House of Commons
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Speaker’s Statement
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Mr Speaker
Before we come to today’s business, I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in marking Emma Raducanu’s outstanding victory at the US Open. In becoming the first British woman to win a singles grand slam championship since 1977, Emma has made the whole nation proud, and I know Members will join me in sending her our congratulations and best wishes.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
Ministers are meeting this week to discuss the success of the holiday activity fund, and good progress has been made on the digitalisation of Healthy Start vouchers. We will continue the ministerial meetings on developing support for families and family hubs.
Robert Halfon
I thank my right hon. Friend for her remarkable work on universal credit during the pandemic. With the forthcoming changes to UC, will my right hon. Friend continue to target financial support on families who need it most, and will she work with the Department for Education to use existing funds from the sugar levy to expand breakfast clubs for disadvantaged children? We know that breakfast provision significantly increases educational attainment. Children with free breakfast provision achieved an additional two months’ progress in educational attainment.
Dr Coffey
I am conscious, especially with my right hon. Friend’s leadership of the Select Committee on Education, of how passionately he feels about this particular area. My Department is supporting the Department for Education’s family hubs work, which includes investing up to £24 million to continue our national school breakfast programme over the next two years, and that includes the recently announced additional £20 million investment from the Treasury’s shared outcomes fund.
Paul Howell (Sedgefield) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
Kickstart provides exciting opportunities for young people most at risk of long-term unemployment and with the greatest barriers to progress. Young people are commencing roles daily and thousands are starting each week. New Department for Work and Pensions data released to Parliament today confirms that as of 8 September, we have reached more than 69,000 starts, pleasingly, with more than 188,000 roles remaining for work coaches to refer young people to.
Paul Howell
While kickstart has been well received by many, there have been frustrations for some. My constituent, Francesca Harding, who runs Butterwick Kennels in Sedgefield, has been particularly disappointed by the performance of Adecco as a gateway provider and the working relationship with Jobcentre Plus. The rules around advertising positions, citing potential age discrimination and all of that, have frustrated the process of getting young people in. It concerns me whether that is a local misunderstanding or whether we need to look at the rules to get even more young people engaged in these schemes.
Mims Davies
DWP has worked closely with Adecco Working Ventures to help support young people via kickstart. As a gateway-plus, it plays an important role in allowing sole traders and other small employers to access the scheme. Employers in gateways can promote involvement, including advertising any approved roles, once they have a grant agreement in place. However, referrals of young people to kickstart jobs must be made by work coaches to ensure that candidates are eligible and suitable, but I am happy to look at the case.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
My constituent Deb Barrow runs a recruitment agency, and she focuses on employing local young people. Unfortunately, the system of kickstart has let her and the local young people of Gower down. It takes, from the point that she gets the job given to her, nearly four to five months for that person to be recruited. That job has by then gone.
Mims Davies
I am sorry to hear about the hon. Lady’s challenges in Gower. We have got 69,000 young people into work, and it is not as simple as getting any young person into any job. We have to work with local people to get the right roles and the right opportunities, so that we get the right outcomes, and I am delighted that her local employer is taking part.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
On Friday, in the youth hub in Darwen and Blackburn, we launched the first kickstart programme in that sort of venue. We look forward to sharing our experience with the Department, because as you know, Mr Speaker, where Lancashire leads, many others will follow.
Mims Davies
I am delighted about that additional youth hub. We have around 150 youth hubs open. Most of them are now physical, with a few working virtually. The hub will really make the difference in that community, and I was delighted to join the opening. It will make that change locally for young people.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
As was announced by the Chancellor at the March Budget, the £20 temporary uplift will come to an end within the next month.
Karl Turner
Time and again, the Government have promised investment into areas such as east Hull, but the Minister knows full well that this savage cut to universal credit will pull £35 million from our local economy and leave families worrying about putting food on the table to feed their kids. Is it not time that the Government matched their rhetoric with actions and cancelled the cut for decent, hard-working people?
Dr Coffey
As the hon. Gentleman will know, at the time of the Budget the uplift was always advocated to be temporary, recognising that the pandemic’s lockdown elements were not over. We did extend it for a further six months, as we did other covid-related support for people. I remind him that when we had Labour’s crisis in the late noughties, that Government did not make any changes to benefits. We are proud that we did so in that temporary time.
Gerald Jones
Last month, I wrote to the Prime Minister with three local food banks, three housing providers and my local citizens advice bureau to highlight the considerable damage that the removal of the £20 uplift would cause. Those organisations and many others in Wales and across the UK are at the forefront of supporting the most vulnerable people in our communities. Does the Secretary of State agree that those organisations are best placed to know the impact of cancelling the uplift? May I ask her to remove the proposal?
Dr Coffey
The hon. Gentleman may not be aware that we have been funding Citizens Advice to assist people in making potential claims for universal credit. To that end, we estimate that about half the people still on legacy benefits would be better off with universal credit and we want to encourage people to consider carefully how they go about that. However, we believe that people progressing in work, as well as getting back into work, is the best way to tackle poverty.
Karin Smyth
The circumstances of this cut are very different from those to which the Secretary of State alluded. In Bristol South, people are not happy about the cut and businesses, which will lose £11 million from the local economy, are not happy with it, either. The Secretary of State should not be happy with the situation. There is time for her to change her mind. Will she do so?
Dr Coffey
The hon. Lady may be aware that more than £400 billion of support has been given more broadly to the UK economy and to people. We are conscious that more than £7 billion was invested in the welfare system to help people during this difficult time. However, as the economy is recovering and employment is growing, we will do more with our work coaches—we have doubled their numbers since a year ago—to ensure that people can get back into work and progress in work.
Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)
The Secretary of State and indeed the whole Government should take credit for the amount of support they have provided to people on low incomes in the past year during the pandemic. Will she take a further look at the housing element of universal credit? In my constituency, rising rental costs and high house prices have made the private rental sector difficult for people on low incomes. Will she look at how the universal credit housing element operates in areas such as mine, just outside London, which are particularly affected by property and rental prices, and whether changes are needed?
Dr Coffey
I am conscious of my right hon. Friend’s concerns. When we made the uplifts just over a year ago, we put an extra £900 million a year into support for housing costs through the changes we made to the local housing allowance rate. He will know that rental areas go beyond constituency boundaries, but the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), who is responsible for welfare delivery, will be happy to discuss what is happening in regard to geographic locations.
Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)
As much as politicians on both sides of this place obsess about the headline rate of universal credit, will the Secretary of State also look at whether universal credit is going as far as it can in meeting rising pressures on the cost of living? In particular, there is the interaction between the energy cap for those with general electricity bills and that for those on prepayment meters, for whom the cap works in a different fashion, which means that people who are often on the lowest incomes pay far more.
Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is right to raise that issue. The warm home discount is administered through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in conjunction with the energy companies, although the DWP does, in effect, facilitate the automatic claiming of that for a number of benefit claimants. I will share his concerns about the potential mismatch with prepayment customers with the relevant Minister, who I hope will respond to him directly.
Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that our economy is beginning to show signs of recovery, with unemployment down and record high job vacancies? In Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, Steelite International, a global ceramics manufacturer, has a jobs fair for more than 100 vacancies. Does she agree that that is the way to help people on universal credit into work and get them out of poverty?
Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Today, the Government have announced the infrastructure programme, with a mixture of public and private sector investment of £650 billion over the next 10 years. We believe that will generate 425,000 jobs in the next four years, and these will be well-paid jobs. Between my Department and the Department for Education, we will be trying to make sure that as many people are as upskilled as possible to take advantage of the higher wages of the jobs being created.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation indicates that nearly four out of every five families with children are receiving universal credit or working tax credit, rising to 45% or more of families with children in the north-east, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the west midlands. Can the Secretary of State share her Department’s assessment, which we heard about at the end of last week, of how these families are expected to manage the income shock of losing £1,000 a year due to the impending cut?
Dr Coffey
It may surprise the hon. Lady to know that more than half of recipients of universal credit are actually households without children. We are conscious that this support had a widespread impact when we had the impact of the pandemic. However, what the hon. Lady will know about is that in the last year, collectively across Government, we have injected several hundred million pounds specifically to help people with children with the difficulties of some of the financial challenges they have. However, now that the jobs market is well and truly open, we will be doing whatever we can to help people get into work, and get into better-paid work as well.
Ms Buck
It is not clear from that answer whether the Secretary of State has actually undertaken any form of assessment of the income shock. However, it is not only about the impact on individuals’ and families’ incomes; it is also about the wider economic consequences. According to the Resolution Foundation, a quarter of all households in the north-east will lose £1,000 a year from the cut, which will strip millions of pounds from the economies of some of the poorest communities in the country. Has her Department carried out an assessment of what the economic impact will be of the cut coming into effect in just a few weeks’ time?
