this trend by ensuring that prospective overseas students see the UK as a possibility.
On research and development, the Government said that they would be setting out plans in the autumn to significantly raise and boost public R&D funding. The statement has attracted support, but the other statement on introducing a US-style advanced research projects agency has alarmed the research community as it seems to miss the key point about research in UK universities. We need stability and certainty, something which at present is sadly missing. According to the Royal Society, since 2015 funding for Horizon 2020 has fallen by 28%, or €0.5 billion, and UK applications have dropped by a third. It is understandable that leading researchers do not want to gamble with their careers when they have no sense of whether the UK will be willing and able to maintain its global scientific leadership.
Through the Queen’s Speech, the Government announced plans to create a UK equivalent of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and to cut down on research funding bureaucracy. Over the past two years, UK scientists have already witnessed a huge reshaping of the funding landscape with the formation of UKRI. With this in mind, how will such a new body complement the work of UKRI? Moreover, does the Minister share our concerns and those raised by academics that the research and innovation communities—
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord has spoken for more than six minutes.
Lord Bassam of Brighton
I am conscious of that and I am coming to a close. Does the Minister share our concerns and those raised by academics about the creation of a new and different process running alongside the current one?
Finally, we have uncertainties about the future of research funding in the universities that help to drive the innovation that is vital to our economy. This fictional Queen’s Speech is a missed opportunity to answer hard questions—questions that will not go away.
Baroness Featherstone (LD)
My Lords, I want to use the opportunity of the humble Address to raise the issue of disability. It touches on many government departments, most of which are the subject of today’s debate. There was a moment in the glory and glow of the 2012 Paralympics where we got it as a nation: it felt inclusive and it felt wonderful. We were super proud of our athletes’ achievements and then, well, not a lot happened. That window seemed to close.
Throughout my political life, I have always been an equalities campaigner. In the 2005 to 2010 Parliament, I led for the Liberal Democrats on the Equality Act. During the coalition, as well as being a Home Office Minister, I was the Minister for Equalities. There, as some of your Lordships will know, I was the originator and architect of the same-sex marriage Act. I produced the first transgender action plan in the whole world and then I was reshuffled to DfID where I spearheaded and introduced the Government’s work on FGM. However, the work I am perhaps most proud of is the inclusion of disability at the very heart of DfID’s work across the developing world, ably helped by my noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie, who was then chair of the Select Committee.
The first lesson I learned when I made disability my priority as a DfID Minister was, “Nothing about us without us”. Key members of the disability lobby became my incredible advisory board. I took Ade Adepitan, the gold medal wheelchair basketball player, with me to Uganda on my mission to mainstream disability into DfID. He played basketball with the local Kampala team. The side he was on won by about 100 to one, which was not surprising because he was amazing. At the end of the game, the players were able to ask questions. They said that they could not play properly because their wheelchairs were so bad. Ade gave them what for. He said, “I practise for eight hours a day shooting 600 baskets. That is why I am good. Practice is what makes you good, not your wheelchairs”. That evening, both he and I gave speeches to the invitees at a vast party. Afterwards, a guy from the World Bank came up to me and said, “I’m building 300 schools here. I had not thought about this, so I will go back and change all our plans to make them fully accessible”. A guy from G4S came up to me and said, “I have a budget for corporate responsibility in Kampala, and I am going to buy the whole team new wheelchairs”, so they got them anyway.
What I have learned from my campaigning and my work is that, where there is political will, there is a way, and now disability is embedded in the DfID framework. While I have campaigned on women’s rights, trans rights, gay rights and international disability rights, it is glaringly obvious to me that there is one protected characteristic in the United Kingdom that is lagging behind in the equalities agenda, and that is disability. We in this House are fortunate to have amazing disability champions. I cite the noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell and Lady Grey-Thompson, my noble friend Lady Brinton, the noble Lords, Lord Low and Lord Shinkwin, my noble friend Lord Addington and many others, as well those who have unseen disabilities. There are others, and I offer my apologies for any omissions.
But how do you or I make the Government make this a priority? When it happens to you or someone close to you, you suddenly understand the hideous unfairness of what life deals out and the inequality that follows. The world may say the right thing—it may even have an Equality Act and a Disability Discrimination Act—but the lived experience is one of struggling. Some of your Lordships may know that two weeks ago, my noble friend Lady Ludford lost her husband, Steve Hitchins. She has given me permission to raise this here. Steve made an incredible contribution to political life as leader of Islington Council and more recently as chair of the Whittington Health NHS Trust, a role from which he had only recently stepped down. Three years ago, following a near-death illness, he had to have his whole leg amputated. Steve and my noble friend discovered, as have many before them, just how bad so many things still are when disability touches you or yours. I know that my noble friend will herself have much to say on this when she returns, particularly about transport.
There are of course many wonderful charities which fight this corner: Scope, Disability Rights UK, Leonard Cheshire, the RNIB and literally hundreds of others, all fighting for equality. The noble Lord, Lord Low, has said that:
“We must get away from the perception that disability rights are something that we in society out of the goodness of our hearts give ‘them over there, those poor disabled people’”.
He went on to say that,
“The advancement of disability rights is a shared task for all of us … for the rest of society no less than disabled people and their organisations”.
I could not agree more.
I am grateful to have the opportunity to say to the Government and to the Minister, who has just taken her place again, “Not good enough—not nearly good enough”. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech that would remedy the lack of enforcement of the Disability Discrimination Act, help further with levelling the extra costs of disability, right the wrongs of the benefit system for those with disabilities or address any of the other campaigns of the disability charities. So I say to them: if you want to restore any semblance of decency to a Government which have in recent times appeared to be harsh and uncaring, perhaps making this resistant inequality a priority would help.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, who made a powerful and important speech. There are six themes on offer in today’s debate and I have chosen to speak about the one that is conspicuous by its absence from the gracious Speech, in order to fill the void where I believe that culture, creativity and the arts ought to be. I start by welcoming the announcement prior to the Queen’s Speech of a £250 million cultural investment fund for infrastructure improvements in regional museums and libraries. It is a timely response to a cri de coeur from museum leaders who have warned of a quiet crisis in infrastructure brought about by a decade of cuts to local and government funding. As welcome as this money is, though, it begs a question. In shoring up our museums, galleries, libraries and theatres for the future, are we doing enough to ensure that every citizen has an equal opportunity to access and enjoy them?
In 2015, the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value revealed a worrying lack of social, economic and cultural diversity in audiences and participants across arts and culture, with the higher social groups accounting for 87% of all museum visits. Cultural organisations up and down the country are working hard to address this imbalance through innovative programmes, marketing and the use of technology, but they do so with one hand tied behind their backs—trapped by the narrowing over the past decade of cultural education in schools. Report after report has detailed the reductions in hours and teacher numbers and the number of students taking arts subjects at GCSE and A-level, yet Ministers are still reluctant to acknowledge that there is a problem.
Like other noble Lords, I welcome the ambition to,
“ensure that all young people have access to an excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work”,
but I regret that it does not explicitly include a commitment to reversing the decline in arts provision in state schools.
This is not just about providing the encounters with arts and culture that would diversify audiences of the future, nor even ensuring equitable access for every child to the rich cultural heritage that is their birthright. No, it is about social mobility, unlocking potential and the preparedness for work to which the gracious Speech refers. Evidence shows that learning through the arts develops core personal and employability skills —confidence, collaboration, communication, problem-solving and resilience—and builds the cultural capital that is crucial in determining who gets into the elite professions and who rises to the top. Independent schools have long understood this, selling themselves to parents on the basis of high-quality arts provision. Meanwhile, art is squeezed out of education for 93% of the population.
Studying arts subjects is also one of the most effective ways of developing creativity, a skill that experts predict will be the most valuable we can offer the next generation. We miss the point if we imagine creativity to be the preserve of artists alone. Without creativity there would be no innovation, no technological breakthroughs and no scientific discoveries.
Of course, science has its place in the Queen’s Speech, with a commitment to establish the UK as,
“a world leader in scientific capability”,
to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing society. It is a laudable ambition, but it ignores the role of the arts and humanities in addressing these complex questions—the historians, anthropologists, ethnologists, philosophers, ethicists and artists who can provide the context, culture and understanding of human behaviour that will be key to driving sustainable change.
This prioritisation is not surprising. The Prime Minister’s most senior adviser has a long-held passion for science, advocating back in 2014 for,
“a civilian version of DARPA aimed at high-risk/high-impact breakthroughs in … energy science … quantum information and computing”.
The reference to this in the Queen’s Speech raises questions about the Haldane principle and the systems in place to separate government from decisions on which research gets funded. Perhaps the Minister can clarify whether this new agency is intended to sit within or outside the UKRI umbrella.
The Speech closes, as will I, with the aspiration for the UK to continue to play a leading role on the global stage. Our artists and creative organisations are among the UK’s greatest ambassadors, but their international standing has been built on the freedom to move people and equipment across borders without carnets, tariffs or visas. It is a sector dependent on importing specialist freelance talent and in which even the brightest and best can earn less than the £30,000 salary threshold proposed in the immigration White Paper. Its number one priority post Brexit is continued and reciprocal mobility to protect the sector’s success and the substantial contribution it makes to the economy, exports and employment across the UK.
Given this, perhaps the Minister might take away the suggestion that the more accessible visa system promised for scientific talent might reasonably be extended to cultural and creative talent too. As we work to rebuild our global reputation after Brexit, the soft power our artists and cultural organisations generate for the UK will be more important than ever before.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, when I hear the noble Baroness speak like that, I want her contribution to end with the word “Discuss”, that we might form ourselves into a seminar and take the subject further. But I must be disciplined and stick to the subject I have chosen rather than engage with the fruitful ideas we heard a moment ago. It is to do with the whole question of DCMS, the online harms process and pre-legislative scrutiny—we are promised a Bill eventually—and all the issues that we have already begun to discuss here but that are coming forward again in greater detail later.
The metaphor of the cliff edge has been in wide use in recent times. They are down the other end at the moment raising the possibility, or probability, of a cliff edge in the Brexit debate. In a speech over the weekend, a former Governor of the Bank of England said we may be “sleepwalking” towards another cliff edge of a financial nature. The cliff edge to which I will refer is the one that I believe exists in the whole world of developing technology and the use of the internet; we have discussed this at length in various debates. The exponential rate of the expanding reach of social media, the internet and information technology vastly outpaces the capacity of a legislative chamber to promulgate a piece of legislation that deals with something that is already yesterday’s story before we put our thoughts together and make it enactable.
Because, I have to admit, I start from a rather low base, I began this year by reading Martin Moore’s Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age. It was a frightening read—very well researched, empirically based and threatening the very foundations of our democracy. The remarks I have heard about Russia’s readiness to interfere in the American election in 2020 just confirm the feelings I got from reading that book.
I am current reading—the seminar idea is coming to the fore again—Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which it defines as,
“a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for … extraction, prediction, and sales”.
I am about 250 pages in and almost having nightmares from what I read.
I am certain we have to do something, and the online harms process is the first instrument available to us. The noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Benjamin, and the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord McNally, have spoken passionately and eloquently about the age-verification aspect of what is now to be incorporated in the online harms Bill rather than to flow out of the earlier Act. That is certainly one aspect of it but from the conversations I have had, it seems to me that there are very serious matters for us to consider when we do this work together.
I would love the Government to assure me that the gracious Speech was more than just an election manifesto for a forthcoming electoral exercise by telling me what the timetable will be for producing the material that would lead to these debates. We had a consultation period that finished in July. When will all that material be processed and available to us so that we can put our minds to it, as well as the Government looking at it? What about this pre-legislative scrutiny? When? What is the critical path? As I say, we do not have time on our side. Developments in these fields of endeavour are threatening the very foundations of our society. We must have a sense of urgency about this. I have read enough to know that. I look forward to the contribution later from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who will say it with much more astute and learned phrases than me.
My contribution to a debate of this kind necessarily has to be broad-brush. Can we sense an urgency in how we address the questions that flow from the very successes of the internet, which carry with them baggage of an altogether more threatening kind? It is quite incumbent upon us to show an ability to do precisely that.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, before I make my remarks it would be appropriate—given what they will be—to remind the House of my declared interests and the fact that I am dyslexic.
I wish to address the subject of how people from neurodiverse groups and those with other disabilities get through exams, given that, in the new culture, they must have good spelling, punctuation and grammar. We have got to the nub of it quickly. This new culture is here: people must all have these largely technical skills, even if they have a brain like mine. I have a bad short-term memory and bad language-processing ability, which means that I acquire these skills slowly.
This is most manifest in the apprenticeship system, or the new T-level system that it is threatened will follow it. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, who has said that she will write to me to confirm this. This puts pressure on the people I have mentioned. From the information I have picked up, at the entrance-level requirement—which you must pass to get the qualification—between 30% and 40% of the marks will be removed if you use assistive technology that allows you to take the rest of the exam.
Once you have a job and the qualification, assistive technology will be provided through Access to Work. You will be provided with it if you are going to university with a disabled students’ allowance, but you will not get any marks for it if you happen to be doing an apprenticeship.
Many noble Lords will be thinking, “Why is he going on about this again? Didn’t we deal with it all those years ago in Children and Families Act?” The noble Baroness laughs, which is probably appropriate. We went through it all once because of the idea that you had to pass English to get through exams to become a carpenter or a hairdresser. Hairdressing was the first occupation that drew me to this issue because someone who had won a national prize was failing their apprenticeship because they could not pass the English test.
On 7 January 2014, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, said that,
“we will include new text in the skills funding statement to remind education and training providers of their duty to support young people with learning difficulties or disabilities and of their responsibility for providing reasonable adjustments, including the use of assistive technology where appropriate”.—[Official Report, 7/1/14; col. 1474.]
Which is true? Is it this new obsession with making sure that you can spell properly, even though you have a disability that says you cannot?
Let us go a little wider. If you have a visual impairment and depend on similar types of technology, differently formatted, or if you are dyspraxic—another big group; between the two, that covers 15% to 20% of the population —which of those commitments is dominant?
All those in this House involved in education are on the Front Bench at the moment. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackwood, will be justified in asking for support from them—I appreciate that that is the situation—but how are we are going to deal with this issue? I do not want to spend another three years boring this House senseless trying to get another solution to this problem. Something has gone wrong. Can the Government give us an assurance that they will put it right—and as soon as possible?
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak on health issues in the Queen’s Speech and in principle on a pressing problem that needs government action but does not appear in the Government’s agenda.
I welcome the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, with its focus on learning and not attributing blame or finding fault. This could transform morale in the NHS, which is fundamental to staff retention and high-quality care. However, it will achieve these benefits only if the blame culture of the many other NHS monitoring bodies is adjusted accordingly. I applaud the Government for that initiative.
The social care proposals, unfortunately, do not reflect the urgency of the situation for older people, those with mental health problems in particular, others and the NHS itself. Several other noble Lords have referred to this problem, in particular that there is no timeframe for the substantive proposals and legislative plans in this area to respond to this problem. Can the Minister give the House some assurance on that issue if at all possible?
I welcome the commitment to issue a mental health reform White Paper by the end of the year, which will pave the way for reform of the Mental Health Act. Can the Minister assure the House that legislation in that field will come forward in this Session?
I hope to contribute to work in these areas, but today I will focus on a health issue that could save the NHS billions of pounds and precious consultant time and which, in my view, should have been included in the Queen’s Speech. On 1 November 2018 medical cannabis was rescheduled and recognised as a medicine for the first time in 50 years, having been used as a medicine for thousands of years before then. However, the job to make medical cannabis available to patients has hardly begun. A year on, only two patients have an NHS prescription and 30 have a prescription from the private sector. In Germany, in marked contrast, medical cannabis was legalised in 2017 and in the following year 95,000 prescriptions were written—not 30 but 95,000—and public health insurers are required to provide cover for cannabis medication. Not in the UK. In Germany, 66 conditions are covered by medical cannabis compared with only one—it could be two by now—in the UK. In Italy, 13,000 patients receive medical cannabis prescriptions; in the Netherlands, 20,000; and significantly, in Canada, which has a much smaller population than we do, 400,000. I could give figures for other countries. We hear no reports of the ill effects of medical cannabis—unlike morphine, which is highly addictive and kills people, but we merrily prescribe that every day.