Dr Coffey
My understanding is that, as we always knew the uplift was going to be temporary, an impact assessment was not undertaken because we knew it would be for a limited time.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
People were already struggling to get by after an eye-watering £37 billion of Tory cuts to social security between 2010 and 2019, and they now face the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the foundation of the modern welfare state 70 years ago. Given that the Secretary of State is her Department’s voice around the Cabinet table, can she confirm with a simple yes or no whether she is and has been lobbying the Treasury to stop these cuts?
Dr Coffey
As the Chancellor set out in the Budget, when we had the discussion of what we are doing, it was about continuing to extend the support beyond the time of the lockdown that happened in step 4. I am conscious that we have increased the number of work coaches in jobcentres in Scotland to help people back into work, and into better-paid work as well.
Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)
Can the Secretary of State outline how much extending the temporary uplift would cost and what measures she could think of to pay for it?
Dr Coffey
The estimated cost for a year of the extension of universal credit is about £5 billion. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has set out, and we have updated the plan for jobs today, we want to invest in people to make sure that they can not only get into work, but get into better-paid work as well. That is why with a variety of levers, such as the lifetime skills guarantee, and all the work we are doing for people out of work at the moment, including the sector-based work academy programme, alongside some of our other programmes, we have a really good record of getting people into well-paid work, and that is where our focus has to be.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
Single parents who are in work told the Work and Pensions Committee last week how hard they are going to find it to sustain the £87 a month fall in their income that this cut will deliver. One witness told us that he is going to have to skip meals to make sure that his children do not have to. Surely social security must be better than that.
Dr Coffey
I hope the right hon. Gentleman will direct that person to go and have a chat with the work coach. I do not know the status of that individual, exactly what paid employment they are in right now or their situation with childcare, but I remind him that 85% of the cost of childcare can be claimed by people on universal credit. One of the directions we want to encourage individuals to go in is to go and talk to their work coaches so that we can help them get on in life and be more prosperous.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
The Department’s focus on 50 PLUS: Choices, alongside our plan for jobs, provides funding to ensure that more people of all ages get tailored support. That includes programmes such as the job finding support service, job entry targeted support and the restart scheme, to help them find work. That is in addition to the Department’s train and progress and sector-based work academy programmes, to help people gain confidence, skills and job-specific qualifications, and to progress into employment.
Dr Evans
Bosworth and the east midlands have a fine tradition of automotive logistics. One of the biggest problems is that that is the area changing most rapidly in keeping up to date with skills, which puts pressures on employers to have those skills. What are the Government doing to ensure we are equipped to move into the green era and deal with the automotive nature of the logistics sector, as we go forward over the next 10 years?
Mims Davies
A green recovery presents a significant opportunity for UK workers of all ages to benefit from increasing employment opportunities, including those clean growth sectors. The DWP is supporting people into green jobs as the sector grows, through work coach interventions that will ensure that jobseekers are able to develop skills to match the changing needs of the local labour market and their own aspirations.
John Howell
One thing that concerns me is how we can boost the technical skills that older people learn. What is the Department doing in that respect?
Mims Davies
I am pleased to share with my hon. Friend and the House the fact that in May, a littler earlier in the year, I launched a key partnership with Google offering free IT training for jobseekers. That opportunity gives 9,000 jobseekers the chance to obtain a Google career certificate, which is a level 3 qualification and recognised by the industry. As of 3 September, our jobcentres have referred more than 3,800 people to that life-changing employment scheme.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
Disabled people face huge challenges when changing careers, partly due to the fact that they often wait for three months to be approved for access to work, even before they receive their first payment. Will the Minister meet me, the Hull-based charity Choices and Rights Disability Coalition, and Disability Rights UK to discuss how together we can look at improving access to work?
Mims Davies
I understand that we are working towards 20 days and a transitional programme, but the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work is keen to meet the hon. Lady and ensure that she understands that fully. This is a priority for us.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
For years I have tried to point out that one reason for HGV driver shortages is that people cannot afford the cost of £3,000 to £4,000 to do the training and sit the tests. Is it time for the Government to consider some sort of grant scheme, so that people get their training paid for them, leading to a welfare saving in the long run? It is win-win, so when will the Government step up and do it?
Mims Davies
The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that the Department has been working on that challenge for some time. On 4 October a new sector-based work academy will commence on that in Truro, in the midlands a pilot scheme has been working directly with Eddie Stobart, and our flexible support fund helps people to go into that sector. Cross-Government work is going on, and we are key to that. We have the people who are keen to be part of this issue, and the programmes to match.
Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
Throughout the pandemic our jobcentres have remained open to support the most vulnerable claimants, as well as those who have been impacted. No assessment has been made of the temporary measure due to the pandemic. Our plan for jobs continues to ensure that people receive tailored Jobcentre Plus support to help them find the work they need and, crucially, to develop their skills.
Simon Fell
I thank my hon. Friend for her response. I pay tribute to the local team in Barrow and South Lakes for their hard work in helping people into jobs, and giving them the skills and experiences they need to get into the job market. Indeed, I am looking forward to opening Barrow youth hub on 30 September. That said, many of my constituents are concerned about the changes to universal credit and the potential cliff edge. Will the Minister explain what mitigations are in place to protect those who have concerns about their future?
Mims Davies
Youth hubs are crucial; we have heard about one in Darwen and one in Barrow. My hon. Friend will be aware that the DWP is focused on the multibillion-pound intervention that is our plan for jobs, which, crucially, will support people of all ages, with support for new skills and help to increase their hours, understand what their barriers are, and find that crucial new work. That includes youth hubs. My goal is to have 150 open by the end of the year, and the crucial new one in his constituency is part of that.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
In June 2021, there were 107,000 people on universal credit in employment in Wales.
Chris Bryant
I do worry about this cut to universal credit of £20 a week. In a constituency such as mine, that is taking £6.5 million out of the local economy. That is going to make it more difficult for local businesses to afford extra staff and more difficult for people to find jobs, so it is a completely counterproductive measure, leaving aside the cruelty of making families struggle on even less money. As I understand it, the Secretary of State said this morning to people who are going to lose the £20 a week, “Well, you just either need to get a better job or work more hours.” Can the Minister explain to us, and to the 2,543 people in the Rhondda who are in employment and on universal credit, how many extra hours at the national minimum living wage they would have to work to get that £20?
Will Quince
That of course would depend on their individual circumstances, but to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, the Government have always been clear that the £20 increase was a temporary measure to support households affected by the economic shock of covid-19. There have been significant positive developments in the public health situation since the uplift was introduced, with the success of the vaccine roll-out, restrictions being lifted and our economy opening up, and now there are more than 1 million live vacancies in our jobs market. I will take one issue with what the hon. Gentleman said: he referred to a cut. A cut would represent savings. There are no savings. What he is proposing is an extra £6 billion to £9 billion, which would need to be raised by taxes.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)
Thank you, Mr Speaker—diolch. There are now 200,000 fewer pensioners in poverty compared with 2010. Rates of material deprivation among pensioners are at a record low, falling from 10% to 6% in the last 10 years. Pension credit also provides financial support for the most vulnerable pensioners and a passport to many other benefits.
Jonathan Edwards
Diolch yn fawr iawn, Mr Speaker. Older women in particular find themselves in relative poverty because 30% completely rely on the state pension for their income. That makes the recent findings by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman about maladministration by the Department and its failure to inform 1950s-born women about changes to their state pension allowance particularly galling. What is the Department’s response to the findings of the ombudsman and, more importantly, what will be done to rectify the situation that WASPI women in my constituency find themselves in?
Guy Opperman
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that we have never spent as much as we do now on pensions. The triple lock has seen a £2,050-a-year increase in cash terms. The Government decided the changes 26 years ago, and that policy was continued by successive Governments, including during the 13 years of the Labour Government. In respect of all matters on an ongoing basis, we consider the PHSO, but clearly, it is a three-stage process and we are only at stage 1.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
People across this country work hard and contribute all their lives; they are right to expect the state pension to be there for them when they retire. Given that the Government have failed to pay the state pension on time and have broken three manifesto promises so far, Ministers can surely accept that pensioners and the public cannot simply take them at their word. Ahead of our consideration of the Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill next Monday, will the Government publish their evidence for breaking the link with earnings in this way?
Guy Opperman
I am not sure that I am going to take any lessons from the hon. Gentleman. Before 2010, when the coalition came into power, the state pension was under £100. The new state pension is now £179. We have raised it by £2,000 in the last 10 years. We have enhanced the state pension massively through the triple lock. We did not even need to do anything last year, but we raised the state pension by 2.5%, and we will be increasing it by the double lock if the Bill passes next week.
Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)
The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)
Recruitment, retention and career progression are key to levelling up, so the successful delivery of the Government’s plan for jobs is vital. Through both the national disability strategy and the health and disability Green Paper, we also explore levelling up opportunities for disabled people specifically.
Jon Trickett
The point is that the Minister’s Department is required to address poverty and to make work pay, but the minimum wage is simply too low. Otherwise, why is it that 2.3 million working families are on universal credit? Now there is a triple whammy coming to those poorly paid people: withdrawing the furlough, raising national insurance payments and cuts to universal credit. The underlying causes of poverty are greedy bosses and rapacious landlords, but does the Minister accept that the cuts they are now imposing will drive up already shameful levels of poverty? Will he say to his colleagues that it is time to cancel the cuts?
Justin Tomlinson
Tackling poverty is a key priority for this Government, as seen with the £650 billion infrastructure investment that will deliver 425,000 more jobs a year. While the temporary increase to universal credit is coming to an end, the national living wage and income tax threshold increases, worth over £4,000 to people in full-time work, will continue, as will the universal credit work allowance changes worth up to £630 and the local housing allowance worth £600. Our excellent work coaches, who have doubled in number over the last 12 months, will be doing everything in their power to support people to take advantage of the record job opportunities.
Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
It is not possible to produce a robust estimate of the impact of removing the £20 uplift on poverty. That is particularly the case at the moment, given the uncertainty around the speed of the economic recovery and how it will be distributed across the population.
Mick Whitley
Cutting universal credit will cause misery for millions of people, including my constituent in Birkenhead, Jess, who says that the extra £20 a week means she no longer has to choose between a hot meal and a hot shower. On Wednesday, Unite the Union and Community members who, like Jess, rely on the uplift to stay afloat will be visiting Parliament. Will the Secretary of State commit to meet them, so she can hear for herself why the Government must cancel the cut?
Will Quince
The hon. Gentleman references cancelling the cut. As I said before, there is no cut because there is no financial saving. If this measure were to continue, the Treasury would need to find an extra £6 billion to £9 billion to fund the temporary uplift. It was always a temporary uplift to universal credit. As a result, the temporary uplift will continue as planned.
James Daly (Bury North) (Con)
The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)
We are committed to seeing 1 million more disabled people in work, supporting that through initiatives including the work and health programme, access to work, disability confident and increasing the number of disability employment advisers to over 1,000. We want to help more disabled people to prepare for, start, stay and succeed in work where it is right for them.
James Daly
The Minister and the Secretary of State have a proud record of putting in place programmes that increase opportunities for everyone to access high-quality employment and training. Further to his earlier answer, can the Minister confirm what specific steps he is taking to ensure that the bespoke needs of people on the autistic spectrum are no barrier to accessing employment or training opportunities? Will he join me in thanking local organisations in Bury, such as the Met theatre which runs confidence-building sessions for children on the autistic spectrum, for the role they play in developing the skills that each child needs to thrive in the job market?
Justin Tomlinson
My hon. Friend highlights the absolute importance of supporting people with autism into work, highlighting the supported internships, traineeships, local supported employment pilots, intensive personalised employment support and disability apprenticeships, in addition to the broader options across the work and health programme and plan for jobs. We are currently consulting through the Department for Work and Pensions Green Paper on other ways to improve disability employment opportunities. Best practice, as seen in places such as the Met theatre, is exactly the sort of thing we want to learn lessons from.
Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
There is a well-established working relationship between my Department and the Welsh Government, ensuring we work together on devolved and reserved areas effectively. However, universal credit is a policy reserved to the UK Government.
Ruth Jones
In Newport West, these cruel cuts to universal credit will hit about 9,000 families, including almost 6,000 children. That is unforgiveable and I will keep fighting these Tory cuts to universal credit. In a written parliamentary question to the Secretary of State, I asked whether she would meet me to address the impact of the cuts on the people of Newport West. The Minister replied to me but ignored my request to meet, so let us try again. Will the Minister please meet me to discuss the impact the cuts will have on the people of Newport West?
Will Quince
We have always been clear: the uplift for universal credit was a temporary measure responding to the extraordinary circumstances. Our focus now is rightly on our plan for jobs, with tailored programmes to build skills, move towards employment, increase hours, get back into work or climb the career ladder, because we know that work is the best route to a brighter future.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
Food banks are independent charitable organisations and the Department for Work and Pensions does not have any role in their operation. There is no consistent and accurate measure of food bank usage at a constituency or, indeed, national level.
Neil Coyle
Since 2010, there has been an explosion in the number of people unable to put food on the table. Conservatives such as the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson) admit that taking £20 a week off universal credit current payments, to use the Minister’s vernacular, will result in another dramatic rise in food bank demand. The Trussell Trust predicts that 900,000 more people will need support. Will the Minister or the Secretary of State meet the all-party group on ending the need for food banks and organisations working on this issue to ensure that there is capacity to meet Government-driven demand?
Will Quince
Of course, I am always happy to meet the hon. Gentleman, as I have always sought to do. I remind the House that there have been significant improvements in the public health situation, the vaccine roll-out is a huge success, our economy is opening up, restrictions are lifted, and we have a record number of vacancies in our labour market. Universal credit provides a safety net but it is not designed to trap people on welfare. Work is the best route out of poverty and to prosperity, but I am very happy to meet him to discuss this further.
Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)
Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
The Secretary of State is legally required to conduct an annual review of benefits and pension rates to determine whether they have retained their value in relation to the general level of prices and earnings. The uprating process for working-age benefits has traditionally relied on the September consumer prices index figure and, in April 2021, universal credit was increased by CPI of 0.5%.
Richard Thomson
If the UK Government plough ahead with their planned cut to universal credit, it will result in one in three families with children in Scotland losing over £1,000 overnight and plunge 20,000 children into poverty. Does the Minister understand why so many people in Scotland think that it is the uplift that should stay and the Government snatching away that financial lifeline that should go instead?
Will Quince
There is no objective way of deciding what an adequate level of benefit should be, as everyone has different requirements. Income-related benefit rates are not made up of separate amounts of specific items of expenditure, such as food or fuel charges. The Government have always been clear that this uplift was a temporary measure, and I gently remind the hon. Gentleman that we spend over £110 billion on benefits for working-age people.
Martyn Day
I wonder whether the Ministers can tell us whether any of them actually listened to the evidence of the Work and Pensions Committee last week about hard-pressed families and the effect that universal credit was having on them. If they did, what would they say to their faces about taking £1,040 away from them?
Will Quince
What I would say is that I am proud that this Government stepped forward at the beginning of the pandemic to put in place the largest cash increase in our welfare safety net to support people through an unprecedented period of economic shock and financial disruption, but as our economy opens up, we have record numbers of vacancies in our labour market—we know that work is the best route out of poverty—and it is absolutely right that we tack our approach to support and empower people into work and to progress in work.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
National statistics on the number and percentage of children in low-income households are published annually in the “Households below average income” publication. In 2019-20, 19% of children living in households where at least one adult is in employment were in relative poverty before housing costs.
Liz Twist
The Government are very keen to say that work is the route to escape from poverty. However, over 27% of children in my Blaydon constituency live in poverty and many of those are in families where at least one parent or more is in work. The £20 universal credit uplift removal will push working families deeper into poverty, so what will the Government do to tackle the crisis of in-work poverty?
Will Quince
We know—all evidence suggests—that full work dramatically reduces the risk of poverty. As our economy improves, we will increasingly focus on progression to improve opportunities for those in low-paid work and support them towards financial independence. But the hon. Lady is right, and I recognise that moving into work is not always enough to lift people out of poverty; that is why we have the independent in-work progression commission, which published its report over the summer on the barriers to progression for those on persistent low pay. It makes a number of recommendations for the Government that we will consider very carefully and respond to later in the year.
Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
Through the enhanced Department for Work and Pensions youth offer, we are providing targeted interventions to help young people to gain new skills, build confidence and move into work. Our work coaches are working in partnership to deliver through our new youth hubs, helping young people to access opportunities, including kickstart roles, sector-based work academy programmes, traineeships and apprenticeships.
Chris Clarkson
Jobcentre staff across the country are doing a fantastic job, not least in the Rochdale youth hub, which serves my Heywood and Middleton constituency, but as my hon. Friend will know, getting young people into work is a cross-Government effort. What steps are being taken to work with the Department for Education to ensure that young people have the skills necessary to take on these high-quality jobs?
Mims Davies
We are absolutely working across Government; we also have our enhanced DWP youth offer, which is a programme of 13 weeks of intensive support to address key barriers and drive positive outcomes, including kickstart. I know that, as we speak, job offers are being made in my hon. Friend’s constituency and in his jobcentre. Crucially, we have also recruited 150 youth employability coaches who specialise in supporting young people with significant complex needs, to help them into work.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)
My hon. Friend is a doughty champion for Crawley. It is fantastic news that 35,000 people have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension in the Crawley constituency as a whole. That is also thanks to the 1,600 employers who have supported them in their auto-enrolment duties.