In the UK, the average cost of medical cannabis for a child with epilepsy is about £2,000 per month for the family, despite medical leaders in the field, such as Dr Mike Barnes, taking no fee for their work. Dr Barnes has spent hundreds of hours hacking through bureaucratic red tape and inertia for no fee. The high cost is due to the crazy rules which require medical cannabis to be imported on a named-patient basis for just one month at a time. The Government need to address this urgently. Bulk importation would slash costs. Cultivation licences are urgently required so that the medicine could be supplied locally and, again, more cheaply.
The Government need to remove cannabis medicines from the “specials” category and enable GPs to prescribe. Only then will the UK begin to come into line with the 50 other countries where medical cannabis has been legalised and patients are rapidly gaining access to the medicine they want and need. In all 50 countries, epilepsy sufferers are prescribed medical cannabis and in 49 countries pain sufferers benefit.
Another major problem in the UK has been the incredibly restrictive NICE guidelines. In its review of medical cannabis, NICE considered 19,491 research studies but dismissed all but four of them because they were not double-blind placebo-controlled trials. However, these trials are not appropriate to assessment of these plant products. I appeal to the Government to raise this issue with NICE so that the hundreds of thousands —probably close to 1 million—patients who suffer the unpleasant side-effects of approved drugs, or risk arrest by buying cannabis in the illegal market, can go to their doctor, get and prescription and improve their health.
In the meantime, drug science is doing its bit to tackle the problem. Professor David Nutt, notoriously sacked as chair of ACMD for telling the truth about the UK’s destructive drug laws, is one of the great experts on medicines and, in particular, medical cannabis. Drug science is doing some important work which will be launched in a couple of weeks’ time.
The NHS could save billions of pounds if medical cannabis was available at realistic prices at GP level. Hospital bed days, consultant appointments and costly medications could be saved. I hope the Minister can give some assurance about the Government’s determination to bring the UK into line with our leading European neighbours, Canada and others.
Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and I applaud her campaign. Recent years have seen a number of key changes to the UK pensions landscape, some concerning accumulation, such as auto-enrolment and master trusts, and some decumulation, notably pension freedoms. Some concern compliance and regulation, such as the charge cap, but, as the Pension Schemes Bill demonstrates, there is still much to do. On much, but not all, of it there is an underlying political consensus.
Auto-enrolment has rightly been acknowledged as a huge success, but data from the Pensions Regulator has shown that more than 9 million workers are not enrolled in a workplace pension scheme and, as usual, it is the low paid and those with several jobs, mostly women, who are missing out. What needs to be done to expand the scope of AE is well known and, although it is right to assess the impact of the 8% contribution level on opting out, we should make faster progress if we are to address the national challenge of undersaving. Expanding the scope to include the self-employed and others with non-standard forms of employment, lowering the age criteria and calculating earnings from the first pound earned will make a difference.
There is a long-standing issue concerning workers earning below the tax personal allowance whose employer enrols them into a net pay arrangement. Opportunities to address the inequity of tax relief for the low paid in these circumstances are not unfamiliar to HMRC. They exist and should be addressed.
As for pension freedoms, a policy introduced under the coalition Government without proper thought and analysis has proved to hold significant risks for savers and has left the FCA and TPA having to play catch up. Recent FCA data identifies that some 646,000 pension pots were accessed in the year to March 2019, with more than half withdrawn in full and almost half accessed without advice or guidance. This raises the prospect of avoidable financial harm, particularly from pension scams and unsustainable withdrawal rates. TPR and FCA research points to the increasing threat posed by pension scams.
We agree with the Government that it is high time to strengthen the oversight of pension saving, including powers to tackle irresponsible management of private sector schemes, and to have enhanced powers for the regulator. The “clearer, quicker, tougher” approach included in the Bill for TPR looks to be headed in the right direction, but it will have to be tested in Committee.
Nearly two-thirds of UK adults have multiple pension pots, which is not surprising given that the average person will have around 11 jobs over their lifetime. The PPI’s last pension survey revealed that 6% of unregulated pots are considered to have gone missing by providers, amounting to a staggering £10 billion. This is why we support a pensions dashboard that will compel providers to make consumer data available. It will increase individual awareness and understanding of their pension information, but we are mindful of concerns expressed about the absence of representation from the auto-enrolment sector on the steering group. How such arrangements are to be structured and operated will be important. The quality of scheme data will be fundamental to its success. Recent research has found that to be trusted, the dashboard should be government-funded. How do the Government respond to this?
Our consideration of pensions policy has hitherto been typically a binary matter characterised by DB or DC schemes. There is another way; the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, mentioned it. In 2017, following on from but not implementing the provisions of the Pension Schemes Act 2015, Royal Mail and the CWU agreed a new pensions arrangement: a collective defined contribution arrangement, as used in the Dutch and Danish systems. Multiple studies show that in the right circumstances a CDC can give a better outcome than others available, but it needs to be understood that that it is not guaranteed. It also needs to be understood that a CDC provides a target income, and work needs to be done to ensure that workers are aware of that and properly informed of its implications. We know that CDC schemes enjoy the support of the CBI, the TUC, the PLSA and the DWP Select Committee. Indeed, the RSA and the Pensions Policy Institute have been promoting a regulated form of CDC for a number of years. The Bill contains much that we have to examine, notwithstanding that we inherently support the CDC approach.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak on education, although this is stretching the Queen’s Speech way beyond its content. As my noble friend Lord Storey and others have said, the only mention of it is:
“My Ministers will ensure that all young people have access to an excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work”.
That is hardly controversial, but it would be good to know just how the Government think they are preparing young people for the world of work with their constant focus on academic GCSE and A-level results at the expense of vocationally talented and motivated learners. Do the Government never make the connection between the growth in gangs and violent crime among young people and the fact that their compulsory education has left them alienated from learning, with a lack of self-confidence and self-respect because Shakespeare and algebra were not their skill set? Had there been encouragement and opportunity to work on cars, plumbing, construction, catering, hairdressing, caring or the arts, how different their lives after school might have been, but schools are not measured on practical achievements.
I declare interests as a fellow of Birkbeck, which has adult and lifelong learning at its heart, and as a vice-president of City & Guilds, which for more than 140 years has provided highly respected and well-understood employer-led vocational qualifications.
Preparation for the world of work depends on careers information and guidance at the earliest stage—certainly at primary school. The country faces a critical skills shortage and all the encouragement we can muster should be going to those young people whose motivation and talents lie in areas where GCSEs will be, to a great extent, irrelevant. What are the Government doing to motivate those young people? They may gain no credits for their schools in the narrow definition of education against which schools are judged. They may wish to embark on apprenticeships, often in the teeth of the opposition of schools and parents who fail to understand just how important a skilled workforce may be, even if they cannot pass GCSE English and maths in the approved fashion.
Where is the Government’s encouragement for lifelong learning? We certainly need the skills of adults to make up for the shortfall in younger skilled people. The Augar report, which seems to have been conveniently parked, recommended much better funding and support for further education for adults and work-based education. I endorse all that the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, said on this subject. Love Our Colleges has been an active campaign, because for too long colleges have been the Cinderella service of our education system, with lower funding and lower pay for staff than for school teachers, but with huge responsibilities put on their shoulders. This has to be wrong.
As Liberal Democrats, we would aim to rectify this and to extend the pupil premium to the age of 19, because deprivation does not stop at 16. The £400 million that the Government have announced marks the first meaningful investment in further education for 16 to 19 year-olds for more than 10 years. It is not enough to reverse the decade of cuts, nor to properly stabilise the sector for the future, but it is a good start. We would introduce a personal education skills allowance to give motivation and funding to adults to retrain and reskill at key points in their working life. We would encourage support for those who take Open University degrees, who are motivated by learning but deterred by funding.
Given my portfolio, I must address the dreaded T-levels. I echo all that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said. This innovation is mistimed, mistaken and flawed. Instead of building on BTEC and City & Guilds qualifications, which have long been the benchmarks for industry, the Government threaten to undermine such tried and tested qualifications in favour of untried, untested T-levels. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, repeated the mantra that by renaming vocational qualifications as technical qualifications we would, at a stroke, solve the academic and vocational divide. If only life were that simple.
This Government will not be forgiven if, in pursuit of this latest initiative—which might well be one of many that founders in the course of time—they withdraw funding and support from technical, craft and vocational qualifications that have long served employers so well. I therefore appeal to the Government to think again on T-levels, to give more time to pilots and, meanwhile, to ensure that existing qualifications remain available and supported to work-based learners. I will not hold my breath for a response today as we do not have an education Minister here to reply, but the education team on these Benches will keep pressing the Government for action on further education and lifelong learning and for recognition of the very real value of practical work-based achievement.
We face huge skills shortages in this country: in construction, engineering, hospitality and the creative industries. We deserve an education system that meets the needs of learners and of the economy. Yes, of course we need to support our brilliant universities, but for the 50% or more who do not go to universities, let us celebrate their talents and the skills that they acquire that meet the needs of employers.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, the guiding principles of our health service are compassion, healing, prevention and equality. Every patient has their own concerns; all are to be treated as valuable individuals and not as units of whom we disapprove or with whom we have no empathy. Therefore, I again urge the Minister to find a way to show compassion and equality to a small but growing group of women who have frozen their eggs—a lifeline for women whose natural fertility is beginning to fade but who have failed to find a partner.
Typically, such women freeze their eggs in their early 30s, and the law is that they can be kept for only 10 years. Therefore, in their early 40s, when they might well think that the last possible chances of natural conception are ending, they will have to destroy those perfectly viable eggs. There was no logical reason for setting the 10-year limit. More than 1,000 women do this every year now, and the freezing technique has improved. The cost of egg removal starts at about £4,000, and then the woman has to pay whatever the clinic asks annually for storage—and of course she cannot refuse. At the end of this expensive journey, costing £7,000 to £8,000, there may be nothing except, to her, a mini death.
We should not condemn women who freeze their eggs because they cannot find a father for their longed-for baby. We should be sympathetic. The pressures on women when the biological clock is ticking are such that their psychological health is affected, and that is likely to make the forming of a permanent relationship even more difficult. No woman should be forced into the mindset of putting instant pressure on a new manfriend to procreate; or to settle for Mr Average or Mr He-Will-Do, rather than Mr Right, not least because such a man might not be the one to stick around and be a good father. Extending the time limit would actually lead to healthier practices, for a woman might then freeze her eggs in her 20s, when they are even more viable, rather than waiting until her 30s. Moreover, if her eggs have to be destroyed after 10 years, she may well resort to a donated egg, with the extra complications in that.
It has been argued that older motherhood is not a good idea and that a short storage period forces women to make up their minds. The law, however, lays down no upper age limit for the treatment of women. The law says that the clinician considering treating her should take into account the welfare of the potential baby and whether it will receive supportive parenting, thus each patient would be considered on the basis of her age, and there are plenty of births to over-40s these days. That is not to mention the lack of public disapproval of old men, such as the wrinkly old popstars on their fifth wife, whose new fatherhood is regularly celebrated in the media. It is not, therefore, for us or anyone involved to try to impose an artificial upper age limit on female procreation.
Another argument is that storage of eggs will increase to unmanageable proportions, but in the 40 years since IVF started, the number of embryos stored has increased by a huge amount without any trouble. Rules for storage for people who are, or are likely to become, prematurely infertile should be amended very slightly in order to accommodate the needs of women who have frozen their eggs. My Private Member’s Bill, about to be introduced, asks simply for consultation and suggests that where a woman has not yet completed her family—in her view, confirmed by a medical practitioner—the eggs should be stored for longer; that period could be confirmed by consultation, or could be 20 years, which really would be reasonable.
Women need the same ability as men to balance career aspirations and family- building. Extended storage gives them just this. They need a law that respects their human rights to a private life and to found a family. They need to be free of discrimination, for men can usually store their sperm for 55 years. Litigation about the human rights elements may take place, but how much more generous it would be for the department to consult and be kind.
A change would mean a great deal to many women and would have a profound and beneficial psychological effect on the way they lead their lives. Surely the Minister cannot deny the strength of this appeal to her better nature and that of her department. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Progress Educational Trust and the British Fertility Society—in fact, the entire profession—have all written to her to urge consultation. The profession and the patients are united in calling for this. In these troubled times, a gesture of kindness would be profoundly welcome.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I want to touch on the health service staff and on universal credit. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, for raising the issue of hospital doctors on the third day of debate on the gracious Speech. She warned that more legislation would not lead to better care. There might well be some improvements for the health service in the long-term plan, but it does not take away the responsibility of the Government for their top-down reorganisation, their failure to fund the service adequately and their past treatment of staff.
In 2016 there was another important event—the referendum was not the only one. It was the hospital doctors’ dispute. The Government’s treatment of the hospital doctors was shameful. They were called greedy, while what they wanted was to be able to get home occasionally and spend more time with their families. Family breakdown and suicide rates are shockingly high among doctors, and professional support is patchy at best. Staff shortages through illness and failure to recruit put extra strain on all involved. Should we really be treated by doctors who are beyond exhaustion? The failure by the Government to deal with these issues will affect our health and that of the vulnerable in the future.
Let us not forget that the shortage of GPs was exacerbated by the Government’s action on their pensions. It became fashionable to attack public service pensions, and the outcome was that GPs decided to go in their thousands. Professor Ted Baker, the CQC’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals, has linked the issue of poor community care with the 50% of A&E departments that are failing. Patients are increasingly frustrated at not being able to have an appointment, and this will eventually be reflected in people’s attitudes to GPs and the health service. The Government use the right words, but their actions need to speak louder.
I turn now to universal credit. The Prime Minister has indicated his support for the continued rollout of universal credit. This is worrying in the light of so many structural problems. The DWP has hired 1,000 extra staff to develop a specialist intelligent automation garage. A unit based in Newcastle and Manchester is developing machine learning to check claims for fraud through 100 welfare robots. The details are secret, as the DWP has refused freedom of information requests to explain how it gathers data on citizens.
There are clearly huge benefits to be claimed from automated intelligence-gathering, but if the human element of the welfare state is being diluted, and the vulnerable end up in what has been described as a “digital poorhouse”, what are the human rights implications? As Ed Pilkington said in his excellent article:
“What happens if you are one of the five million adults in the UK without regular access to the internet and with little or no computer literacy? What if the algorithm merely bakes in existing distortions of race and class?”
There is evidence of a rising error rate. Some 5,700 people a month are affected by claims of incorrect data sharing between HMRC and the DWP. I ask the noble Baroness for assurances—if not tonight then after the debate—on human rights, transparency, the objectivity of algorithms being used and on how vulnerable claimants will get to speak to a human being.
Turning to the “controversial Managed Migration pilot”—not my words but those of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in its seven-page commentary on 5 September—there has been strong criticism of laying the replacement regulations,
“on the cusp of the summer recess”,
and three months after the High Court judgment, using the negative procedure when it was clearly a matter for the affirmative procedure. Members of the House described it as “disrespectful to Parliament”. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee described it as a “tactical ploy”. I describe it as sharp practice. It has been stated that the DWP will publish an “evaluation strategy” by the end of 2019 and publish the evaluation of the pilot before returning to Parliament with further legislation to continue migration activity. Can the Minister say when the evaluation will be available to Parliament and when there will be a debate in this House on the managed migration pilot?
Finally, I will say a brief work on universal credit and the self-employed. I have said many times that UC is not fit for purpose for the self-employed because of its clunky methodology known as the “minimum income threshold”. It is estimated that about 700,000 families with at least one self-employed earner will claim support from universal credit. A study by Policy in Practice has revealed that this figure is likely to be a significant underestimate, which makes it all the more important for the Government to look at it again, and in particular at the vulnerable self-employed. If nothing is done, they too will end up in the digital poorhouse.
Baroness Verma (Con)
My Lords, I refer to my interests, as listed in the register.
It is welcome that the Government have referred to social care in the gracious Speech. However, adult social care is in crisis and has been for a number of years. The issues of cost and funding will only get more difficult if Governments are not willing to see the social care sector through the same lens as they see the NHS. As a provider of homecare over the last 20 years, I am aware that, with a reduction in funding and in the time available for care workers to deliver care calls, the increasing requirements imposed on providers by local authorities cannot be met.
We all recognise that we have a growing ageing population. Living longer should be not a burden but a celebration. It should be recognised as a sign of improved living standards. However, it appears that, although politicians are willing to go out and actively and publicly claim their admiration and affection for the NHS—they are absolutely right to do so—it is not about loving the NHS so much as loving the people who work in it and the people who are looked after by it. Why cannot politicians do the same in relation to the incredible and challenging work carried out by those delivering adult social care within our communities? Millions of people depend on the services of trained, poorly paid care staff, who provide a lifeline to families struggling to care for their loved ones.
I will focus on adult social care, predominantly around the older age group. Care staff deliver care across all age groups and to people with varying degrees of disabilities, whether they are physical or unseen disabilities. For far too long, the social care sector has required a fundamental shift in how that care is delivered. Instead of tinkering around the edges with intermittent small injections of funding to fend off crisis after crisis, a total rethink is needed of how care within the community setting is delivered. There is already a challenge in making the care sector an attractive place to work. Pay is low and the working conditions are deeply challenging, and an expectation of increasing responsibilities is making care work an ever-demanding job that offers few benefits but increases stress for both care workers and families.
Recruitment in the care sector has hit an all-time low. Providers are worried about the tone that has been taken in the Brexit debate on immigrants and immigration, and they fear that care provision will face serious employment problems. Filling vacancies is already extremely difficult. It is unrealistic to assume that the gap will be filled by local people because, as is evident in the NHS, those posts have always required immigrants to come in to support our critical infrastructures. The Government are talking about a points-based system and skilled workers being welcome in the UK. However, unless we are able to provide home-grown workforces to deliver for an increasingly ageing population, our hospitals will have further expensive challenges thrust upon them.
A realistic and pragmatic approach has to be taken to respond to the challenges that we face. Unless there is a fundamental shift in how care provision is viewed in this country, people who have worked throughout their lives and contributed to the growth of this great nation will increasingly be airbrushed out of society and out of government commitments. They are not seen as vote-winners or contributors. Although we have a housing crisis, it should not be acceptable for people wishing to downsize to smaller properties as they get older to have no available provision, or choice about where they spend their later years. Going into a residential home or a nursing home should not be among the few options available. It seems that, once you have less to offer, you are redundant and surplus to requirements, and can be put out of sight and out of mind. What a reflection of the country we are becoming.
The one inevitability in our lives is that we will grow old. Surely, it is not beyond our wit to develop a care system that provides care, dignity and independence. The feedback that we continually receive from our clients and their families is that care must be about more than just addressing physical needs such as washing, showering and toileting. It is about mental well-being and continuing to engage with the community at large. It is about being socially active and feeling valued. Offering a more holistic approach to care in a community setting would fundamentally reduce the pressures associated with people having to visit the NHS.
Although we talk about NHS staff with affection, care staff in the community are viewed in a completely negative way. Both systems support people in our communities, yet the care sector, which acts as a complete support system for millions of families, is, unfortunately, disregarded. I urge the Government to rethink how care provision is delivered and funded, and not to make it the Cinderella arm of looking after people. The demands associated with health and well-being will not reduce; instead, as we grow in number, they will increase. Unless we see a fundamental shift in how care provision is funded and care staff are rewarded in their pay packets, this crisis will most definitely grow and create unsustainable pressure on the NHS.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted to make the first contribution to this debate since the defeat of the Government’s programme Motion in the other place.
It is a long time since the last Queen’s Speech in June 2017, but now we have this one and another is due shortly. It is like waiting a long time for a bus and then seeing two of them come almost at once. However, this Speech is more manifesto than legislative programme. It promises that,
“Measures will be brought forward to support and strengthen the National Health Service”.
But those words may be just an election slogan, because the NHS long-term plan is under threat in several ways, and I will outline just three of them.
The first is the obvious lack of a specific funding plan to tackle the social care crisis. We were told in the gracious Speech that proposals will be brought forward to,
“reform adult social care in England”.
However, we were told in the 2017 Speech that:
“My ministers will work to improve social care and will bring forward proposals for consultation”.
Almost two and half years later, we are still waiting. Unless any new proposals are bold, and recognise what we need to pay for, then most, if not all, of the promised extra resources for the NHS will be taken up by looking after people in hospital who really should not be there. These people should be looked after in ways that they prefer, with greater independence and cost-effectiveness, at home or somewhere else outside hospital.
A second threat to the NHS plan is the Government’s lack of commitment to funding public health initiatives to address issues such as obesity, overconsumption of alcohol and tobacco smoking. The OECD estimates that obesity shortens lives by an average of 2.7 years and cuts GDP by 3.3%. It cites specifically the effectiveness of tackling the problem of obesity with measures such as the sugar tax, but this has been branded a “sin tax” by our Prime Minister.
So far, the Government are also failing to follow the successful lead of Scotland by introducing minimum unit pricing for alcohol. In fact, we are going in the opposite direction. Studies conducted using the University of Sheffield’s alcohol policy model suggest that cuts in alcohol duty over the last six years have resulted in not just the loss of £1.2 billion per year in revenue but over 60,000 additional hospital admissions. The additional costs to the NHS are estimated to be around £341 million.
Government funding is also being denied for cost-effective advertising campaigns which promote ways in which people are helped to quit tobacco. The amount spent on these campaigns in 2018-19 is less than half of that spent in 2015-16 and just 10% of the amount spent 10 years ago. Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable, premature death in the UK, killing around 100,000 people every year, which is around 300 people per day. The Government have committed to considering a “polluter pays” approach for the tobacco companies. Although there is no reference to this in the gracious Speech, I hope that they will now act on this principle to help deliver the additional national and local tobacco control activity needed to achieve their own target of a smoke-free England by 2030.
Thirdly, the greatest threat to the long-term sustainability of the NHS may be Brexit itself. The Government are clearly running away from producing an impact assessment of their Brexit deal. They know that our economy will be significantly smaller outside the EU than if we remained within it. Goldman Sachs estimates that the damage already done to the economy by Brexit over the last three years has been around £600 million per year. Brexit means less funding for the NHS and certainly not the additional £350 million per week that was promised. The economic facts contradict the claim painted on the side of that infamous red bus, which was probably the greatest lie of the decade. The NHS has serious staff shortages and Brexit is already causing some of the people we need to leave it.
It is astonishing that all this can be considered a price worth paying for changing our relationship with the EU from one in which we have a voice, a vote and a veto into one that means we will, like other neighbours of the EU, have to spend the rest of our lives negotiating with a much weaker hand than we have at present, accepting much of what we do not like in order to do business.
One reason for supporting Brexit is given by the tobacco lobbyists. They do not like the EU regulations to which we have agreed, which have successfully helped reduce tobacco consumption. Will the Minister confirm that, even if we are outside the EU, the Government will remain committed to maintaining exactly this kind of regulation and achieving the goals set out in their tobacco control policy?
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. I will concentrate largely but not exclusively on two subjects in the gracious Speech: education and culture. In many ways, these are intertwined, synonymous and mutually dependent on each other. Well, that at least should be the case. However, despite the huge success of the creative industries in this country and their significant economic contribution to the Treasury, I fear that there is real slippage in terms of investing in the next generation of creative artists.
During a recent Oral Question about government preparation for the future of subsequent generations, asked by my noble friend Lord Bird, I asked the Minister about reported financial threats to music hubs. These hubs have been deservedly lauded by the Government but have also been used as their “get out of jail” card when they have been tackled on the very real lack of music in schools and its disappearance from syllabuses such as the Ebacc. Concern over the funding of music hubs has been highlighted by widely reported comments from, for example, Sir Simon Rattle and the mother of the brilliant young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. She said that his success would never have happened in today’s schools—a pretty sobering thought—and that the lack of state-school funding for the creative arts is creating a “two-tier culture”. Sheku, the winner of BBC “Young Musician of the Year”, was educated at a state school in Nottingham and his mother has expressed deep concern for the future of succeeding generations of children. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, graciously promised me a response on the financial security of music hubs from the Department for Education and I would be most grateful if the Minister could chase up this much-needed reassurance.
Exposure to the creative arts is not only a good financial investment. It also has a profound social dividend and should be the right of every child, not just the privileged. Being given the means to express joy, anger or frustration through the arts is cathartic. It helps to reduce friction and, potentially, violence. Playing in an orchestra or singing in a choir teaches children how to listen to each other and work as a team.
I move on to another concern widely held in the musical and arts world, which has already been voiced in this Chamber: that of the difficulty of travel post Brexit—especially when accompanied by a cello. Artists visiting this country already accept much lower fees than those offered on the continent. Promoters and orchestral managers really worry that, if increasingly stressful visa and travel arrangements are added to that, these artists, who contribute to the vibrant exchange of ideas, simply will not bother coming. For much the same reason, foreign students, who bring in cross-cultural ideas as well as vital funds, will no longer come to our colleges and academies. I know that the Government are looking at this and I would be grateful for any update on progress.
Finally, I move on to health—a drum I have frequently beaten. I think the only Private Member’s Bill to start in the Lords and make its way onto the statute book in the last Session was an amendment to the Children Act 1989. It related to FGM and strengthened the protection for young girls at risk from this barbaric practice, which has absolutely no foundation in either religion or medicine. I do not suppose that there is a single noble Lord in this Chamber who is not appalled by this and who does not think that mutilating a young girl’s genitals is an utterly abhorrent, and of course criminal, act. But the most recent figures from NHS Digital, where FGM must be reported if it is seen, show that, every quarter, between 1,000 and 2,000 cases are seen by health workers. So, despite enormous efforts by the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health—I know how seriously they take this—we cannot and must not be complacent. We must continue to educate. I, for one, will continue to agitate until this loathsome practice is entirely eradicated from what we surely all like to think of as our civilised society.
Lord Morris of Handsworth (Lab)
My Lords, I too pay tribute to the gracious Speech. I declare an interest: I have family members who have worked in the NHS for many years.
In the gracious Speech we were told:
“Measures will be brought forward to support and strengthen the National Health Service, its workforce and resources”—
so, a promise of new hospitals to replace leaking, creaking, not fit for purpose buildings. But why were they allowed to get into that state in the first place? While some 34 hospitals will receive £100 million in initial funding for development projects, the money will not be available for some years.
Over recent weeks, my attention has been caught by a number of reports on the NHS. Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor working in the NHS, wrote in the Guardian about staff trying to care for their patients amid collapsing ceilings, broken boilers and unsafe fire cladding. But she says that it is people, not bricks and mortar, that the NHS is really crying out for. The Care Quality Commission reported that more than half of the A&E units in England are providing sub-standard care because they are understaffed and cannot cope with the continuing surge in patient numbers. Sally Warren of the King’s Fund reports:
“Staff are working under enormous strain as services struggle to recruit, train and retain enough staff with the necessary skills”.
Nick Scriven from the Society for Acute Medicine told of an inadequate workforce that is haemorrhaging senior staff. He warns that the NHS is reaching a vital tipping point where care will be compromised. But as well as an urgent need for more trained staff, the Government need to act on ways to reduce waiting lists and bed-blocking.
Dame Sally Davies, the retiring Chief Medical Officer, recently called on politicians to put children’s health before company profits. She demanded tough action against the tide of junk food, which is causing obesity and shortening lives. Ten primary school children in every 30 are overweight, which in later life will lead to heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes.
In April 2018, the Government put a tax on sugary drinks, which has resulted in manufacturers cutting sugar content by nearly 29%. It is reckoned to have taken 90 million kilos of sugar out of the nation’s diet. But, during the Tory leadership campaign, Boris Johnson, not yet Prime Minister, pledged to halt any new “sin tax”—his words—on sugary drinks. That same day, obesity was named by Cancer Research UK as causing more cases of four common cancers than smoking.
The Government was urged to put a tax on sugar and calories in everyday foods consumed by children. Instead, in March 2017, they challenged companies to reduce sugar and calories in those foods by 20% by 2020. So far, companies have managed a less than 5% reduction. How much healthier might the nation be if it had been a tax rather than a challenge? The Prime Minister apparently prefers to listen to the manufacturers and sellers of junk food in dealing with a health crisis—one assumes for company profits rather than the health of the nation.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
My Lords, I start by remarking on what very strange times we live in and the frankly rather surreal context to the debate. I was particularly struck yesterday by the remark of my noble friend Lord Beith, who I am delighted is in his place next to me, who called this the “fantasy gracious Speech”—and that was before the vote to reject the timetable for the withdrawal agreement Bill and the Prime Minister’s recent announcement that it will now be “paused”.
With that preamble aside, I will start with one aspect of the gracious Speech that I welcome: the commitment to reform the Mental Health Act to,
“improve respect for, and care of, those receiving treatment”.
That is based on the independent review of the Mental Health Act, chaired by Sir Simon Wessely, which reported in December 2018 with 154 recommendations aimed at improving and updating the Mental Health Act 1983. That is critical, given the growing number of detentions, of which we know that there was a 40% increase over a 10-year period, and grave concerns about the disproportionate numbers of people from black and minority ethnic communities being detained.
Unless my hearing failed me, at the start of the debate I was pleased to hear the Minister confirm that it is the Government’s intention to publish the White Paper outlining their response to the independent review by the end of the year. I welcome that, but is the Minister able to say anything more about the timetable for bringing forward a new mental health Bill and whether the Government will be able to accept the Wessely review’s recommendations in their entirety? We should not lose sight of the fact that the best way to reduce the need to detain patients under the Act is to prevent their health deteriorating and reaching a mental health crisis in the first place. That is best done through expanding and improving mental health services.
So it is to be hoped that delivering the improvements contained in the NHS long-term plan will bring real benefits to people with mental illness. However, as we have heard before this afternoon, these all rest on having enough staff with the right skills to deliver care to patients—so could the Minister also say when the Government will publish their legislative proposals to implement the long-term plan? While I welcome plans for a new piece of mental health legislation, as I have said, it is also important that the forthcoming White Paper considers the non-legislative steps needed to improve patient care.
The noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, made the really important point that the review of the Mental Health Act found that mental health facilities where patients are admitted are often some of the most out of date. Indeed, they were described as the “worst estate” in the NHS, at times with more in common with prisons than hospitals. Badly designed, dilapidated buildings and poor facilities contribute to a sense of containment and make it difficult for patients to effectively engage in therapeutic activities. This capital investment to improve the in-patient physical environment, which was recommended by the review and supported by the long-term plan, is critical, so could the Minister set out what action is being taken to fund these infrastructure improvements?
Ensuring that patients are not detained any more than is absolutely necessary—something I am sure we would all agree with—requires expanding mental health services and having the medical workforce to deliver and sustain the commitments in the long-term plan. That will require the Government both to sort out the short-term recruitment and retention crisis in the mental health workforce and to prepare for the longer term by doubling the number of medical school places by 2029, as was discussed in Questions yesterday.
One group who would benefit from proposals for greater integration of mental and physical healthcare are those who have mental illness and alcohol and substance abuse issues. They are often seen by various services but do not get the holistic care that they need. I think that we all know that patients being seen for mental health conditions often do not get the physical healthcare they need and vice versa, with those with physical health conditions often having their mental health needs ignored. I was therefore interested in the proposals put forward by NHS England and NHS Improvement for an NHS integrated care Bill to assist the delivery of the NHS long-term plan and allow services to work together more easily. Can the Minister say what is happening in this area?
A common misunderstanding is that the Mental Health Act applies only to adults rather than to young people, but we should note that, in total, almost 3,500 children and young people were admitted to inpatient mental health hospitals in 2017-18, with more than 1,000 formally detained under the Mental Health Act and more than two-thirds of those children aged 16 and 17. Therefore, as the review makes clear, detention should only ever be a last resort. Consequently, it is vital that reforms to the Mental Health Act are accompanied by greater investment in early intervention for children and young people, so that more young people receive support in their communities before they reach crisis point. Again, I would be grateful for anything that the Minister might be able to say, either now or later, about the specific steps being taken by the Government to make early support a real priority.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as outlined in the register. It is a pleasure to follow the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, because I have had to cut my own considerably so that I might contribute to this debate on the gracious Speech not only on my own account but to some extent on behalf of my noble friend Lady Emerton, of Tunbridge Wells, who has given notice of her retirement from 1 November. I am glad that I might be given a few extra seconds as a result. She very much wanted to be here today but is unable to be so. I want to acknowledge her extensive contributions to the nursing profession over the past six decades, and particularly the distinction with which she has served this House for the past 20 years.