Henry Smith
Those are very impressive statistics that prove that this Government’s policy of auto-enrolment has been a great success. Will the Minister join me in paying tribute to auto-enrolment pension providers such as B&CE—The People’s Pension—which is based in my Crawley constituency?
Guy Opperman
I was delighted to meet The People’s Pension with my hon. Friend a couple of years ago and see the fantastic work that it does. It has more than 5 million members and is one of the largest providers in this important market. I am sure that we will continue to work with it as we expand automatic enrolment, take it to the first £1 earned and lower the entitlement age as we bring forward the 2017 automatic enrolment changes.
Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
This summer, we launched our national disability strategy, setting out more than 100 practical actions and a long-term vision for reform that will make a real difference to disabled people’s everyday lives. Our strategy sets out the actions, ambition and accountability in helping disabled people to overcome the remaining hurdles. We will publish annual reports setting out progress and further actions, and the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work will chair cross-Government meetings to hold our ministerial disability champions to account for delivery across Departments.
Just as you praised a recent sporting achievement, Mr Speaker, I would like to pay tribute—fresh from the Paralympics GB homecoming yesterday and the celebration on the Terrace just now—to all our amazing Paralympians. I was able to cheer them on in Tokyo and talk to them about aspects of the national disability strategy and the daily barriers that they face. In addition to praising Emma’s remarkable success in winning her championship, I say well done to Alfie Hewett and Gordon Reid, who won the gold medal at the Paralympics for wheelchair tennis doubles. They flew straight to the USA, and I am pleased to say that on the same night they also won the grand slam. Those are fantastic sporting achievements—well done to them.
Karin Smyth
I join the Secretary of State in those comments; it was a pleasure to bump into some of those athletes and Ms Balding this morning in Westminster Hall. It was lovely to see them here—well done.
The latest figures show that 50% of personal independence payment mandatory reconsiderations result in a change of award. This is causing huge stress and anxiety to vulnerable people in Bristol South and additional work for advice agencies. What sanctions have been applied to the private companies that are wrongly assessing the applicants?
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
I am conscious of what the hon. Lady has said. Over the past couple of years, we have tried to improve the decision-making stages along the way. One of those important elements involves mandatory reconsiderations, and how we take what we have learnt into the initial decision making, which is still done by DWP civil servants on the advice of assessors. We have further plans, as set out in our Green Paper, which we published before the summer recess, and I am sure that the hon. Lady will take a close interest in that progress.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is right to praise his local jobcentres. One thing we have done as part of the plan for jobs is increase the number of work coaches, and indeed the number of jobcentres, thus demonstrating to people—particularly those who have been out of work already but are coming off furlough—that we are ready to support them so that they can get back into work as quickly as possible.
Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)
This morning, during her television appearance, the Secretary of State said that a person could make up for the Government’s £20 a week cut in universal credit by working just two extra hours a week. I am sure she is aware by now that she got that completely wrong: the taper rate would of course remove a proportion of those additional earnings, so the net earnings for those extra two hours would be far less than £20. May I therefore ask her if she now knows how many more hours a single parent working full time would have to work to make up for the money the Government is cutting?
Dr Coffey
Every single universal credit payment depends on the individual, so I cannot articulate that, but it is fair to say that a number of different levers appear when people work more hours, and that includes the lifting of the benefit cap. There are a number of ways in which people can earn more and keep more of their money when they are working more hours.
Jonathan Reynolds
The figure is 10 extra hours a week, so the cut would force that person to work 50 hours a week in total to get what he or she is receiving now. That is why I have said that reducing the taper rate will be our absolute priority in our replacement for universal credit, but it is also why we oppose the cut. It is why six former Conservative Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions oppose the cut. It is why every Labour Mayor, and even Conservative Mayors such as Andy Street, have spoken out against it. It is why the Government’s own analysis, leaked last week, says that the cut will be “catastrophic”.
This is a Government who half the time do not know what they are doing, and the rest of the time they just do not care. Is not the truth that the only way to get the Government to see sense will be the House of Commons voting to defeat them this Wednesday?
Dr Coffey
I do not know the basis of the hon. Gentleman’s calculation and his suggestion, but what I do know is that the Labour Government did nothing to help people in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008, whereas we have injected more than an extra £7.5 billion. We recognised the need for the temporary uplift, particularly for those who were newly unemployed and coming on to benefit for the first time. That is why we made the temporary uplift similar to that of the minimum paid through statutory sick pay. We will continue to do what we have been doing: investing in our plan for jobs, helping people back into work and helping them to make progress in work.
Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that we are currently working across Government to understand local labour market needs and opportunities, and to understand how best to support those who wish to enter self-employment and be self-supporting and, above all, self-starting. We have learned from the new enterprise allowance and we also understand the impacts of covid, and we are working on all that right now.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
Many pensioners will be relying on pension credit to get by after the Tories’ brutal triple lock betrayal. Will the Secretary of State follow Scotland’s lead and commit herself to introducing a proper take-up strategy for reserved benefits, including pension credit, and will she consider the automation of payments to ensure that more people receive the support to which they are entitled?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that pension credit take-up has improved, not least through the actions of this Government. For example, we have seen the pension credit action day in June this year, the partnership that we have entered into with the BBC and Age UK, and the working group that we have. I continue to work with the BBC and I met the chief executive, Tim Davie, only last week.
Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)
The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)
We are committed to seeing more disabled people becoming elected representatives. In addition to political parties doing more, the national disability strategy sets out the Minister for the Constitution’s work to bring forward a new scheme in 2022 to support candidates and, importantly, those already elected to public office.
Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
It was disappointing that the Government chose to sneak out their disability strategy over the summer recess, meaning that we had no opportunity to question the Minister on its failure to address barriers to employment for disabled people. Why are his Government not introducing mandatory reporting on the disability employment and pay gaps? Why does the strategy contain no proposals to work with trade unions? Most importantly, can he explain why no parliamentary time has been given over to the scrutiny of this strategy?
Justin Tomlinson
I am very much looking forward to going to the Work and Pensions Committee to discuss this very topic this coming Wednesday. It is disappointing that the hon. Member does not recognise that, despite the unprecedented challenges of covid, we once again saw an increase in disability employment over the past year. The figure now stands at 1.5 million since 2013, with the disability employment gap continuing to close. This Government are absolutely committed to their target of 1 million more disabled people in work by 2027.
Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)
Could the Secretary of State—or the Minister for Pensions, who is doing such great work in this area—explain what they are doing to ensure that when pensions are invested, the environmental, social and governance agenda is about incentivising high-quality sustainable products across the world, for instance in Africa, and not just becoming a box-ticking exercise here at home?
Guy Opperman
I will take my right hon. Friend’s compliment. The UK is the first country in the world to address the social elements of ESG. We have produced a call for evidence, “Consideration of social risks and opportunities by occupational pension schemes”, and I would encourage everyone to get involved with that. That will genuinely transform the supply chain, access to finance and investment in all parts of the world, but particularly in respect of Africa.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
Mims Davies
I thank the hon. Lady for making that point. The benefit cap is there to provide a strong work incentive, to be fair for those people who are hard-working and tax-paying, and to encourage people to move into work where possible. I understand the point she makes regarding the impact of a partner and their work history in this situation, and I am happy to discuss that with her. I have been talking to other Members on this issue. Exemptions will of course apply to the most vulnerable claimants, and we take this area very seriously.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
We have heard a lot from those on the Treasury Bench about how much money will be spent on the plan for jobs and the kickstart programme. Can the Secretary of State set out how she will measure success in this programme, and will she commit to coming to the House regularly to update us on progress?
Mims Davies
I am absolutely delighted about the impact of the kickstart programme. I went to an event at the Emirates this week where there were 1,400 people coming to find jobs that simply were not there before the start of the pandemic. It is absolutely right that we focus on the outcomes for young people. We have more than 288,000 roles out there for young people, and there are 69,000 people in those roles. That is success. There are traineeships and apprenticeships, and work through youth hubs, and we will find a path for them.
Mr Speaker
May I gently say that Members should be addressing the Chair and looking this way?
Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
I thank the hon. Lady for that question. As she knows, we have brought forward two of the exemptions to the shared accommodation rate. We have committed to the third, and if I can accelerate it, of course I will do so.
Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and her Department for their success in doubling the number of work coaches to 27,000 in just a few short months. Does she agree that thanks to that boost more jobseekers will get the personalised support they need?
Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is so right; it has been a successful recruitment programme. We wanted to reintroduce the face-to-face interventions because we know that that direct intervention through our work coaches is the best way to help people identify roles that they are suitable for and consider the skills involved—they might want to change career. That is how we can guide them on our various jobs programmes and make sure they can start earning again.
Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)
Dr Coffey
The hon. Lady is wrong to suggest that our Government have not supported the people of Luton throughout this difficult time. The furlough scheme was unique; it was not introduced when many hundreds of thousands of people were made redundant after Labour’s financial crisis. We stepped in, putting more than £400 billion into Government spending overall to support the country during this time. I am conscious of that fact that some people will be concerned about the impact on aviation travel, which is why we have invested in various job schemes, including encouraging people to switch sectors, recognising that the skills they have are transferable.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
Will the Secretary of State tell us what work is being undertaken to prevent future maladministration in the communication of major policy changes? I am thinking about not only 1950s-born women, but, as we heard at the Select Committee last week, the many claimants who are still to be told of the imminent cut to UC. Is the ombudsman going to be kept very busy because of the structural failings of this Department?
Dr Coffey
Communications have already been issued to every UC claimant, through the journal messages, and further communications are continuing to go out.
Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)
In my constituency, some 5,000 families with children—possibly more than 10,000 children—are dependent on UC. Can the Secretary of State guarantee that when the benefit is reduced by that £20 a week not one of those children will suffer as a result? Can she look me in the eye and promise that that is the case?
Dr Coffey
Every family has a different situation and I encourage any of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents who are concerned to approach their jobcentre. We are very conscious that where both parents are actively working, rather than one parent being economically inactive, that will bring more revenue into the household budget. That is one thing we need to do to try to make sure that as many people are economically active as possible, for not only their own prosperity, but the prosperity of the nation.
Anum Qaisar-Javed (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
Many constituents have emailed me to outline their concern that the planned removal of the £20 uplift will have a significant impact on their family and children. How does the Department expect families to survive Tory cuts to UC coupled with a national insurance hike?
Dr Coffey
The national insurance levy increase is there to tackle a long-standing issue and will be spread between businesses and employees. In fact, the top 15% of earners will pay roughly half the future levy revenues. We are conscious that the universal credit uplift was temporary and we will be doing what we can to help more people not only to get back into work but to progress in work.
Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
My local economy is already struggling, with £12.6 million to be taken out by the universal credit cut. The Secretary of State said that no economic impact assessment had been carried out so far, but will she look again and consider doing one? The cuts are going to affect the most disadvantaged parts of our country, and that does not fit with the Government’s so-called levelling-up agenda.
Dr Coffey
Just today, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have announced £650 billion of investment in infrastructure over the next decade. The right hon. Lady will be aware of the industries in her constituency, where there has been huge support from the Government to bring green jobs to her part of the world, and I am conscious of the other benefits that she and colleagues may see in respect of freeports. All that is putting into effect our aim: we want to help people not only to get back into work but to progress in work, with higher-skilled jobs that bring higher pay.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
This morning, the Secretary of State claimed to know exactly how many extra hours a universal credit claimant would have to work to make up the £20 by which the benefit is to be cut; this afternoon, she admitted to the House that she had no idea of the answer to that self-same question. That must mean that her comment to the BBC this morning was at best wildly misleading and recklessly irresponsible. Will she apologise for that inadvertent but serious error?
Dr Coffey
I was not misleading the House in any way in any of my statements made so far, and I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
Why are lifetime individual savings accounts counted as capital in the calculation of universal credit entitlement? They are designed not to be touched until the saver reaches 60 or is buying a house, so why are people like my constituent being hit by penalty charges because the DWP is forcing them to withdraw from a lifetime ISA early?
Dr Coffey
Since universal credit was introduced, there has always been a capital recognition, recognising when people have resources that they can draw on to support themselves rather than drawing on the resources of other taxpayers. That is the principle of why capital is included when people want support for their other living expenses.
HGV Driver Shortages
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Transport if he will make a statement on the Government’s plans to address heavy goods vehicle driver shortages.
The Secretary of State for Transport (Grant Shapps)
I welcome this opportunity to update the House on the actions that my Department and others have been taking to address the shortage in HGV drivers. This is, of course, a global issue, with our supply chains adjusting to the impact of the pandemic and working incredibly hard to make sure that consumers get whatever they need. We have been working with the industry for many months, unlocking testing capacity so that UK workers can join the driving sector.
My Department has already increased the number of vocational driving tests from 2,000 a week pre-pandemic to 3,000 a week—that is a 50% increase—and last Friday I announced to Parliament additional measures that will significantly increase the number of HGV driving tests, by up to 50,000 per year. First, we will eliminate the need for some car drivers who want to tow a trailer to take an additional test. Some 16 million drivers who took their test before 1997 already have that right, and we are going to allow everybody to enjoy the same privilege of the licence, allowing around 30,000 more HGV tests every single year.
Secondly, tests will be made more efficient by the removal of the reversing exercise element and, for vehicles with trailers, the uncoupling and recoupling exercise. That test will be carried out separately by a third party, so it will still be done.
Thirdly, we are making it quicker to get a licence to drive an articulated vehicle without first having to get a licence for a smaller vehicle. That will make around 20,000 more HGV tests available every year and mean that drivers can gain their licence and enter the industry more quickly, without the removal of any testing. I have instructed the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to prioritise the processing of licence applications, and we are supporting the industry to get UK workers into training.
This is not the only action that we have taken. Over recent months, we have made apprenticeships in the sector much more generous; offered incentive payments to employers to take on apprenticeships in the sector; worked with Jobcentre Plus with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to direct more people towards this brilliant career; and provided funding of £1 million for the Roads to Logistics scheme, encouraging ex-military leavers, ex-offenders and the long-term unemployed to move into jobs in this sector. This is not just a transport problem or effort, but ultimately many of the solutions will come from standing challenges, which the industry itself will want to take on.
This Government welcome the prospect of better remunerated drivers, with better conditions and a more diverse HGV workforce.
Jim McMahon
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question.
We have heard the words, but they offer far too little far too late. We have all seen constant examples of businesses impacted by supply change disruption from McDonald’s to Nando’s and Wetherspoons. We have all seen supermarket shelves empty, and now the delivery of vital medical supplies is being affected. We have already seen the number of people wanting to do their HGV driving test literally fall off a cliff, with only 9,000 being completed in 2019. That was before Brexit and it was well before covid. Industry has been warning of this crisis for years, but the Secretary of State has been asleep at the wheel. Just months ago, one of his own Ministers accused the road haulage industry of crying wolf over shortages despite the evidence that the crisis was getting bigger and bigger and that it was grinding our economy to a halt.
Last week, I challenged the Transport Secretary to lay out his plan. Not only did it fall short, but it contained some worrying news. One of the measures would see the reversing element of the assessment removed completely, despite the Health and Safety Executive reporting that 25% of all deaths involving a vehicle are the result of a reversing strike. Was he aware of that? If he was, what assessment has been made of the increased risk made by lowering standards even further?
We urgently need to see Ministers bring forward a road freight recovery plan, bringing together all interested parties, with training providers, examiners, businesses, industry bodies and trade unions all working behind a single plan. Will the Secretary of State do so and finally get a grip before it is too late?
Grant Shapps
Once again, I must stress to the hon. Gentleman that this is a global problem. The chief executive of eastern Europe’s largest hauliers, Waberer’s, said:
“It is a global driver shortage across Europe, not an isolated problem of one country”.
He points out that the shortages are in Romania, Poland, Germany and many other countries. It is not just a European problem, but a global one. In the words not of a UK haulier, but of the chief executive of US Xpress, telling of the problems in the American trucking market:
“The driver situation is about as bad as I’ve seen in my career.”
This is a global problem that we will try to resolve.
The hon. Gentleman has misunderstood one of the three key measures that we introduced on Friday, so I am grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to set it out. The reversing manoeuvre that he refers to is not being removed from testing; it is the testing that is being handed to the training organisation rather than having the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency carry it out. That was widely supported. In the 9,000 consultation responses, it was one of the most strongly supported moves and measures, and it makes a lot of sense.
I have not heard the hon. Gentleman tell us what he thinks the solution is. All I hear from him is that we need to undercut British workers by expanding visa system and letting more people in. He may be right that we have to look at all different options, but I have to say to him, given that he is chair of the Labour and Co-operative parliamentary party, that it is a shame that his solution seems to be to undercut British workers by keeping their wages low.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
The Secretary of State is right to say that this is a problem across Europe. Germany is estimated to be short of 45,000 to 60,000 HGV drivers and France 45,000. Back in 2016, when I was a member of the Select Committee, our Chairman, Dame Louise Ellman, said:
“This is not a new challenge. The road haulage sector has been short of skilled drivers for the last ten years. The familiar profile of the professional driver – over 45, white and male – will need to adapt.”
She also called for pay to go up. Does the Secretary of State agree that the way for the industry to deal with this is to increase pay, and not to suppress wages and to look for labour from abroad, which, clearly, will not work?