On a more personal note, her encouragement, mentorship and support to me as a “fellow nurse” has been exemplary since my appointment to this House four years ago. I wish my noble friend a happy retirement and I am fully aware, having spoken to her on the phone this afternoon, that she is following my contributions in the House now and will do so in future. I can only hope that, with further experience, I will live up to at least some of her high expectations.
I welcome the new laws that the Government intend to bring forward to assist in the implementation of the NHS plan in England, in particular the £33.9 million per annum increase in the budget by 2023-24. However, how do they intend to ensure that the appropriate workforce will be available to deliver the plan? The recent NHS people strategy outlines the challenges that we face in this domain. Is it not time for the Government seriously to consider writing off student debt for healthcare professionals who work in the NHS and state-funded social care roles for three to five years after graduating from university? Providing “golden hellos” to recruit to hard-to-fill roles, including learning disability and mental health nursing, podiatry and some areas of medicine, should be seriously considered. Having investigated the Army support structure for attracting nurses, it is clear to me that there are established successful schemes of this kind in the UK public sector. Why cannot this approach be adopted more widely? We will not be able to provide safe staffing in the NHS unless we recruit and retain excellent healthcare professionals.
I was a member of the pre-legislation scrutiny committee for the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, ably chaired by Sir Bernard Jenkin MP, a strong advocate for the Bill. As others have outlined, the Bill will transform the way in which patient safety incidents in the NHS are investigated. Investigations would be for the purpose of learning and not to attribute blame or fault, thus improving patient safety by encouraging staff to identify areas of concern and to be candid in the information they provide to the investigatory body. I fully support this approach, while recognising that the Bill requires proper debate and amendment, as other noble Lords have outlined. I hope that we might be able to do this in what might be a very short term after what has happened today.
My noble friend Lady Emerton has been a champion in promoting high standards of community-based, individualised care for people with a learning disability. On behalf of us both, I ask what the Government’s plans are for finally replacing inappropriate, institutionally-based services with more suitable provision. This issue appears notably absent from the gracious Speech.
It is essential that the proposed Mental Health Act reforms are initiated. This will require additional investment in mental health services, as others have outlined, yet the NHS long-term plan, with investments relating to 40 new hospitals, makes no mention of new community mental health facilities. The Royal Colleges of Nursing and Psychiatrists call for an end to dormitory provision in mental health wards; a fleet of vehicles to transport people having a mental health crisis to a care facility, rather than using police vehicles; and the provision of more appropriate assessment space in emergency departments, in particular therapeutic calming spaces. Can the Minister outline whether any such investment is planned?
It is acknowledged by the King’s Fund that the NHS plan will not be achieved without further investment in social care, as was far more ably outlined by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. The Government intend to bring forward the Green Paper proposals to reform adult social care to ensure dignity in old age. This is urgent. What is the planned timetable for this legislation? It is unacceptable in 2019 that dignity in old age should be a vision for the future rather than a right today.
Health is adversely affected by poverty. Barnardo’s, the Trussell Trust and many other bodies estimate that Brexit will create inflationary pressures that will hit the poorest in our society the hardest. Will the Government commit to providing a hardship fund for those on universal credit if there are sudden increases in food prices? If so, can they guarantee that such a fund would provide grants and not loans? Reducing food poverty and investing in public health measures, including health visiting services, particularly for children, may do more to improve the nation’s health than the proposed hospital building programme. We need a rounded approach.
It has been a pleasure to contribute to this debate. I look forward to the Minster’s responses to the issues that I have raised. Finally, I wish on behalf of the nursing profession to thank other noble Lords for their appreciation of my noble friend Lady Audrey Emerton’s public service contributions and her long and distinguished service in nursing, the NHS and this House.
Lord Smith of Leigh (Lab)
My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the LGA and chair of the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership; and I am still an elected councillor for Wigan.
I was not going to talk about local government finance today; I have bored this House often enough on that subject. However, I must respond to the reference in the Minister’s introduction to yet another social care precept and emphasise how unfair such a system is. If you put 1% or 2% on council tax it sounds even across the country, but the amount of revenue raised by it depends on the value of properties, the banding and so on. Quite frankly, there are more £1 million houses in Richmond than there are in Wigan. A 1% increase in Wigan raises about £1 million; in Richmond it is about £2 million, and our population is bigger. This is a discriminatory move, and I hope that the Government have learned from previous problems.
Sustainable health is an important area which has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords. Just before the Conservative Party conference, the Prime Minister visited north Manchester and announced that a new hospital was going to be built as part of the capital programme. That was welcome in the city, because the old one is a disgrace and ought to have been replaced many years ago. The health outcomes in that part of the city are among the very worst in the country. Manchester has some of the worst anyway, and north Manchester is one of the most deprived parts of the city, with life expectancy between four and five years below average. Even greater is the gap in healthy life expectancy. In north Manchester, people become ill in their mid to late 50s with a series of long-term conditions and become dependent on drugs and so on. In Oxford, people are probably in their 70s before that happens, so they can have a number of years of healthier life.
Welcome as the new hospital is, it is only going to have a marginal impact on those health statistics because we know that the determinants of health are not simply medical facilities but lifestyles and economic and social factors. In that area, 21.7% of people smoke, whereas the national average is 15.5%, which is considerably different; one in four is economically inactive, which we know makes a difference to health; and one in three older people is said to be destitute. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said, Sir Michael Marmot’s report in 2010 identified all these wider links to health outcomes which we need to think about. We need to rethink how we are going to change health. The long-term plan was a welcome move in the right direction, but it is not far enough. We need to go further.
It was recently said that life expectancy in the UK has risen for about 47 years, but it has now begun to tail off. There are international comparisons, but it is probably worse in the UK than anywhere else. We need to understand this. The gap in healthy lifestyle between the top fifth of the population and the bottom fifth is growing. People have said that this is down to austerity; I do not want to get into that argument. We need to acknowledge that this is happening and try to find ways of dealing with it. The CQC report, which a number of noble Lords have mentioned, highlighted the inexorable rise in demand for the NHS. July levels in A&E were the highest for a number of years. On Friday, we had a conference in Manchester about winter pressures. We need to recognise that, for the NHS, winter now lasts about 10 months of the year.
As your Lordships may know, there was some devolution of health powers to Greater Manchester in 2016. We have a partnership made up of health authorities, local authorities, voluntary and community groups and so on. We want to recognise that our challenge is not simply to deliver a good and effective health service. It is not enough to make sure that there is better integration between different parts of the system. We must address the fundamental issues of health and well-being outcomes. We are not going to do that simply by concentrating on health matters; we want to concentrate on wider social issues. We surprised some people with our early strategy which included school readiness and economic activity. We have achieved some things, but I do not have enough time to go through them.
I want to look to some solutions. Health cannot do this on its own; it has to work in partnership with other people. It is part of public service reform: reshaping services to meet people’s needs; thinking about population health with prevention and early intervention. Above all, it is about keeping it local: identifying local needs and encouraging collaboration and innovation. There are things we can do together to improve and make the health service more than just an ill-health service.
Lord Sharkey (LD)
My Lords, I will touch on three issues, all to do with higher education, and I declare an interest as a member of council at UCL. The first is the decline in part-time and adult students. There really is a crisis here. Between 2010 and 2016, there was a 60% fall in part-time students. The decline was especially heavy in sub-degree courses which we rely on to train the next generation. Because of this enormously steep decline, and the failure of the Government to intervene, since 2010 we have lost about one-third of part-time education providers. All those who gave evidence to the recent Economic Affairs Committee inquiry stressed the huge importance of life-long learning, of part-time study, of upskilling and reskilling, but none had a plan for actually doing any of that at scale. How do the Government intend to address this enormously important issue, and what is their plan for delivering lifelong learning?
The next issue is the very high interest rates charged on student loans, currently standing at RPI plus 3%. Students have been paying, and are continuing to pay, around 6% interest. This is a very high rate and very much greater than the Government’s cost of borrowing. The Government and some commentators have defended this very high interest rate on the grounds that it is progressive. Many disagree, including the Economic Affairs Committee. We concluded that,
“graduates who only just pay off the loan within the 30 years will pay far more in real terms than higher-earning graduates who pay the loan off sooner”.
We called for the interest rate to be reduced to the level of the 10-year gilt rate, currently around 1.5%. Do the Government still believe that the 6% interest rate is progressive? Will they consider adopting the committee’s proposal to reduce it?
The third issue is that of a sharia-compliant student funding system. I first raised this issue with Ministers in January 2016 and have raised it frequently since. Sharia law forbids interest-bearing loans. That prohibition is a barrier to Muslim students attending our universities and has been a problem since 2012. Successive Governments have known about this problem and have recognised that the current system effectively discriminates against devout Muslims. In April 2014, a BIS consultation on the issue generated an astonishing 20,000 responses. The consultation report noted:
“It is clear from the large number of responses ... that the lack of an Alternative Finance product as an alternative to conventional student loans is a matter of major concern to many Muslims”.
But the report also identified the solution. The solution is a takaful, a well-known and frequently used non-interest bearing Muslim financial product. The Government explicitly supported,
“the introduction of a Sharia-compliant Takaful Alternative Finance product available to everyone”.
That was five and a half years ago. Two years ago, we passed the enabling legislation, but nothing else has happened. Why this extraordinary delay? The Government blame complexity, completely overlooking the fact that the sharia-compliant version of Help to Buy took only five or six months from the beginning to develop and launch. I am told that the reason really lies in a lack of political will and in the inability of the Student Loans Company and HMRC to organise themselves to deliver the product.
I last asked the Government about this in an Oral Question on 25 July. I asked what progress was being made. The Minister replied that the Government would,
“set out plans for implementation as we conclude the post-18 review at the spending review”.—[Official Report, 25/7/19; col. 813.]
The spending review took place seven weeks ago, and still we hear nothing. I remind the Minister that in 2013 David Cameron promised, at the World Islamic Economic Forum, to introduce a sharia-compliant student finance scheme, saying:
“Never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan – simply because of their religion”.
That was six years ago. It is shameful that we have allowed so much time to elapse; it is shameful that we have known the solution for more than five years; and it is shameful that the Government display such an apparently casual contempt and disregard for our Muslim community. Can the Minister say when David Cameron’s promise will be fulfilled?
Earl of Devon (CB)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and so many others more qualified than I. This was my first Queen’s Speech and it was a surreal experience indeed—and not just because I sat between the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the erudite noble Viscount, Lord Ridley. Given the messy political reality of a legislative programme that will never see the light of day, this was, effectively, a party-political broadcast, and I question whether that is an appropriate use of Her Majesty’s ancient and regal authority.
As for the topics of today’s debate, I refer to the register. I am proprietor of a heritage-based social enterprise active in health and well-being, social care, and education. I am also a technology litigator with clients in the digital space, and I am a father of school-age children.
I am encouraged by support for integrated healthcare and the opportunity for the NHS to work more freely with partners. In Devon, I see how much volunteers, charities and private enterprise do to support public health and well-being: the more the Government can support local delivery of health and social care within communities, the better. I applaud the renewed focus upon mental health and highlight the need to ensure that everyone in society has ready access to a mental health professional—not because of mental illness but to support our mental wellness. I also strongly support the development of social prescribing. This will strengthen communities, improve health and decrease reliance on primary healthcare.
I note the commendable position that the NHS is not for sale in any future trade deal, but this must not preclude reasonable commercialisation. There are major benefits to be obtained by the secure use of anonymised health data at a national level. Given our single health system and our strength in data science, the UK must lead the world in the use of AI in healthcare, yet we lag behind in basic digitisation of medical records. What are the Government doing to address this?
In the digital space, the Government are focused upon online harms and a desire to make the UK “the safest place in the world to be online”. Though I support age verification, I sound a note of caution: in the brave new post-Brexit world, undue restrictions on internet platforms in the UK may well limit our access to cutting-edge ideas and technology. Rather than restrictive censorship, is it not better to encourage education in safe and appropriate internet usage? Rather than child-proofing the internet, it is more empowering to internet-proof our children and ensure that it is treated as a public space with enforceable public standards of behaviour.
Turning to culture and tourism, on which the noble Baronesses, Lady Doocey and Lady Bull, spoke so well, I applaud the work of the APPG on Arts, Health and Wellbeing, particularly its work on heritage and its contribution to healthy and sustainable communities.
While welcoming the recent announcement of funding to support public museums, I ask that the Minister acknowledge the huge contribution of private heritage to this sector. Historic Houses, of which Powderham is a member, preserves thousands of heritage landscapes, collections and buildings in their natural state, generating over 26 million visits each year—more than the National Trust—without any recourse to the public purse. Historic Houses is to our heritage what national parks are to our nature: thriving cultural centres alive within their natural environment. In comparison, galleries and museums are often lifeless efforts to preserve heritage outside its meaningful context—a form of zoo. Will the Government acknowledge that it is a national shame that these buildings are carrying over £1.3 billion in repair backlogs, with insurance and compliance costs now skyrocketing?
Finally, multiple heritage bodies have major concerns that the draft Environment Bill introduced today in the other place excludes heritage from its definition of the natural environment. It is dishonest to decouple our natural and man-made environments. We occupy the most man-made landscape in the world, and we need to be responsible for it.
Take the River Exe estuary as a simple example. The five miles of boggy marsh between my home and Exeter tell of over 3,000 years of human interaction with nature, from Bronze Age trading ingots through a major Roman city, to the medieval Countess Wear, creating England’s second biggest wool port. Thereafter we see England’s earliest canal, alongside acres of Dutch-drained early modern pasture, rearing England’s finest spring lamb. Then, we see Brunel’s remarkable atmospheric railway embankments, which stoically hold back the ever-rising sea levels to protect Exeter’s “green lung”—and Europe’s largest selection of car showrooms at Marsh Barton. The area is also, uniquely, an SSSI, a Ramsar site and a major RSPB reserve, not to mention the shellfish, cycle trails, foreshore and pubs, and England’s oldest sailing club. Nature and culture are indivisible in this landscape. As recognised by UNESCO’s Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, the integration of culture and nature is essential to the sustainable development of both. We cannot and must not separate the two.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton in welcoming some aspects of the Pension Schemes Bill, particularly easier access to information through the pensions dashboard and greater protection from misleading information.
Unfortunately, the Government’s understanding of their legal and moral responsibilities relating to misleading information was exposed recently when their QC in the “Back to 60” court case stated:
“It’s clear from case law that the enactment of primary legislation carries with it no duty of fairness to the public”.
Rather than acknowledge that a lack of fairness from government was unacceptable, as it would be from a private pension company, it was used to justify leaving many thousands of older women in poverty. Even the judges in the case said they were saddened by the women’s situation.
This proposed Bill on pensions again fails to take account of the differences in working lives of men and women and, as a result, will continue to treat women unfairly. The gender pay gap remains significant, even when comparing women and men in full-time employment. Women earn considerably less than men through their working lives, and the gap is at its widest for women over the age of 60. It is estimated that women starting work today can expect to receive £225,000 less over their working lives than men.
The pay gap is a disadvantage to women throughout their working years and goes on to make a substantial difference to their pension entitlement should they enrol and stay in an occupational pension scheme, but, not surprisingly, women of all ages are less likely to join workplace pension schemes than men. Nearly 10% of women opt out of auto-enrolment compared with 7% of men. For older women, this increases to 33% opting out.
The reasons are clear. Women are more likely to be in part-time, temporary or unskilled jobs. They are also more likely to be single parents and carry the responsibility of caring for elderly or disabled family members. It is often their money that is vital for immediate household needs such as food and clothes, and they often meet childcare costs from their salary. When every penny is needed for the here and now, it is hard to balance that against a distant future, particularly when that future seems further away than ever.