Grant Shapps
We will carry on looking at all the different measures. I hear what Members across the House have said today and previously about this matter. An increase in salaries, better remuneration and better conditions seem like very sensible ways to deal with the issue. We are in support of people who are working hard being paid a decent day’s salary; I support that.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: 99% of HGV drivers are white, middle-aged and male. They are increasingly well paid. Their average age is 55. Mr Speaker, I could almost qualify myself if this job doesn’t work out.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
God help us all, Mr Speaker, if that comes to pass.
Ministers are said to be worried about Christmas, and they should be, but the crisis is upon us now, not in three months’ time. I wrote to the Secretary of State in spring urging action, but there has been nothing until now. The impact of Brexit on daily life is becoming clear, so does he regret the number of times that Members of his party said that the prospect of bare supermarket shelves post Brexit was some baseless “Project Fear”?
The loosening of regulation must not be allowed to put safety at risk. I have been contacted by training providers in my constituency that are facing overnight financial ruin. They were given no notice, no consultation and no explanation of what the Secretary of State and his Department are proposing on trailers and on B+E tests. My constituent has seen his full list of bookings until the end of the year cancelled. How will training firms going out of business or staff being made redundant due to a lack of work help when the longer-term problems of driver recruitment, retention and drivers’ facilities still have not been addressed?
Finally, the Government must listen to the Road Haulage Association, the Food and Drink Federation and pretty much everyone else outside the Department for Transport, and grant temporary visas for HGV drivers. Is the Secretary of State lobbying the Home Office for that—yes or no?
Grant Shapps
Let me first stress that we have been working on the issue for a very long time. In fact, I think it was in my first meeting when I became Secretary of State—certainly my first meeting with the Road Haulage Association—when I granted the RHA £1 million for the Road to Logistics fund to bring in ex-forces and those who have been unemployed for a long time. That was the very first thing I did, more than two years ago. It is important to recognise that we had been taking action on this for a long time, and, indeed, before many others started to look at the situation. This is a long-term shortage in the marketplace.
The hon. Gentleman expresses legitimate concerns about the role now for those carrying out driver training. We are working to introduce an industry-led accreditation scheme, which could help the 16 million drivers who do not currently require trailer training to have some form of accreditation—perhaps leading to lower insurance and the rest of it—before trailing trailers. We very much hope to help, including firms in his constituency, by expanding the skills base for people driving in all its forms.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker—[Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] Apologies; I meant to say Mr Speaker.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for setting out the range of measures that he is taking to address the problem of HGV driver shortages. He is right to emphasise that this problem predates covid and Brexit, and has been growing for a considerable length of time. He mentioned the role of veterans leaving our armed forces and has talked about the long-term unemployed. Does he recognise that there is potential, through working with the Prison Service, for ex-offenders to be helped and supported into a rewarding career path on leaving prison? Is he having discussions with the Ministry of Justice to see whether a good nationwide scheme can be put in place?
Grant Shapps
We have indeed had exactly those conversations. The Road to Logistics scheme that I mentioned actually takes into account ex-offenders as well. I am speaking to my colleagues across Whitehall—not just at the Ministry of Justice, but also at the Department for Work and Pensions—all of whom have been keen and proactive in bringing people from other careers and no career into this marketplace.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy—[Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] I mean thank you, Mr Speaker.
As the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), the Chair of the Select Committee, so ably said, this problem has long been predicted. However, the current and short-term solutions that the Secretary of State is introducing include extending driver hours, loosening the rules on pulling trailers and having a fast track into HGV driving. Will the Secretary of State release the impact assessments on the safety implications of those and the other changes, which raise extreme concerns for road users?
Grant Shapps
We are always, front and centre, most concerned about road safety; the hon. Lady is absolutely right to point that out. Fortunately we have a very large cohort of drivers who can already pull longer trailers— 16 million of them, in fact—so we are able to study the safety data, and have done so. On some of the other changes that she, and the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), referred to, testing is not being removed, as has been advertised; the test is being moved to a different point with the training organisations, which are very good and responsible organisations. Of course we will monitor this very carefully. Drivers’ hours are more flexible but they are still very restricted under the relaxations that we have provided, and they have to be notified as well. So yes, we keep a very close eye on these things.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for setting out the measures that he is already taking to tackle this really important issue. Will he also consider other issues that are preventing people from going into the industry and deterring people from staying in it? One of those is safe and quality facilities when they need to stop, because these rest stops are really important. To get people to go into the industry, they need to have the security and the safety for themselves and for their load in having the right places to stop.
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about this. I think the whole House will recognise that the quality of stop facilities has not been anywhere near where it needs to be. That is one of the reasons the industry has struggled systemically for so long with the lack of drivers. We have already mentioned the statistics, and it is not a surprise that we do not get more women and more people from different backgrounds into the sector. We must sort that out. Again, I am grateful to colleagues across Government, including in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, in terms of planning, for their help and assistance. We are going to have a better-paid, better-quality job where people come into this with the right skills and for the long term.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
On Saturday, I met people from East of Scotland Growers—a farmer-owned co-operative based in North East Fife. Their processing season started three weeks ago and they usually get nine lorries a day; they are currently getting five. Their freezers and cold stores are full of highly perishable items right now. The steps that the Secretary of State has outlined are welcome but are not going to help to salvage a system that finishes in six weeks. What other things should the Government be doing?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s welcome of the measures. She is absolutely right to point out that these problems go well beyond a simple shortage of drivers, which, as I have commented on several times, is pan-European—in fact, global—and stretches to problems of supply through the entire supply chain. For example, this morning I met representatives of the maritime industry at the start of London International Shipping Week. They have had to go through enormous problems with factories closing, the problems at Suez and much else in order to keep shipping going. That is all part of the much wider supply chain. I extended the offer of meeting Ministers to explore the opportunities, and I would be happy to hear about and learn from firms in her constituency.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for a big expansion of testing capacity and the idea that we can train more drivers at home. Given the need for much better facilities, will he work with local government and his own Department to identify public sector land at lorry parks or adjacent to the highway that could be used, along with private sector investment, to provide those better facilities?
Grant Shapps
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to stress, again, the need to have those facilities improved. The answer to his question is yes, I will certainly do that. In fact, I am already doing it. It is very important that there are decent facilities for people to stop at. We have an opportunity to do that now, and I am looking forward to working with him and Members across the House to identify such sites.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
May I beg the Secretary of State to think of the health and welfare of the drivers? Recent Loughborough University research commissioned by the NHS finds that the average life expectancy of drivers is 14 years shorter than the general population. Why is that? It is because these drivers drive on the filthy, polluted roads in our country. Not only that, the research shows that that filthy, polluted air gets into the cabs. This is a major health problem. Even at £50,000 and £60,000 a year, men and women are reluctant to enter the profession. Let us get our priorities right—keep these men and women who drive for us safe, and do something about the filthy pollution on the roads in our country.
Grant Shapps
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we want to drive up the standards, but he somewhat misrepresents the picture of improving quality of not only our roads, thanks to our enormous £27 billion investment in our roads, but of air quality as the standard of trucks gets better and better. He may have missed it, but I recently introduced a consultation on the ending of the sale of diesel trucks in this country. We will be one of the first countries, if not the first country in the world that manufactures to do so. I will welcome his response to that consultation, which will help clean the air up for everybody on our roads.
Fay Jones (Brecon and Radnorshire) (Con)
I am grateful that the Department is getting after these issues so urgently. During the summer, I met A.E. Gough and Sons, which has been trucking from Llandrindod Wells in my constituency since 1926. It is a family-run business. It is very proud of its industry, and sees a bright future for it, but it has concerns about the conditions that its drivers experience, such as poor rest facilities. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss its concerns and ensure that we keep this historic business going?
Grant Shapps
I thank my hon. Friend for that great question. Similar to the point made earlier, we want to see truck stops improve. We want to see the overnight facilities improved. We want to attract people into this industry. We are starting to see that movement, not only because there has been a welcome increase in salaries and wages, but because of campaigns, including by The Sun newspaper, to “Keep on trucking”, which is encouraging more people into this industry. I or my roads Minister would be happy to meet my hon. Friend.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
Food products missing from supermarket shelves are commonplace, but my constituents are worried not only about the food shortages, but the shortages in vital medical equipment. We cannot resolve the supply chain problems if the Government will not face up to the cause. Will the Secretary of State admit that his Government’s trade and co-operation agreement with the EU is at the heart of the chronic shortages?
Grant Shapps
I cannot stand at this Dispatch Box and admit something that is patently untrue. It is not just me saying that; it is the labour unions and the international haulage associations, all of whom are saying that the pandemic is of course the root cause. I will not stand here and deny that there have been big changes to how our industry is operating, but no one can realistically deny that those problems have been coming along for a very long time. If there is a No. 1 cause, it clearly is the pandemic.
Saqib Bhatti (Meriden) (Con)
Last time I checked, Germany, which requires 45,000 drivers, and Poland which requires 123,000 drivers, were still within the European Union. Despite the Scottish National party and the Labour party trying to paint this as a Brexit issue, will my right hon. Friend please reconfirm to the House that this is a global issue? While they try to undermine British workers, he is focused on finding a solution for this industry.
Grant Shapps
I just cannot put it better than my hon. Friend. Those countries are in the EU, as are France, Spain and Italy in addition. All have enormous shortages of drivers. There is, of course, a change in our economy; there is a change to the global economy brought about by coronavirus. Without allowing the terms and conditions to improve in the HGV world, we will never attract the right number of drivers. That is something that, thankfully, is starting to happen.
Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
Today, the First Minister of Scotland, in her capacity as leader of the Scottish National party, said this of Brexit:
“The impact on daily life is becoming clear. There are already shortages of some foods—yes, really, food shortages in one of the richest countries of the world.”
Does the Minister regret the number of times representatives of his party, including Ministers, claimed that the prospect of empty shelves as a result of Brexit was some baseless fear project?
Grant Shapps
If the hon. Gentleman had his way, he would be importing drivers from England to settle the shortage. It just makes no sense. We have gone round in circles on this. The reality is that we are working very hard to fix a global problem through enabling more testing and encouraging more people into the market. I would welcome him encouraging people to join this market, too.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
Anyone who has engaged with the haulage industry over many years, as I have, knows that this issue is nothing to do with Brexit and much to do with a long-running image of an industry that has found it difficult to attract people. I welcome the measures announced by my right hon. Friend, which many hauliers in my constituency would say are overdue. Does he recognise that there is still a concern about the short term and that many of the measures will take some time to work through? What does he envisage happening in the short term to allay fears in my constituency and elsewhere about people getting the goods they want for Christmas, for example?
Grant Shapps
First, it is important to say that many of the solutions rest with the sector. It is not simply the Government who need to resolve the supply shortages; as I said earlier, it goes much wider to the maritime industry and others as well. None the less, we have taken early and consistent action that has already increased the number of tests available by 50%; and, as I described, my first meeting in this job was about enabling more people to come into the sector. The measures that I announced to the House through Friday’s written statement and, in particular, the number of testing slots that will become available straightaway as a result, take that faster and will have an impact this side of Christmas.
Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)
We have heard from the Secretary of State that this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with him, but the reality is that last year’s immigration Bill was not accompanied by any alternative domestic skills plan whatsoever, and that has quickly caught up with the Government, who rejected all of Labour’s calls for impact assessments that would have identified critical skills gaps. One of my local businesses told me that its sector is at crisis point and that the HGV driver shortage is making supply-chain issues impossible. What can my local business do to recruit and retain HGV drivers to alleviate these crippling problems right now?
Grant Shapps
I am a little confused by the question because I have never said, “This is nothing to do with me.” In fact, I consider it the Department for Transport’s responsibility to propose measures to alleviate the problem, as I have already explained twice. I did that from my very first meeting in this job and I have continued to do it through measures such as the road to logistics programme and adjusting drivers’ hours as well as those I announced to the House the other day. It is the case, however, that 6 million Europeans—many of whom will be drivers—still have pre-settled status, and many will be attracted back by the price mechanism with it being worthwhile to come and drive in this country. I hope the hon. Member joins me in welcoming what I think will help the businesses in her constituency: better pay and conditions for the people who carry out this hard work.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Opposition Members seem to be trying to paint this as a picture of Brexit and UK immigration policy, but does the Secretary of State agree that that does not explain the shortages seen in Poland, Germany, the United States and France and that if we do not accurately diagnose the problem as one of wages and conditions, we will not be able to solve it? Furthermore, does he agree that it is quite astonishing that the SNP and Labour seem to be against improving workers’ conditions?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is, of course, spot on. It is extraordinary to hear the Opposition’s absolute obsession with Brexit. Government Members have all moved on, have we not? They want to go on and on about Brexit and, when we are trying to solve the problems, they want to take us backwards again. The reality is that their only solution is to import and undercut British workers. We want to train those workers, pay them more and improve facilities.
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
I have been contacted by a number of drivers in Ceredigion who believe that a long-term solution to the crisis must include improving delivery times at distribution centres. Many drivers have told me of having to wait for hours while their loads are tipped at the centres and that preventing such long stays would go a long way to enhancing driver welfare and driver retention in the industry. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss that further?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman makes the good point that we have a just-in-time delivery system in this country, and we must maintain it. The resilience of many of the supply chains, including on the short straits between Calais and Dover, is critical. We saw the problems created at Christmas when the French closed the border over coronavirus—note that it was not over Brexit—so it is important that we put all the necessary measures in place to ensure that our system runs as smoothly as possible across the distribution network. I would be happy either to meet him or for him to meet the roads Minister on the subject.
Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)
The Prime Minister has often declared his love of buses in this place, so does the Secretary of State recognise that there are recruitment issues not just in the HGV sector, but in the bus sector? In rural and isolated constituencies such as mine of North Norfolk, that has real problems. Would the Secretary of State reassure me that he will put as much energy as he can into recruiting people into the HGV sector as into the bus sector?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the need for vocational training and testing in all sectors. One of the good things about these measures is that the expanded number of tests that will be available will be useful for vocational drivers in all sectors, including the coach sector and the much loved Bus Back Better sector as well.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
It has been highly amusing seeing the Secretary of State paint himself somehow as Comrade Shapps, a champion of the workers who is enhancing terms and conditions while at the same time increasing workers’ hours. Actually, this measure has a really detrimental effect on health and safety. I have written to the Secretary of State about a number of constituents who could not get their tests to become HGV drivers. Is it not about time that the Secretary of State sat down with the new general secretary of Unite, if he is so interested in terms and conditions and in improving wages? He should sit down, collectively bargain and enhance terms and conditions for British workers.
Grant Shapps
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here, because what we have done does not increase workers’ hours. It provides flexibility without changing the hours. If the hon. Member is accusing me of being in favour of the worker and on the side of people earning more money for a decent day’s work when they deliver the goods to our shops, guilty as charged. I hope he will join me on the frontline.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The British Army is one of the biggest employers of HGV drivers; it has about 2,000. What discussion has the Secretary of State had with our right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary about the use of some of those drivers to preserve critical supply chains were that to be necessary, and also about the impact of this crisis on retention? At the moment, supermarket chains are paying upwards of £60,000 to drivers, which is a very powerful inducement for people to leave the Army.
Grant Shapps
It is of course absolutely true that, with salaries increasing, more people are being encouraged to come into the sector. That means that there may be an impact overall where people are paid more in different professions. We have seen an increase in the number of drivers coming in—I know this from the DVSA booking figures—which shows that there is a solution on the horizon. My hon. Friend is also right to question whether the Army could deliver some of the goods and services. At the moment, that is not being considered. Of course, the Government as a whole keep a very close eye on this issue and have contingency plans in place, but it is absolutely not something that at the moment the Government are looking at.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
Empty supermarket shelves, increasing prices of building materials and shortages of blood tests and flu jabs are an indication of a very serious set of crises. We are 90,000 short of drivers in this country, which is more than twice the figure in the other countries that the Secretary of State mentioned. According to a constituent of mine, only eight tests were available at the Switch Island testing centre in my constituency last week. Taking short cuts that undermine safety cannot possibly be the answer to this crisis. There is a problem right now. Lorry drivers need it sorting out, consumers need it sorting out and businesses need it sorting out, as does the country. What is the answer—here, now, today—to this shortage?
Grant Shapps
Again, there seems to be some misunderstanding. First, the tests are still required for HGV drivers. We are not compromising safety; the tests are just taking place in a different place. For example, there is the C+E test, which is for articulated plus rigid. These used to have to be done separately, and we are just combining the tests so that people do not first have to have done the C test before they do the E test. It does not reduce safety at all, and it is widely welcomed by the sector. Similarly, the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), who is leaving the Chamber, said that we are increasing drivers’ hours. We are not increasing drivers’ hours. There is a lot of misunderstanding. The measures we are putting in place now will provide immediate additional capacity. They already have—we already have 50% more tests available—and they will bring up another 50,000 per annum. We are doing this today.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I am pleased that Stroud’s haulage drivers are receiving more recognition for how integral they are to the smooth running of our lives and businesses, and I hope that will help with recruitment. As my right hon. Friend works hard to consider a range of options and solutions to combat the global driver shortage, has he considered making changes—temporary or otherwise—to certificate of professional competence training requirements, so that we can bring back experienced retired drivers more quickly?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend raises an excellent point that has not come up in the debate so far. We considered CPC requirements during the transition period and we made some changes, and we will always keep a close eye on whether such changes are required. We will keep the issue under constant review, and I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s thoughts on the matter.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
In a Transport Committee meeting on 17 July 2019, I informed the then Secretary of State for Transport that post-Brexit we would be short of 50,000 HGV drivers. It would appear I was optimistic. If the Government have been working on this matter for a long time, as the Secretary of State just said, why are we facing this crisis?