The treatment of the WASPI women is likely to make all women sceptical about pensions. Rules change and goalposts shift, but never to the benefit of women paying in. Is there any possibility that the Government will make an act of good faith to the women who were misled over their pension entitlement? After all, the Prime Minister agreed that he felt that the answer he got back from the Treasury on behalf of his own constituents was “not yet satisfactory”, and said that, if he was lucky enough to become Prime Minister, he would undertake to return to this issue with fresh vigour and new eyes to see what he could do to sort it out. That being the case, can we expect to see fresh action on this issue soon?
Finally, can the Minister comment on how workers who invest their future in pension schemes can be represented in decisions about how those funds are invested? The money is, after all, their deferred wages.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)
My Lords, listening to the Queen’s Speech, what drew my attention was the reform of the immigration regulations and that these would include restriction of freedom of movement. I agree that we need reform of the Home Office Immigration Rules, because they are totally unfit for purpose. For instance, this year we saw Windrush remembered, and only last week heard that a lass born in Glasgow 30 years ago now faces deportation. The whole thing is agony for so many people. They are here and yet the Home Office seems to treat them very unjustly. I therefore suggest that we make a fair adjustment of the regulations so that nobody will feel that they are being used in an unfair way.
We face immigration problems that will increase as the years progress. We see that climate change in Africa could well turn many people from their homeland to look for somewhere else to survive. Warfare in places such as Syria and Afghanistan will also lead many people to leave their homeland to look for somewhere they can have a fair and peaceful existence. We, as the United Kingdom, could be the leaders in this reform of immigration thinking. So often we are the people who react, not the people who lead. We could be the people who lead on these immigration transformations. That means we would need to take the initiative; we would have to forget building walls and start building bridges. That is the only way we can become a whole human family.
I sometimes wonder how we disregard all the benefits of freedom of movement. People came here from other parts of the world, bringing new medication, new engineering and new academia. So many new things came from places other than the United Kingdom. Now we are thinking of restricting that. It will make us a country that does not meet its obligations, denies people their rights and denies itself the benefits of immigration—the benefits of new people coming here.
Last Sunday morning, I was in London—we had a special sitting on Saturday that had kept a Welshman here. On the Sunday morning, I went to the Castle Street Welsh Baptist Chapel. It was one of many Welsh churches built here over the past century as people came from Wales and worked in the shops, as schoolteachers and as dairy people.
I am told that there were 3,000 Welsh dairies in London in the 1920s and 1930s. What would have happened if the farmers and milkmen of Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire and the Conwy Valley had decided to stay at home? I hate to think what people in London would have done for their cup of tea. We came: we brought ourselves and our abilities here to London. Imagine if the vineyard owners of France had been denied the right to come to the UK. I am a teetotaller, but I am sure others would have felt the strain of that situation.
We can lead, but we must do that in a fair way. Schoolteachers who came to London—Miss Jones, Miss Roberts, Miss Edwards and Miss Hughes—were great teachers, but if they had stayed in Wales, what would have happened to education in England? I am told that in some places, half the teachers came from Wales. We were glad you had us, but we must keep encouraging freedom of movement, not denying the future or what we have inherited from the past.
We can do it. Where there is no vision, the people perish. We must have the vision to keep freedom of movement so that the benefits of other places can be ours and our contribution, such as the parliamentary system, can be theirs. Canada had a general election yesterday. I like the result—not everybody will, but I do. It is the same format as ours. One thing they beat us on is that they have desks to bang in the chamber of their Parliament. We exported that, we exchange ideas, we are people who are free to move—and that is a benefit to us all.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lord, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, and I was very pleased to hear about the Welsh dairy farmers. As far as I know, Stoke Newington was an area where the milk for London used to be produced and where the cows lived.
Although it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, the Queen’s Speech was certainly not a pleasure to hear on my area of passion, which is our food system. As ever with the Government, there was little to do with food policy and our need to change. Every day, we hear stories about how our food system does not work. Take the first thing of the day—breakfast. Every day, 1.8 million children are at risk of starting the day hungry. Hungry children cannot concentrate. They miss out on hours of valuable learning. By the time they leave school, children eligible for free school meals are, on average, 19.3 months behind their wealthier peers. This is data recently collected from Magic Breakfast. This is not just gross inequality; it is also economic madness. It is certainly not unlocking our children’s full potential.
Children from the poorest households also struggle to eat healthily, which in part explains why children with severe obesity are four times more likely to live in deprived areas than in less deprived areas. The Chief Medical Officer’s report two weeks ago told us about the devastating consequences of childhood obesity, to which other noble Lords have referred. There are 100 new cases of childhood type 2 diabetes every year. There are 650,000 children with fatty liver disease and 90,000 children eligible for bariatric surgery, of whom less than 10 get the operations every year. Sally Davies was right to say this is a blatant contravention of children’s right to health.
Food is not only fundamental to health; it is also fundamental to the climate emergency. Currently, a third of greenhouse gas emissions derive from deforestation, as we grow palm oil for processed food and cut down rainforests to grow soy to feed livestock—possibly the most inefficient way of obtaining proteins that we could manage. It drives species extinction, as well as ill health.
Yet, in the gracious Speech, there was silence on all of this. The Agriculture Bill, which is making its way through Parliament very slowly—after the news tonight, I have no idea when it might arrive here, so I would be grateful if any noble Lord has a clue—concentrates a lot on the environmental goods that farmers need to provide. It promises public funds for public goods and nobody wants to disagree with that, but we need this Bill to help support farmers to deliver health goods as well.
Support for the horticulture sector is a case in point. Much neglected by the common agricultural policy, we could grow a great deal more of our fruit and veg in the UK. With the right mix of marketing and demand-side incentives, including public procurement, we could help our farmers improve our diets. It is a staggering fact that, for every one of your five a day you eat, your risk of early mortality decreases by 5%. Yet, according to the Food Foundation, of which I am a trustee, 30% of our children eat no vegetables at all, unless you count chips from McDonald’s.
Food is an incredibly complicated area. We need much more than the right support for farmers. Food is in almost every ministry; it touches health, trade and the environment—right across the board—and we have not, since the war, had a national food strategy. But one is being worked on right now, and I am very proud to say that I am an adviser on it. Over in Defra, Henry Dimbleby and a fantastic team are pulling together a strategy that will bring all these different elements together to try to give us a food system that really is fit for purpose and works for the future. It is so important that every noble Lord in this place supports it. We must not let this golden opportunity pass; we need to start debating all these key issues.
“Business as usual” is no longer good enough. Our food system runs, basically, for profit, like our agriculture system. It does not run to protect our health or the environment. In my years running the London Food Board—eight of them for our current Prime Minister and two of them for Mayor Sadiq Khan—I used to say, “Every day in London, we dish up 30 million meals”. As anyone who knows it can be quite difficult dishing up dinner for two, 30 million is mind-boggling. I understand why it is very hard for politicians to get their heads around this. It truly is awesome. But if we carry on with our small piecemeal policies and relying on the wonders of companies such as Magic Breakfast, which feeds 48,000 children every day through charity and raising money, then we really only have ourselves to blame for an environmental crisis and a health crisis, both of which could be prevented.
I would like the Minister to assure me that, whatever happens—I understand that she or anyone else is probably not in the position to give a definite answer to this—that her Government will continue to support the work of the food strategy and, hopefully, usher it into life, regardless of who sits in No. 10.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, unlike most of my colleagues here, I want to address the question of culture, which forms part of the debate. I want to ask very briefly how our public culture has been profoundly distorted by the controversy surrounding Brexit and the way in which it has been formulated and pursued.
Historically, we have been a liberal democracy in the sense that liberalism had the upper hand and set the framework within which democracy was articulated. Over the years, we have moved in the opposite direction where democracy has the upper hand and lays down the framework within which liberalism should be pursued. When democracy has been detached from liberalism in this way, it comes to be equated with crude majority rule. So democracy stands for majority rule, and we are told that in a democracy majority opinion—the will of the majority—must be respected and not to do so is to be a traitor to democracy. That kind of thing can work at the level of elections, where people vote on a wide range of issues and it is difficult to pinpoint people’s opinion on this or that matter. However, when we conduct a referendum, the situation becomes very difficult because people vote on a specific issue and their differences are expressed publicly.
That is what happened in 2016. Brexiters had a majority, remainers were in the minority and the argument was that the voice of the majority must be respected. The difficulty there was that remainers felt that they were politically disfranchised and that their vote counted for nothing, because even though they secured 48% of the vote, it amounted to nothing because Brexiters had the full gain to themselves. So what resulted was triumphant Brexiters and rather subdued remainers, who felt slighted and diminished.
The other problem associated with this issue is that the two sides have little respect for each other. For remainers, Brexiters are a bunch of fools; they are rather backward, not terribly bright and could be seduced by any kind of information provided by the peddlers of the Brexit model. If only they had been provided with better information, they could easily have been won over to the other side. For Brexiters, by contrast, remainers are ruthless, cosmopolitan liberals with no love for the country in which they live—they have no sense of patriotism. So the result is that we have two sharply defined groups with precisely articulated differences along these lines.
This polarisation between the two groups is particularly acute because of the issues involved, including British identity and British independence or sovereignty. What is Britain, really? Is it or is it not European? Since the question goes right to the heart of what Britain is, therein lie very powerful emotions, with the result that the Brexit controversy has virtually monopolised the entire public debate. There is hardly an area of life where the Brexit/remain division does not infiltrate.
The result of this kind of polarisation, with two groups facing each other, has been the following. First, the two groups have very little in common and cannot even talk to each other. Secondly, each group is self-righteous and, as a result, contemptuous of the other. Thirdly, each group thinks that the other is deeply misguided and is misleading the country and so, in that sense, is a traitor. Fourthly, it has created new identities. I am not only an Indian or an academic; I am also a Brexiter or a remainer. In other words, it has created a new generalised identity under which people can be subsumed. The media have also been highly polarised, and no space has been left for impartial assessment.
More importantly, the polarisation has extended to the very structure of our democratic way of life. What is democracy? Is it all about majority? What is the relationship between the people—the electorate—and their representatives? Should the representatives simply reproduce what the electorate want? Therefore, the crisis of culture I am talking about extends not only to specific issues but to the very fundamentals of our political system.
It is no less important to note that this kind of polarisation has, sadly, distorted our political discourse. It is suffused with the language of “traitors”, “betrayal” and being “ashamed to be British”. Not surprisingly, it has led to physical threats. So questions of civility and scepticism, which have traditionally been characteristic of our political culture, seem to have been thrown out the window. This is the crisis of our culture. As a crisis of culture, it also affects the very bonds that bind people together, it undermines the public realm where impartial discussion can take place and it eats up almost everything that comes in its way.
We must ask: how do we reduce the crisis and resolve it? Equally important is that, even when it has been resolved, it is not going to disappear and the consequences will continue to haunt us. Like so many others, I suggest that, like a tsunami, Brexit has flooded all of our major institutions and forms of language, so it is important to take this question very seriously and give it the importance it deserves.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, when thinking about what to say today about last week’s gracious manifesto, I found myself facing two challenges. The first was how to address commitments that seem unlikely to be implemented before another Queen’s Speech following a general election. The second was that the Speech itself had little to say about two of the three issues I wish to cover. A third challenge is that most of what I want to say has already been said, more eloquently and better, by other noble Lords.
The first issue is education and skills. The Speech states that:
“Ministers will ensure that all young people have access to an excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work”.
It is hard to argue with that. The extra £400 million promised to further education is welcome, but it will hardly make up for years of underfunding. FE funding has declined by 30% over the past 10 years, at a time when colleges’ role in skills training is more important than ever, with the additional challenge of delivering T-levels.
The Education Secretary promised at the Conservative Party Conference,
“to give my all to make technical and vocational education the first choice for anybody with the aptitude, desire and interest to pursue it”.
T-levels should be central to that laudable aim, as should apprenticeships, which were not mentioned in the Speech. I hope that the Minister will be able to say rather more about exactly how the Government’s strategy will achieve this aim beyond providing extra funds and stating ambitious goals that no one could disagree with. For example, will they continue to support and extend the careers strategy led by the Careers & Enterprise Company and already showing encouraging results since its launch in 2017? What action will they take on the FE and technical education recommendations of the Augar review? How will they engage employers, including SMEs, both in expanding and improving apprenticeships and in meeting a greatly increased need for work experience?
My second topic concerns the creative sector. Your Lordships may be tired of being reminded that the creative industries make up one of the largest sectors in the UK economy, although perhaps not quite as large as tourism, as well as being the fastest growing, but the conditions that have made this success possible need to be safeguarded, including in relation to music, freedom of movement and a strong music education system, as powerfully argued by my noble friends Lady Bull and Lord Berkeley of Knighton. How will the Government ensure that UK musicians will still be able to travel, tour and perform abroad after Brexit without prohibitive costs and bureaucracy, while at the same time we can continue to attract top musical talent into the UK?
What are the Government’s plans for the future of the national plan for music education, launched in 2012 with the aims of giving all schoolchildren opportunities to experience and take part in music and singing? This was a notable achievement, but it needs to be refreshed. The current funding for music education hubs runs out next March. It should be renewed and increased to a more realistic level, and the effectiveness of the plan’s delivery should be reviewed to ensure that all children benefit, so that the risk of a two-tier music education culture, described by my noble friend Lord Berkeley, is avoided.
Last week, the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education published its report emphasising the urgent need for the teaching of creativity in schools to be prioritised, not just for the benefit of the arts but for all disciplines. I hope that the Minister and her colleagues will look closely at its recommendations, including for the establishment of a funded national plan for cultural education.
I will comment finally on broadband access. The Government promise to:
“Roll out gigabit capable broadband across the UK”,
and have pledged £5 billion to support this goal in the hardest to reach 20% of the country. But with a home on a hillside in rural Carmarthenshire, I count myself lucky to get broadband speeds of 10 megabits per second, if conditions are favourable and the oak trees across the valley are in the right alignment. I take the promise of 1,000 megabits with a pinch of salt and ask some questions. How much of the £5 billion will be used for developing new technologies to serve locations where a physical connection—for example, via fibre—is just not feasible? How will this UK-wide commitment apply to the devolved nations, including Wales, and how much of the funding will be allocated to them?
Thirdly, I am slightly puzzled by the lack of mention of mobile phone coverage. Will the Government look at enabling roaming in areas such as my own, where the number of providers with coverage is very limited? If you are not on the right network, you do not get any mobile phone coverage.
These issues may not have as much popular appeal as the NHS, crime and policing, social care, the environment and others addressed in the gracious Speech, but tackling all those requires resources. Skills, creativity and digital access are essential to generating those resources, so I hope they will be given due prominence in a Queen’s Speech from a Government able to implement their proposals.
Lord Bradley (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to be able to make a short contribution to this last day of the Queen’s Speech debate. I refer to my declarations in the register of interests. I also commend my noble friend Lady Sherlock on her excellent opening speech, which clearly laid out the context for this debate on behalf of these Benches.
The first issue I raise is education, and specifically the crucial policy area for the future well-being of our economy: apprenticeships. On this, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, rightly said, the Queen’s Speech is silent. The University of Salford, where I am chair of the board of governors, is rapidly growing its degree apprenticeship provision. Combining degree-level study with on-the-job training, degree apprenticeships are a shining example of the high-quality technical and vocational education that the Secretary of State quite rightly champions as vital to the future economic well-being of the country, but we are not making the most of them. A recent report by Universities UK showed that four in five year 10 to 12 school pupils know “little or nothing” about degree apprenticeships. If young people are not made aware of the different educational opportunities, particularly vocational and technical, they are unable to make informed choices as the Secretary of State so wishes. I therefore encourage the Government to do more to raise the profile of degree apprenticeships among school leavers and their parents.
I cannot speak about apprenticeships without mentioning the apprenticeship levy. Now more than two years old, the objectives of the levy were sound, but the outcomes it has produced are not. The overall number of apprenticeship starts has fallen since the introduction of the levy, and there is a shocking lack of transparency around how firms’ levy contributions are spent. While many big employers report a significant underspend, there is an overspend on the overall apprenticeship budget, meaning limits on the funding made available for non-levy payers, which are predominantly SMEs.
At the University of Salford, we have around 50 SMEs that want to take on apprentices with us, but we have to turn them away because we do not have sufficient funding. This has to change. SMEs cannot be left out in the cold from the degree apprenticeship revolution, and I hope the Government will look at this to enable apprenticeships, at all levels, to be a viable and valued education and training route for businesses and careers.
The second issue I raise is mental health and the reform of the Mental Health Act. I was pleased to be able to contribute to the review of the current Act by Sir Simon Wessely, and I welcome his report. I hope the Government’s response with a White Paper will be published before Christmas, that we will move more quickly to legislation, and that tonight the Minister will allay the fears that we may have to wait at least two years before legislation is introduced into Parliament.
I will highlight just two of Sir Simon’s recommendations as they relate to the criminal justice system. First, recommendation 130 states that,
“Prison should never be used as a ‘place of safety’ for individuals who meet the criteria for detention under the Mental Health Act”.
I agree. This prohibition, like the use of police cells as a place of safety for children—which should of course be extended to adults—must be enacted as a matter of urgency. Secondly, recommendation 132 concerns the transfer of prisoners sectioned under the Mental Health Act from prison to healthcare. It specifically sets a statutory time limit of 28 days broken down into two 14-day periods, the first for assessment and the second for transfer. This is a more realistic and practical proposal than the similar one I made in my report some years ago, but, again, it must be enacted as a matter of urgency. However, both these recommendations rely on urgent investment in appropriate high-quality alternative facilities as places of safety across the country, and investment in NHS secure beds to ensure that the transfer target can be met.
My third point relates to investment in mental health services for children and young people, and particularly for those with special complex needs. The Association of Child Psychotherapists, among many organisations, has suggested that as many as 40% of children with mental health problems have complex conditions—often arising from early trauma or adverse childhood experiences—which are likely to require specialist input. We urgently need a national multidisciplinary commissioning proposal to address the situation as part of the planned investment in mental health services in the NHS long-term plan.
I hope the Minister will be able to respond to each of these points when she concludes this debate.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
I draw the attention of the House to my interests, particularly that of being chair of the 5Rights Foundation.
We know that a person’s trajectory is largely defined by the circumstances of their birth and that prevention and early intervention are more effective than policies driven by headlines and voter frustrations. This should put children at the top of the policy agenda but, while jiggling a baby for the camera is a well-worn meme of the campaigning politician, the fact remains that children have no electoral capital, and this gracious Speech, like those preceding it, reflects their lack of political power.
Nowhere is that truer than in the digital world. Like others, I welcome the online harms Bill but I am concerned by the shifting language that prioritises the burden on business rather than the welfare of children. Almost every aspect of a young person’s life is mediated by devices and services that impact, both beneficially and problematically, on their life chances. Children are more vulnerable to the risks associated with profiling: behavioural advertising, abuses of health and education data, gaming, gambling, bullying, self-harm, anxiety, identity fraud, unwanted contact and unwanted content. We are in the grip of an anti-vax movement that results in children having measles. Children are vulnerable to a system that fails to separate fact from fiction. Even this morning we saw reports that one-third of all searches on Google to buy a teething toy featured potentially dangerous products. As Professor Sonia Livingstone says,
“children are the canaries in the coal mine for threats to all”.
Other noble Lords have asked when we might see a Bill, but I ask the Minister when, in her estimation, parents, teachers and children—to whom successive Secretaries of State have made repeated promises—can reasonably expect the online harms Bill to be law? I also ask whether the teams in DCMS and the Home Office will remain at current strength or be reduced or in any way downgraded until that time? While I very much welcome the commitment to high-speed broadband, can the Minister confirm whether we are to get an online harms Bill before broadband rollout? If we do not, we will exacerbate the problems rather than deliver the desired benefits for children.
I shall briefly address three urgent matters that cannot wait for an online harms Bill. First, the Federal Trade Commission is undertaking a review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA. For those who do not know, COPPA is responsible for 13 being the de facto age of adulthood online. COPPA leaves children aged 13 to 17 with no specific protections and is so poorly upheld that the sector routinely engages with tens of millions of children aged under 13 on services designed for adults. The review could and should put in place protections for all children aged under 18 wherever they are online, but instead a powerful tech lobby proposes to weaken it further. I would be grateful to know what steps the UK Government are taking to ensure that children in the United Kingdom do not inherit a US law that may undermine the considerable efforts we are making here to improve our own laws.
Secondly, there is the plan of Facebook and others to implement end-to-end encryption, which has been widely condemned as a disaster for the global effort to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse material. Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the problem by characterising privacy as a social good at any cost, while simultaneously highlighting that that cost included “bad people” doing “bad things”, including the global dissemination of child sexual abuse material. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, alongside her Australian and American counterparts, responded by calling on Facebook to allow lawful access to encrypted services, which resulted in a ferocious backlash about government access to personal data. In reality, existing detection services, such as PhotoDNA, do not challenge user privacy since they identify only known images and do not require a back door. Conflating issues of privacy or security with the protection of child sexual abuse victims makes vulnerable children collateral damage in an information war between commercial entities and Governments. Are the Government willing to mandate that end-to-end encryption be deployed in a manner that allows detection of CSAM, independently and transparently assessed, with no accompanying requirement for a back door to encrypted services?
Finally, last week the Government reaffirmed that they will shortly lay the age-appropriate design code before Parliament. I look forward to that, but ask that we swiftly adopt Article 80(2) of the GDPR, so that civil society can act on behalf of vulnerable groups. We asked for this during the passage of the Data Protection Act and were told it would be reviewed. Perhaps the Minister can provide an update on its status.
Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as an apprenticeship ambassador and an ex-apprentice. Noble Lords can guess from that introduction that I shall focus on apprenticeships in my contribution.
I start from the premise that I want the apprenticeship levy to succeed. I was a bit puzzled about the Government’s commitment to it when I looked through the list of Ministers, only to find that we no longer have a Minister for Apprenticeships. I do not know whether that is intended to signal a lack of interest or is just the accidental result of a reshuffle, but if we look at the list of government Ministers—I can see a puzzled response—we will not find a designated Minister with that responsibility. Of course, the Secretary of State has the ultimate responsibility, but that is not quite the same as when we had a Minister for Apprenticeships.
The Government had a target of 3 million apprentices during the life of this Parliament. I remember many of us saying that they should forget the target and focus not on the quantity but on the quality of apprenticeships. You need to convince people—potential apprentices, their parents and their teachers—that this is a worthwhile career path. It seems that the Government are beginning to realise, first, that they will not reach that target, and, secondly, that we were right when we said that they should focus on quality.
I started to look at some of the statistics, and the most worrying was for the starts at level 2. Why does that matter? Level 2 apprentices are often the young people who will not go on to an academic education. They are the young people who, perhaps, have a more practical bent at this point in their lives and who—I hope—we want to prevent becoming NEETs: not in employment, education or training. They really are an important group. I listened carefully to what the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, and I agree with many of her points. If you look at those statistics, it really is quite worrying. We started in 2016, before the levy, with 260,000 and we are now down to 142,000. That is a worrying loss.
I discussed the next area of statistics that I am concerned about with the Government. I told them that if they wanted the apprenticeship levy to succeed, they had to ensure that they moved the needle on the dial on the number of small and medium-sized enterprises involved. Again, I failed significantly. It is really hard to get statistics, but the House of Lords Library gave me this one: we started, again in 2016, with 473,761, and by the time we reached 2019, we were down to 170,325. That is a really worrying drop in the number of apprentices employed by SMEs.
I acknowledge that the Government have listened to large employers who said, “We’re not managing to spend our levy money; we would like to send more of it to our supply-chain SMEs”. The Government increased the amount to 25%. Did that solve the problem? No, because, as companies tell me, you cannot just throw money at these SMEs in their supply chains; they have to be managed. One thing I want to say to the Minister—I do not expect a reply today—is that some of that levy money ought to be used in the management of these supply chain SMEs, in admin costs, for example. If the Government really want to increase the number of SMEs employing apprentices, I recommend that they look at what are known as group training associations, which deal with things such as admin and basic skills.
I was really interested in the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, who is in her place, about the 2012 Olympics. A major theme in that unforgettable opening ceremony was the NHS. I could not help thinking that we have 40,000 nurse vacancies at the moment. It was a really smart decision by the Government to charge potential nurses for their degree programmes. Why would we do that when we are desperate to fill those skilled vacancies? That has had an unfortunate impact on morale in the National Health Service. The Government ought to scrap the charges for nursing degrees. We surely want to encourage a vocational route and encourage healthcare assistants who have the potential to become nurses, which many have.
I am coming to the end of my allotted time, so I will be brief. On average, employers claim only 50% of their levy money. They say to me, “What will happen to the unclaimed levy?” Sending it back to the Treasury does not seem a very smart solution to me.
Baroness Hollins (CB)
My Lords, I refer to my interests as listed in the register.
In reflecting on the Queen’s Speech and its relevance for the nation’s mental health, I wondered how, in 2019, we would now understand Nye Bevan’s assertion that no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means. Over the past 71 years we have deepened our understanding of what it means to be sick and what it means to be healthy. We have seen the futility of separating health from social care, and learned that a person’s capabilities are as essential a resource as their finances.
One of the earliest debates that I was involved with in this House related to the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the issue of parity of esteem for mental health. Informally, in preparing for that debate, I asked Members of your Lordships’ House what they understood by “health” and “illness”. Your Lordships spoke about strokes, heart attacks, diabetes and so on, but at that time there was little mention of mental illness or mental health.
The conversation has changed since 2012. There is more and better-informed talk about mental health. However, despite the commitment to parity, only 40% of people with mental illness receive treatment, and only £1 in £10 of NHS spending goes on mental health. There has been a 14% fall in the number of mental health beds since 2014 and community services have not been equipped to compensate for this change. For example, at least seven people are known to have died between June 2018 and March 2019—people who had been assessed as requiring admission but for whom no mental health bed was available.
When people are admitted to hospital, as we have already heard from many noble Lords, they are likely to experience some of the worst estate within the health service. The Government’s recent announcement of,
“the biggest, boldest hospital building programme in a generation”,
contained no new funding for psychiatric hospitals.
We are now more cognisant of the social determinants of health. Theresa May noted in her first address as Prime Minister that people born into poverty will live nine years less on average, and we have heard again today about the reduction in life expectancy for black and minority-ethnic users of mental health and learning disability services.
We also better understand the detrimental effects on adult mental health of adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, neglect and parental death or separation. I hope that the Government will seriously consider the effects of proposed longer criminal sentences and the consequent further break-up of families on intergenerational cycles of mental ill-health.
It is difficult to recover from severe mental illness if you do not have shelter, yet half of delayed discharges from mental health beds are due to difficulties in securing appropriate housing and care packages, with some patients choosing to discharge themselves and be homeless rather than remain on understaffed mental health wards, while others remain detained under the Mental Health Act for prolonged periods because of their vulnerability should they be discharged to inadequate provision. This is clearly an inappropriate use of the Mental Health Act and of hospital beds, and it is a problem based on a deficit of adequate housing and social care.
Offering psychotherapy to someone who cannot be sure that tomorrow they will have a roof over their head is like providing medication to a patient in hospital but not feeding them. For people with serious mental illnesses, learning disability and autism, the division between health and social care is not just artificial but harmful.
It is time to extend the parity principle to social care as well as healthcare and ensure that both are adequately funded. Can the Government commit to employing the principle of parity of esteem in their response to the social care crisis by placing the social care needs of people with long-term mental disability on an equal footing with the social care of people with physical illness and frailty in later years?
Just because the health service does not cost money to use does not mean that everyone has the means to use it. Many people are unable to navigate an increasingly complicated healthcare system by themselves. Fragmented and ever-changing services are difficult enough for the professionals working in them to fathom, and it takes effort and luck for any patient to get the best out of the NHS.
With the failure of the Transforming Care programme and the abuse reported at Whorlton Hall eight years on from Winterbourne View, fears that a hospital admission could lead to abuse or even death are understandable. Ongoing review by the CQC into the use of segregation for young people with learning disabilities and autism is essential. These are some of society’s most vulnerable and overlooked people and we need to understand what has gone wrong, without apportioning blame. For this, the newly announced health service safety investigations Bill is welcome.
I hope that some of the difficulties I have highlighted will be addressed through increased integration of services in line with the Government’s commitment to the NHS long-term plan. I want to end by applauding my noble friend Lady Audrey Emerton’s extraordinary contribution both in this House and as a leader in nursing in enabling better life chances for people with learning disabilities. I personally will miss her wisdom and good humour and I wish her a contented retirement.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)
My Lords, it really is a pleasure to contribute to this debate. While I cannot claim to have listened to every single speech, it has been a great pleasure to listen to the many that I have heard, which have been notably well informed. I know that the Minister will have a very difficult task in winding; I can see from her face that she has worked that out already. I also know that she has been listening very carefully and I very much hope that she is not alone.
We have been told several times already what the gracious Speech says about education—which is frankly not very much and certainly nothing that it would be possible greatly to disagree with. In fact, no Government in modern times would really have said anything different, which suggests that this is a largely policy-free area. The real question is not what you say about aspiration but what you do to make sure that that aspiration is achieved. In opening, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who is in her place, talked about additional money. That is of course very welcome, but it is not the whole story if there is nothing to say about content.
I will ask the Minister to pick up two recent reference points. One of them, the Durham commission report which was published last week, has already been mentioned several times. The commission was of course graced by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, among others and was chaired by Sir Nicholas Serota. Last Saturday, the Guardian summarised the report’s significance rather well. It said:
“The report, put together in collaboration with academics from Durham University, concludes that creativity is not something that should inhabit the school curriculum only as it relates to drama, music, art and other obviously creative subjects, but that creative thinking ought to run through all of school life, infusing the way human and natural sciences are learned”.
The second reference point is a current Science Museum and Radio 4 collaboration which I have been very much intrigued by. It is called “The Art of Innovation” and is co-presented by the director of the Science Museum, Sir Ian Blatchford, and his colleague, the head of collections, Dr Tilly Blyth. It is a whole range of perfect little programmes about how art and science have inspired each other. I highly recommend them to anybody who has not already heard them. Both of these things point in the same direction, as did Sir Ken Robinson’s report, All Our Futures, 20 years ago. Like the Durham commission, he emphasised that creativity can be taught.
Art, science and mathematics all rely on creative thinking, curiosity and imagination—as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, for example, said earlier. In my view, all start with the same question, which is, “What if?” Asking this question requires the confidence and courage in both students and teachers to challenge, doubt, question and get things wrong. Nothing in current education policy supports this approach, even though many fine teachers try every day to encourage it. The emphasis on testing knowledge has been shown to narrow focus, and to breed caution and anxiety. At this point, I refer to the many contributions that have touched on mental health. Mental ill-health in young people is a serious matter and something that we are not currently dealing with very well in either the NHS or the education system. We could do better quite easily.
The day I hear a government Minister say from the Dispatch Box that he or she understands that education is far more than the acquisition of knowledge; that young people need imaginative reach in all areas of learning; that simply getting more students to take exams in drama, art or music, while very important, is by no means enough; that passing exams is only one measure of educational success, not the be all and end all; and that these things will be reflected in future policy will be a good day for me. I hope that when the noble Baroness comes to wind up she can make my day.
Lord O’Shaughnessy (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, following her dash from the Woolsack, and to join your Lordships in discussing two issues dear to my heart: education and health—or, as Tony Blair used to say, “schools ’n’ hospitals”. These are the everyday issues that our fellow citizens are concerned about: their health and that of their parents, their loved ones, partners and children, and, of course, where those children will go to school, college and university. What a joy it is and has been—a throwback, perhaps, to a gentler time—to take part in a debate in which there has been so little mention of the “B” word. Perhaps this is what political normality looks like. Do any of us remember?
I join other noble Lords in paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton. She has been a fine servant of this House and a source of wise advice on health issues. She will be sorely missed. It has been commented many times, in this debate and elsewhere, that there are perhaps too few nurses in the NHS. I am afraid that there are now too few in this House as well. We wish her well. Before I go any further, I refer noble Lords to my interests as set out in the register.
On education, contrary to some of the views expressed this evening, I believe that the Government have a track record to be proud of: hundreds of thousands more children educated in outstanding schools, hundreds of new schools and academies created, and the introduction of a wide set of reforms to standards on phonics, maths, the curriculum and qualifications that will help young people reclaim their right to be among the best educated in the world. I could not help but note that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, was not so impressed by these reforms, pointing to the results of the international PISA survey. In the interim, between his speech and mine—I hope he will not mind—I checked online. I noticed that the most recent published data was for tests sat in 2015. The 15 and 16 year-olds taking part had spent most of their life being educated under a Labour Government. Nevertheless, I share his urgency on improving school standards, but it is only fair, since the national curriculum was introduced in September 2014, to wait for future evaluations before we come to any final judgments.
In the last few years, school funding has been a growing pressure. The promised increase in the school budget to level up spending for the worst-funded schools is welcome, but it is further education that most needs our attention. FE has always been the Cinderella service among policymakers, usually because people in positions of power have little experience of it. The extra £300 million set aside for this sector in the recent spending round was good news, but it is only a one-year settlement. I hope that my noble friend the Minister can provide some comfort to your Lordships that it is only the first step of many towards a properly funded lifelong learning and further education system.
On health issues, I congratulate my noble friend and her department on a full slate of major reforms in the most gracious Speech. We are looking forward to the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, which receives its Second Reading next week. I will reserve my comments on it until then. Perhaps in the interim, however, my noble friend could reassure the House that the Government are not putting all their eggs in this basket and that other separate but equally important patient safety initiatives, such as my noble friend Lady Cumberlege’s review of the safety of medicines and medical devices, will be acted on with the same energy.
The most gracious Speech also contains details of an important Bill that will determine the future regulatory system for the medicines and medical devices we rely on in the NHS. Does my noble friend agree that, on regulation, our aim for the future relationship with the European Medicines Agency should be to become an active and participating full associate member, but, if that is not possible, that we should use the opportunity to create the fastest, most sophisticated and joined-up system for bringing advanced therapies to patients anywhere in the world?
One way of achieving this goal is to ensure that the NHS has world-leading digital infrastructure. I know that my noble friend cares deeply about this topic, so can she tell the House how she will maximise the benefits of the UK’s health data assets for NHS patients? A significant investment by the Treasury in this project at the upcoming Budget would be a welcome sign of progress.
Finally, the Queen’s Speech was strong on promoting science and R&D. Nowhere does this matter more than in the life sciences and in health. Does my noble friend agree that a major focus for increased spending should be the National Institute for Health Research, one of our most effective research organisations, which has had only a flat cash settlement for the past 10 years? Funding this institution should be part of a collective strategy to reimagine the NHS as the world’s biggest and best R&D organisation. It will be patients who benefit the most from such an ambition. In these divided times, surely that is something we can all agree on.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, the Government may aspire to the uplands of the “greatest place on earth”, but social and economic headwinds may undermine that persuasive rhetoric. The growth in employment has been positive for households, but the labour market is softening and there is a growing body of evidence that household financial resilience is weakening. Many households are living on the edge. They are getting by, some comfortably so, but a single adverse event can push them over that edge. Low financial resilience is not reserved to those on low incomes; it has travelled up the income scale. Some are well placed to weather the storm of a sudden fall in income or unavoidable rise in expenditure, but others are not.
Each year, some 6 million working-age people face a life event likely to cause a substantial fall in income; a further 6 million face a sudden, unplanned expenditure need. These shocks arise for reasons such as illness, job loss, reduced hours, relationship breakdown, bereavement and new caring responsibilities. Low resilience has consequences for people, for welfare and health costs, for employers, and elsewhere in the economy. A range of factors increases resilience: access to employment benefits, state benefits, private insurance, savings, affordable credit, help from family and fewer pre-existing debts, but those factors are weakening, shifting more responsibility for financial resilience on to the individual, which many are ill prepared to take on.
Support from employer occupational benefits such as sick pay, redundancy pay and death-in-service payments is declining in coverage and value: only 28% of employers provide more than the basic statutory sick pay of £94.25 a week. State benefit rates have fallen in real terms; help with housing and mortgage costs has reduced. While it is true that more people are in work, one in six is self-employed, one in 12 has contracts with reduced employment protections and some 73% of people in regular jobs face significant fluctuations in monthly earnings. Fewer people work for large businesses, which traditionally offered benefits that mitigated income shocks. Now, 60% of private sector employees, more than 16 million people, work for small and medium-size enterprises and more than half, 8.8 million people, work for micro businesses.
On savings and insurance, the FCA found that 13% of adults have no cash savings whatever and that a further one in three has savings of only between £1 and £2,000, while 65% have no form of life or protection insurance.
Secure, regular work, with good employment benefits, is an important defence against low household financial resilience. Given the weight of the current evidence, moving away from a level playing field on employment standards, which the new Brexit allows, will not build the greatest place on earth but will push more families over the edge. Employment growth has been positive but as David Ramsden, a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, observed, that businesses are increasing employment at the same time as they are reducing investment raises concerns over that resilience in the labour market. One explanation could be that businesses are substituting labour for capital, as hiring is easier to reverse than capital expenditure. A further explanation could be a shift away from capital-intensive, export-oriented businesses and into labour-intensive, domestically focused ones. Either way, neither is beneficial for financial resilience in households.
I welcome the pensions Bill. There is about £7.6 trillion of state, public and private pension entitlements in the UK pension system. The market and public policy supporting that system demand scrutiny and the Bill provides a further opportunity to do that. However, I am concerned it does not lock in that a pensions dashboard is for the public good, and that the best interests of pension savers are not to be traded off against the interests of financial providers. I am sure that this House will want to debate that issue with the Government at some length.
The Government could do much more to address the persisting gender pensions gap. Only about 36% of those eligible for auto-enrolment are women. Women’s ability to save is also constrained by income inequality throughout their lives. The highly regarded Fawcett Society has outlined the case for the introduction of a carers’ credit towards occupational pension saving, to ensure that those who take time out of paid work to care for children or adults would see their caring contribution recognised not only in the state pension system, where this is already the case, but also under the auto-enrolment system. Prior to the introduction of the flat-rate state pension in 2016, the principle of crediting carers applied to the state second-tier pension, S2P. That principle should not be lost but should continue to apply now that the second tier has transferred to private provision through auto-enrolment. I hope that the Bill will be the opportunity to push the Government on what progress they can offer to address this persistent gender pensions gap.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register. I am going to be talking about Bills and what I call missing measures—or perhaps that is my wish list. We welcome the healthcare Bills in the Queen’s Speech. The Health Service Safety Investigations Bill seems sensible, and I look forward to a departmental briefing before Second Reading. The Mental Health Act was passed in 1983 and updated in 2007. Sir Simon Wessely has carried out his consultation on the Act, which should finish by the end of this year, and we look forward to the White Paper and subsequent Bill. The Medicines and Medical Devices Bill may well be critical in the event that we leave the EU. There will be a Bill to deliver the long-term plan, which will be interesting because it will have to enact some kind of reverse surgery on the Health and Social Care Act 2012, undoing some of the stuff that was done and putting other bits together. With apologies to St Matthew, what has been joined together may be very difficult to rend asunder; we shall see. With all these Bills the devil will be in the detail, and I am sure the Minister will understand that we will not hesitate to hold the Government’s feet to the fire where we think it necessary.
Everyone in the UK is thankful for the NHS, values it and understands how important its success is, but it is struggling, as we see in the parlous state of our cancer survival rates and one of the worst rates of depression in the EU. Some 1.4 million people this year did not receive any social care support, meaning that they went without a bath, help getting dressed in the morning or help with food, which puts a huge strain on family carers. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, spoke about the need of elderly people for personal contact and how good it is for their well-being and mental health. Our workforce is in crisis as never before, with shortages of nurses, care workers and doctors, GPs and consultants across most specialities. The latter are particularly affected by the pension issue mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy. Can the Minister tell us whether the Treasury is close to resolving this issue?
For the past few years, we have watched as the Government have repeatedly cut public health funding. In the UK, a wealthy first-world country, life expectancy is decreasing for the first time ever. That statement should shame us all. It is not something that we should ignore, and the Government should not be surprised if there is a campaign to increase or at least sustain funding for health and social care.
Several areas vital to the future of health in this country are being sidelined at the moment. First, the state of mental health services is a scandal. We welcome the commitment to a new mental health Act, but it will not be worth the paper it is written on unless we can do something urgently about the workforce and local access to services for both adults and children. It is a sign of the times that a wonderful new residential facility for 12 children in Cornwall had to be funded by a local charity. The NHS did not have the funding locally to do it, but it is a brilliant facility.
For most of us, our first point of contact with the NHS is the local GP, but many feel unable to diagnose mental health conditions, so we need to improve mental health training for all GPs and health staff. Many long-term physical conditions have free prescriptions: I hold my hand up as being in receipt of that. Have the Government looked at replicating this for the most mentally unwell, where the condition is enduring? I know that for many there is a worry every month about which medications they feel they must have and which they feel they can do without. That is a scandal, too. While she was Prime Minister, Mrs May promised a Green Paper on social care. Many noble Lords referred to this and it was referred to in the Queen’s Speech. We all know that the only way to secure the future of social care is through a cross-party commission on social care funding. All parties have agreed to sit around a table, yet the promised Green Paper is hidden in the long grass. Two Prime Ministers have promised to sort this out, but we are still waiting.
We need to ensure that the quality of social care, both for our elderly and for those with disabilities, is excellent. The people who care for them, whether a family carer or a professional, need recognition and support. I gently remind the House that adult social care concerns vulnerable older people and disabled people of working age—that is often forgotten. I would welcome more ambitious targets on reducing life expectancy inequality for people with learning disabilities. Can the Minister confirm whether work to achieve this is in hand? On public health, we need to keep working with manufacturers to reduce sugar and to ensure that there is minimum unit pricing for alcohol. This is not the nanny state; it is, as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, put it, “benign paternalism”. I think that is far nicer. Over the past 20 years or so, the public have continued to eat too much of what is not good for them, and the taxpayer picks up the bill for NHS care for their type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer.
Our dedicated workforce determines everything within the health and social care system; nothing will succeed if there are not trained staff right across the system.
The NHS is not universally a good employer, with flexible working and mental health support. Many junior doctors do not even qualify for shared parental leave. The unresolved contract issues need to be sorted. Pharmacists are key to improving community healthcare right across the country, but services are not being commissioned from them. Many of us have friends or family who have been looked after by care workers on the minimum wage. I would like to see in the next Queen’s Speech some legislation to require care work to be a profession and care workers to be registered.
This debate should be in praise of the NHS and social care. Most noble Lords present will have a reason to be grateful to NHS or care workers who have gone the extra mile, whether in A&E, specialist services or a late night attendance at home. I would like to express all our thanks for the hundreds and thousands of friends and family carers who have gone unnoticed in the Queen’s Speech, who give up their jobs and lives to care for someone who can no longer care for themselves. Although she is not in her seat, I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, would remind us that they save the state the equivalent of the whole annual NHS budget. I also applaud the carer’s credit of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake.
Like others, I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, is not in her place. When I was new here, she was hugely helpful and gave me much advice about dealing with both health policy and noble Lords. She was a formidable nursing leader, made a DBE when I was in my 30s—which seems a really long time ago now—and will probably remain the only nurse to have a building named after her. I hope she is better soon.
I must praise the voluntary sector in both health and social care, the professional bodies and our world-leading think tanks. They carry out research and act as beacons for good treatment and health and social care policy, and thus improve care of patients and the professionalism of health and care workers. I also echo the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London in applauding the work of faith groups and local charities in health and social care delivery. This has been a wide-ranging debate, and we have learned much about the challenges of other disciplines. I eagerly await the Minister’s response.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, a field of 60 speakers covering four government departments has produced wide-ranging and in many cases thought-provoking contributions. I have time to refer to just a few of them.
The noble Earl, Lord Devon, said he felt that simply being part of this debate was a surreal experience. Well, today is the sixth and final day of what is a rather surreal Queen’s Speech debate, as all noble Lords are only too aware that it is not a serious plan for government. But that is not its intention. It is merely a draft of the next Conservative Party manifesto, as noted by so many noble Lords. We shall be here again quite soon—although not necessarily on the same sides of the Chamber.
We cannot be oblivious to events taking place simultaneously in another place. Boris Johnson assumed the premiership with a promise to return to Brussels and open discussions on the withdrawal agreement. It took some degree of skill to negotiate an even worse deal than that concluded by Theresa May, but he has done precisely that. The Minister said in her opening remarks that the Queen’s Speech would deliver EU exit. Well, we shall see.
This phantom Queen’s Speech had nothing to offer on education, as many noble Lords have noted, with no commitments for new legislation or policy to improve our education system. It is now three years since we had an education Bill—although I suppose I should be careful what I wish for, because education legislation since 2010 has not been at all welcome or beneficial to the life chances of our young people, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. Despite making a number of commitments that would require legislation, it seems the Government have now abandoned their own policies.
The Minister in her reply will no doubt claim that the Government outlined additional investment for schools in the recent spending review. Quite so, but that funding announcement has been massaged to make it sound much more impressive than it is. It talks of a £14 billion increase, but that represents the extra spending aggregated over the entire period from 2020 to 2023. It is not a measure of how much higher spending will be at the end of the three-year period than at the beginning—and it emphatically will not reverse the cuts of the past nine years.
Then there is the issue of the politicisation of the distribution of that funding, which will clearly favour the schools with the least disadvantaged pupils. Data analysis by BBC’s “Newsnight” last month found that overwhelmingly Conservative-held constituencies would be the beneficiaries of the proposed increase in schools funding. This reveals a clear targeting strategy by the Government with, one suspects, an eye on the general election.
The recent spending review committed the Government to “level up” funding for schools by 2021-22. But analysis shows that nine of the top 10 beneficiaries, in terms of an increase per pupil, are in Conservative-held constituencies. All but four of the 36 seats which get no uplift at all from this additional spending are Labour-held. As the Education Policy Institute commented:
“Levelling up doesn’t mean addressing social inequality. In this context, it means bringing generally more affluent schools up to the same level of funding as more disadvantaged schools”.
I think that most people understand that funding needs to be higher in disadvantaged than advantaged schools, and they understand why. Most people—but not, it appears, those in this Government.
Detailed analysis by the teaching unions has further demonstrated the strong link between deprivation and the scale of government cuts to school funding. Cuts to schools serving the poorest pupils are more than three times as deep as those to schools teaching the wealthiest. Of the 10 poorest local authorities in England, the cuts are above average in seven of them. Of the 10 most prosperous local authorities in England, the cuts are below average in eight of them. I do not expect the Minister to justify these shocking figures, because education is not her responsibility. But she should not worry, because even her DfE counterparts could not do other than concede that it was done for political advantage. Playing politics with the life chances of young people says all that needs to be said about the Government’s lack of fitness to govern.
Beyond schools, my noble friends Lord Bradley and Lord Young, and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, rightly spoke of their concerns about apprenticeship numbers. The Open University recently published its Access to Apprenticeships report, which clearly demonstrated a strong desire on behalf of employers to recruit more people with disabilities into apprenticeships and to close the gap in employment between those with and without a disability. Yet the Queen’s Speech had nothing to say on that subject or on the wider skills agenda. As my noble friend Lady Blackstone said, our FE colleges play a vital role in preparing young people for careers, but they could do much more if they were properly funded. I echo her call for funding to be raised to £5,000 per FE student, to match the figure in secondary schools.
My noble friend Lord Bassam, the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, all highlighted the need to follow up on the Augar report. I fear that that will never see the light of day.
A strong case needs to be made also for maintained nurseries, which are once again facing the possibility of transitional funding running out due to a lack of long-term investment from the Government. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, highlighted the gap in children’s development when they first arrive at school. It is now widely accepted that the greatest contribution to social mobility is made in early-years settings, and that should be reflected in the way they are resourced to do their job. Labour will give each level of education the investment it needs as part of the development of a national education service, to transform educational opportunities for the next generation.
As my noble friend Lady Sherlock said, the welfare state embodies a vision of a country where we take care of each other. It is based—or ought to be—on a concept and an understanding of social solidarity. But that is a concept and an understanding that, it seems, are alien to many in the Conservative Party, particularly those who have now shouted and elbowed their way to dominant positions in the party and the Government. No wonder the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, in his contribution bemoaned the decline of one-nation Conservatism.
Deep cuts to benefits over the past nine years have served to drive people into poverty. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, rightly highlighted in-work poverty. However, the system of working tax credits introduced by a Labour Government to make work pay has been swept away—a process which, I have to say, was begun by a Government of which the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was a member. How can it be right—how can it be regarded as civilised—to have a society in which even families where both parents are in work have to rely on food banks? Yet there was no social security Bill in the humble Address, and not even a mention of poverty.
Perhaps that should have come as no surprise, as the Government have banished the word “poverty”. They abolished the Child Poverty Act in 2016 and got rid of the target to end child poverty. That same year, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission was renamed the Social Mobility Commission, but the Government have certainly not banished poverty, as several noble Lords highlighted in this debate.
The only DWP Bill in the Queen’s Speech was the Pension Schemes Bill, on which my noble friends Lady Drake and Lord McKenzie spoke forcefully. I think my noble friend Lady Bryan merits a response from the Minister on the wrongs suffered by WASPI women that she so effectively outlined.
On health, all we heard was repeats of previously announced spending plans, together with ill-defined proposals to reform the Mental Health Act and address social care. Many noble Lords, most forcefully my noble friends Lady Bakewell and Lady Wheeler, spoke of the urgent need for action on social care—which was, let us not forget, first promised by the Government in the March 2017 Budget, then in the 2017 election manifesto and again on the steps of Downing Street in July that year. The Government have consistently failed to deliver. This July, the Financial Times reported that the Green Paper had been ditched and that instead a White Paper would be published in the autumn of 2019. Here we are in the autumn, and still nothing has appeared. Perhaps the noble Baroness can explain that lack of action in an area where legislation is desperately needed.
In contrast, Labour has set out our vision for a national care service that includes free personal care for older people, a lifetime cap on care costs and immediate funding up front to deal with the crisis of nine years of cuts to council budgets.
Will the Minister explain why the mental health Bill announced by the Government 10 months ago did not make it into the Queen’s Speech? Will the Government now implement the recommendations of the independent review of the Mental Health Act asked for by so many noble Lords?
In conclusion, I hear some noises from the Government Front Bench in response to some of my comments. If I appear to be more political than some people might have expected, let me say that it is in response to a Queen’s Speech that is more political than people had a right to expect. I think it is appropriate, as this is a low point of the political and economic standing of this country. As noble Lords who have travelled abroad recently will know—I was in France at the weekend—you meet people who are incredulous about what is happening in this country, particularly within Parliament. When I speak to people of other nationalities, they laugh rather nervously when I say that I, too, am incredulous at some of the developments. I believe that I am not alone in that.
Today, the Prime Minister has failed once again to impose his will on Parliament. He is a discredited figure here, as well as abroad. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was apparently serious when she said in her opening remarks that this is a country “happy and confident” about its future. With the greatest respect, she needs to get out more, because that is very far from reality. I fear that the scars caused by the past four years will not heal quickly.
In a few weeks, no one will recall this Queen’s Speech, and nor should they. The next one will map out the future direction of this country, and we can only hope that the Administration who are dragging us down in the eyes of the world will not be its authors.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford) (Con)
My Lords, I am honoured to close this final day of debate in support of the gracious Speech. As ever, debate has been robust, largely courteous, but underpinned by the extensive expertise of this House. In this age of partisan rancour, our debate has been informed by a deeply held belief that in this place, regardless of political persuasion, we are bound together by a collective responsibility to use our roles here to improve the lives of our fellow citizens. That is something to be proud of.
The topics we have debated today—education, work and pensions, culture and health—make more difference than any others to the lived experience of people across this country. That is why the past seven hours have flown by for me as I have listened with pleasure to the important contributions of 61 noble Lords. It is because of the importance of these issues and the consensus on the need for action that the Prime Minister and his Government have prioritised them over recent months and, of course, in the gracious Speech, investing £14 billion in schools over the next three years, supporting the modernisation of pensions, accelerating access to broadband—perhaps even to the home of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—and three new health Bills, with a commitment to work towards a further two. It is an ambitious agenda and has been fully reflected in today’s wide-ranging debate.
I will now do my best to respond to the many important points raised today, but it will be necessary, I am afraid, that the relevant Minister might have to write on a few issues that I am not able to cover in the time that is available. I begin by focusing on education. I know that the whole House is passionate about supporting investment in education and the importance of ensuring, as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, so clearly put forward, that all children, no matter their background, can benefit from an outstanding education. As the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Berkeley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Bull and Lady McIntosh, noted, there should be a broad and varied education. As a former musician myself, noble Lords are preaching to the choir when they emphasise the value of creativity to society and its role in preparing children for the future—even its role in preparing a recalcitrant Health Minister.
As has been mentioned, the Government have announced welcomed investment in schools. I can confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that, following the funding allocation statements issued by DfE last week, all schools will be better off in three years’ time.
The noble Lord, Lord Addington, raised very important issues around special educational needs, and the Government have announced an additional £770 million of investment in 2021 for SEND education. But the whole House will appreciate that providing the best possible education is not just about money. That is why the DfE has commissioned a review of SEND education to assess what further we need to do in order to support pupils with special educational needs, so I will put forward the specific points that he raised in order to ensure they are properly considered.
The Government have also set up a cross-government hub for all disability issues in the Cabinet Office to draw together a catalysed, more effective cross-government action on these points. The DWP has increased the size of Access to Work grants by £15,000 in the last year, driving forward a 7% increase in the volume of grants made in recognition of their importance. This will support those with disabilities and special educational needs in the workplace.
A wide range of noble Lords noted the critical role of further education, with my noble friends Lord Lingfield and Lord O’Shaughnessy, and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Blackstone and Lady Garden, all drawing attention to it. Further education is at the heart of the Government’s plans for an education system that works for everyone. That is why we have announced—as has been noted—an additional £400 million of funding and a focus on improving not only the quality of teaching and learning but also its status.
Many noble Lords have welcomed an investment as well of £290 million in 20 institutes of technology to deliver higher technical education as a clear route to high-skilled, high-wage employment, but they also sought more clarity on how this will work in practice. I shall ask for those points to receive an individual response as I cannot get through all of those right now.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, and others also raised the response to the Augar review, which is awaited. I confirm that Ministers are considering this very carefully and will respond shortly. This is a policy area that would clearly benefit from close attention in the spending review that is coming up next year.
On essay mills, I can confirm that, in the first instance, the Office for Students will engage the sector in order to eliminate the use of such organisations, but the Government do not rule out further action.
Clearly, more progress needs to be made on apprenticeships, but much progress has been made: over 1.8 million apprenticeships have started since 2015, investment annually is over £2.5 billion and over 60% of apprenticeships are of the highest industry-desired standards. I recognise the need for progress, and we are working hard on it. That is why the Secretary of State has taken the portfolio of apprenticeships as his personal responsibility, in response to the point made earlier.
I turn to work and pensions. The noble Baronesses, Lady Donaghy, Lady Watkins and Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, all raised universal credit and concerns about in-work poverty. I think there is a consensus that work should always pay. Universal credit is a welfare system designed to help people into work, to support those who need help and to be fair to everyone who pays for it. The DWP recognises, however, the need to continually review and improve universal credit. This year alone, the DWP has committed to running a pilot on moving to universal credit to ensure the further and safe rollout of the advantages of universal credit. I noted the question about an update on that progress and I will ensure that a note comes to the noble Baroness about that. The department has announced that it will reduce the maximum single sanction that a claimant can face from three years to six months, and the number of those sanctions has also fallen. The department has instructed work coaches to use the flexible support fund to support parents with childcare costs. It is also providing £3 billion to support transitional arrangements for claimants moving over from other benefits. Noble Lords also raised concerns about the benefits freeze being extended. I can confirm now that it will come to an end by 2020.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, and a number of noble Lords mentioned the pensions Bill. I genuinely feel that pensions is an area where there has been positive progress over the past decade. The Bill now goes a step further to improve both the options available to employers and accessibility for employees, so that they can track their pension as they would their bank account.
Our debate on DCMS was particularly robust, it is fair to say. I begin with broadband rollout, which was mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Aberdare. The Government have been clear in their commitment to delivering nationwide, gigabit-capable, reliable and resilient broadband—that is not easy to say at the end of a long debate—as soon as possible. That is why the gracious Speech included the telecommunications Bill, to ensure that millions of leaseholders are not left behind as we upgrade our communications network. I am conscious of the time but I am also aware that the Second Reading is imminent, so I am sure that many of the points made by your Lordships will be answered in letter form and that there will be ample time for detailed debate and robust scrutiny, which I am sure this House will provide.
The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Griffiths, and a range of Peers noted the challenge of online harms and how to regulate and respond to digital technologies that can change and evolve rapidly. The online harms White Paper was published in April. It set out the Government’s plan for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. The public consultation has closed and the Government’s response will be published in the coming months. We will then publish a draft Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny. Let me be clear: the Government recognise that this is one of the fundamental challenges facing our society in the coming years and they are determined to address it.
I want explicitly to recognise the strength of feeling expressed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Benjamin and Lady Howe, the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord McNally, and other noble Lords on the issue of age verification and the pace of reform. I will confer that back to the department. The Government are clear that protecting children is at the heart of our online reform agenda and is key to wider government priorities. The issue here is making sure that those reforms are as effective as possible and do the job that they are intended to do.
Moving on to health and social care, my department was delighted to begin the year by publishing the clinically led NHS long-term plan and by securing £33.9 billion to support its implementation. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Smith, the plan focuses not on funnelling ever-greater funding into the health service but on ensuring sustainable and substantive reform that can support what we all want to see in the health service. As my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy noted, there are delicate balances to be struck on integration versus accountability, which the upcoming NHS long-term plan Bill is intended to address. That has also been clinically and NHS-led.
I follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who is not in his place—
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford
Sorry, he is in a different place. I follow the noble Lord in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and his colleagues on the Long-Term Sustainability of the NHS Committee, which he chaired, because many of its proposals were replicated in the long-term plan.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Greengross, Lady Walmsley and Lady Massey, and my noble friend Lord Young raised the importance of prevention, primary care and tackling inequalities. These are all important agendas for the Government and for my department, which is why the Government have committed more than £4.5 billion of additional funding to support GP services and will recruit an additional 20,000 staff to work in practices.
It is also why the Government have published their prevention vision, which sets out an ambitious agenda in order to put public health at the heart of everything the department and the NHS do, including aggressive action to tackle obesity such as the sugar tax, which has proved to be a great success. I am happy to reassure my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham that this will continue to be right at the heart of our agenda. Moreover, the department is addressing the real and valid concerns about health inequalities. We have just recently finished consulting on how to improve the health of people living in the poorest communities. Reducing inequalities is a key part of the long-term plan and will be a requirement as part of our PCMs.
We have also worked closely with Defra on the introduction of the clean air strategy, which was noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and on antimicrobial resistance, which no one noted but I do so now, and with Henry Dimbleby on his food strategy. On this last point, while I cannot commit the Leader of the Opposition to continuing commitment on this agenda, I can certainly reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, of the Government’s ongoing commitment and I thank her for both her expertise and her work on this agenda because it is essential.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Greengross, Lady Meacher, Lady Hollins, Lady Watkins, Lady Sherlock, Lady Campbell, Lady Wheeler and Lady Bakewell, along with my noble friend Lord Young, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London also raised the critical issue of social care. As my noble friend Lord Willetts said, we must just get on with it, and I do not think that I can improve on what the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said: “Ageing is not an option”, and nor is substantial reform in this area.
The Prime Minister was clear on the steps of Downing Street about this Government’s determination to fix the crisis in social care to ensure that every older person has dignity and security and that no one needs to sell their home to fund their care. He wants this to be a bold, once-in-a-generation reform and I can reassure the House that officials across government are working, probably at this moment, on developing ambitious proposals on top of the £17.1 billion invested in the past financial year. However, I will strongly reiterate to the Secretary of State and to the Prime Minister, as I often do, the very strong mood in this House that the time for action is now. I will also confirm that the department will consider carefully the recommendations set out by the Independent Living Strategy Group, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and those of the Intergenerational Fairness Committee, of which the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, is a member, as part of those considerations.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Jolly, Lady Donaghy, Lady Janke and Lady Watkins, along with the noble Lord, Lord Patel, raised the issue of NHS staffing. Having the right staff is crucial to delivering the aims and objectives of the long-term plan. To address this, we are recruiting more staff than ever before with, for example, a 25% increase in training places for medical students. We have also given a significant pay rise to more than 1 million staff and my noble friend Lady Harding is currently preparing for publication the people plan, which will set out a range of ambitious options for what more we can do to improve the situation. In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, this will specifically consider the whole range of potential financial incentives which could support recruitment and retention. At this point I will follow other noble Lords in putting on the record my department’s deep appreciation of the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, for her wonderful work as a champion of the nursing profession.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Jolly, Lady Hollins, Lady Sherlock, Lady Featherstone, and Lady Tyler, and my noble friends Lady Verma and Lord Kirkhope, along with the noble Lord, Lord Watson, noted the importance of getting mental health right, the reform of the Mental Health Act and the care of those with disabilities. This is not only a crucial issue but a complex area, so it is important that we get the reform right. I recognise the impatience of noble Lords to go further faster, but there is real progress to report. The Government have already accepted a number of the recommendations made in the independent review. We will publish a White Paper by the end of the year and we will set out in detail our legislative and non-legislative response. To address the immediate service challenges, the Government are also investing record amounts in NHS mental health care as well as in care for those with learning disabilities and autism. I can also report that capital will not be overlooked. Since 2017, we have recruited more than 3,000 additional staff to put in place a wide range of measures to ensure that care is provided closer to home.
The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy raised Brexit and the health service. In any Brexit scenario my department is committed to maintaining the very highest standards of regulation and I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham that we will remain a world leader in the regulation of tobacco and of prevention, as we have laid out in our prevention vision. Our preference remains close co-operation with the EMA as well as with our other long-term friends and partners such as the Commonwealth, as my noble friend Lord Howell mentioned.
The importance of patient safety was also raised by a number of Peers in relation to the upcoming Health Service Safety Investigations Bill. I am very much looking forward to its Second Reading next week, when I am sure we will have plenty of time to debate it and I will be held to account in every possible way—so I shall not go into detail on that now.
I will say just a word about innovation, raised by the noble Lords, Lord Patel, Lord Kakkar and Lord Bassam, who raised the importance of life sciences and innovation. We have a very strong record in this area. I am afraid I do not recognise the picture presented in the IPPR’s recent report. Turnover and employment in UK life sciences have grown notably over the last decade, and the life sciences strategy sets out a powerful vision for action, which we are delivering against assiduously. This has included £1 billion of government investment and £3 billion of leveraged industry investment. We now have substantially better partnership between the NHS, academia, government and industry, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, that we have to improve on our rate of progress between ideation and adoption. Part of that is better working between all those agencies engaged in trying to deliver against that objective.
I also noted strong support from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and others on the fast-track visa for top scientists. I will take away the sensible suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, that this be expanded to include the cultural and creative sectors.
Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, raised the storage of gametes. I agree on the importance of this, as I think she knows, and have continued to push this matter within my department. To that end, I hope to have a positive update in the coming weeks.
I am mindful that I have only a short amount of time and the clock is counting down. In closing, I reiterate my thanks to noble Lords for their many and varied insightful contributions. Responding to a debate such as this is a challenge, given the breadth of issues we have covered, but it is also a pleasure, giving me the opportunity to engage on many issues that I do not regularly come across in my brief. As has been pointed out, we debate the gracious Speech in unprecedented political times, but my commitment to this place on behalf of the Government and the departments for whom I speak today is that we will continue to strive day in, day out to improve the lives of and the services available to people right across the United Kingdom. I know that is an ambition to which all your Lordships here today will join me in being committed.