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
My right hon. Friend’s statement shows that the Conservative party is the true workers’ party. A Harlow HGV driver said to me that the big issue is conditions, as has been pointed out. Is not the answer to this issue—indeed, this is the answer for so many problems to do with skills—to rocket-boost HGV apprenticeships? What is my right hon. Friend doing to work with the Department for Education and the Institute for Apprenticeships to rocket-boost those vital apprenticeships for HGV drivers?
Grant Shapps
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. As I mentioned in passing—I will provide a little more detail—we have raised the funding band from £6,000 to £7,000 to allow large goods vehicle apprentices to come into the market, which is helping to attract more people. We have also included an incentive payment to employers of £3,000, made available for every apprentice they hire as a new employee. I hope both those measures are having a real impact.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
The Secretary of State might be concerned that this problem is now affecting medical supplies. What specific short-term steps will he take to safeguard medical supplies, while we wait to see the impact of the other measures he announced?
Grant Shapps
Although that goes somewhat outside my remit, I can tell the hon. Gentleman that the Department of Health and Social Care has robust programmes in place, not least through its work prior to Brexit, to ensure a supply of medical provisions. That includes things like already having them in stock, and many other measures that do not require the traditional route. It is worth knowing that despite the crisis—which, as I say, is global—we have not had to use any of the approaches that were talked about prior to Brexit. Those include buying additional Government purchase capacity for freight in order to shift medicines or other supplies around. Indeed, we purchased such capacity as a standby, but we did not have to use much of it at all. As I say, however, the issue is not directly in my remit.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the excellent removal of the need for young people, who have been hit so hard by the pandemic, to spend their money on a trailer test. That is really welcome in rural communities, and with that extra freedom comes extra responsibility. When can those young people expect that policy to be implemented—is it today?
Grant Shapps
I am pleased to tell the House that the statutory instrument is going down, which means that the change will be made very soon indeed. I will write to Members to provide further detail on that. My hon. Friend is right to point out that extra responsibility comes with some of the freedoms, and the industry-led accreditation scheme, which we have already started to discuss with the industry, insurers and those who hire out trailers, is important. We can also improve the quality of driving among the 16 million people who already have permission to drive those trailers without any tests.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)
It is safe to say that a big problem facing the HGV industry when it comes to recruitment is a lack of diversity. What steps will the Secretary of State’s Department take to make these jobs more attractive to women and black, Asian and minority ethnic drivers?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. First, we need to make sure that the job is properly remunerated. Secondly, the terms and conditions—the quality of stops—must be commensurate with the job that people are doing, and I have talked about how I am working with colleagues across Government on that front. Thirdly, I am working with my right hon. Friend the welfare Secretary on how, with a variety of different programmes, we attract people from more diverse backgrounds so that the sector is not 99% white, male and middle-aged. I am working with my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary on how we can expand programmes in that direction too.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
The Secretary of State has just acknowledged the need for a broader mix of people in the sector—particularly women, who make up only 1% of workers. He has also spoken about how improved facilities will help ease that. Does he agree that there is a great example at the UK’s newest motorway services, operated by Moto at junction 1 of the M6, which were opened during the summer by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean)?
Grant Shapps
That is Corley service station, which used to have an excellent Julie’s Pantry, I recall, many—
Grant Shapps
It is a Rugby one, is it? I look forward to visiting very soon to see it for myself.
Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)
I have worked closely with the Government for four years, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on trailer and towing safety, to secure an amendment to legislation following the tragic death of a toddler in my constituency. The Government’s proposed change 3, which would allow car drivers not to take the additional test, is a bitter blow to the work that we have done over four years, and I have not been told, and do not understand, what the changes mean for trailer safety. I would very much welcome a briefing on these proposals from officials for me and the all-party group—proposals in which my constituents whose son died, who have lent their support to Government campaigns, are very disappointed.
Grant Shapps
I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady about the importance of road safety. In this country, we have ended up with 1,700 deaths per year—the number has come down—making ours some of the safest roads in the world, but the number of remaining deaths and serious injuries has been very stubborn. I am happy to arrange for a meeting with the hon. Lady and the APPG. I have mentioned that there could be a significant upside to these changes. I hired a trailer just before the summer, on a pre-’97 licence, and I was not asked for any form of accreditation at all. In our future system, we hope and expect that the industry-led accreditation scheme will ensure that people are hiring with better skills in place. I think that we can use that to improve the skills of the 16 million drivers who do not require any particular test in order to hire a trailer. I think there is a very happy situation here where we can improve safety overall.
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
I thank my right hon. Friend for the way he is working with the sector to come forward with practical solutions, but delays at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency are delaying some people in getting their HGV licence and, indeed, other work. What steps is he taking to get the DVLA staff back to work and fully functioning to deal with the backlog and the delays, so that my constituents and people around the country can get their driving licences quickly and take up the jobs that are available?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am asking the DVLA to prioritise the issuing of HGV licences. That is part of the issue, but he is right to highlight that there is an ongoing strike that bears no relation to the current situation. I encourage the Public and Commercial Services Union to bring that to a close as soon as possible. It is harming the most vulnerable people in society, whose licences and documents are not being issued and/or returned, and in this particular case it is also harming the nation’s effort to get HGV drivers on the road.
Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
Can the Secretary of State guarantee that there will not be shortages and empty shelves at Christmas because of the shortage of HGV drivers?
Grant Shapps
What I can guarantee is that we will do everything we possibly can to enable more HGV drivers to pass their tests and get on the road, and to have better conditions and the raft of other measures we have discussed, but the whole solution, unfortunately, is not in our hands. This is a global situation that has been described many times during this debate.
I must just correct an hon. Gentleman who claimed that we have the highest shortage. That is the not the case. For example, we have seen the figures from Poland, which has a shortage of 120,000, so it is a global problem. We will work day and night to do everything we can to secure supply, but not all the answers lie in the hands of the Government.
Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)
Along with the many hauliers based in my constituency, I also have Don-Bur, which I recently visited. It makes HGV trailers and reported to me a huge increase in demand for its trailers because of the need for larger trailers. I very much welcome the announcement from my right hon. Friend on new larger-body trailers, but what more can be done to support this very important industry and, in particular, to get more people working in it?
Grant Shapps
I do hope the measures we are introducing will help. I also think the accreditation scheme we talked about, industry-led as it will be, will enable high quality companies, such as the ones in my hon. Friend’s constituency, to take advantage and help to train and secure better training for people who use trailers. I think the future is bright for the trailer firms in his patch.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)
Businesses in my constituency have been reporting labour shortages for many months now—not only HGV drivers but the meat processing and health and care sectors. However, the Welsh Government currently have no powers over immigration to help to address the situation. Does the Secretary of State not agree that if the Union was working, there would be nothing to stop the Welsh Government—and, indeed, the Scottish Government and the Northern Irish Executive for that matter—adding occupations to the shortage occupation list as an emergency measure to help to protect our economic interests?
Grant Shapps
It is a long-held reserved power. As the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom Government decide who can come into the country and under what circumstances. There are 6 million EU citizens with pre-settled status. They are not necessarily all here, but many could come and drive here. As I said to the Opposition Front Bencher, rather than trying to undercut people’s salaries, why do we not work on attracting more people into the sector by paying them a little bit more?
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I was recently in the US, where a shortage of 60,000 truck drivers was across the media. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the answer is improving standards and conditions for British workers, not undercutting them?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think I saw the figure that the US will need another 1.5 million drivers over the next few years. It is experiencing very, very similar problems to those here within its own market, as are—this has been discussed many times now—many countries in the EU and beyond. It is a global supply issue. The British Government are doing everything within their power to ensure that we can help to ameliorate it as much as possible through the measures that I wish the Opposition would support.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
The Secretary of State rightly identified the long-term structural issues that have caused the shortage, but then he said it is a global issue and it is the pandemic. That suggests the measures put in place just now, on extra testing being available and longer driver journey times, will not work in the long term or the short term. On longer journey times for drivers, how many operators have notified the Department for Transport of relaxation and what analysis has it undertaken on how many operators are making their drivers drive for longer?
Grant Shapps
I can write to the hon. Gentleman with the answer to his question so that he has specific numbers. From recollection, it is in the low hundreds. Most of the companies that have notified of that have not, in fact, ended up needing to use it, but have been appreciative of the additional flexibility.
I just want to express to the House again that this is not about what people think of as the EU driving hours. This enables flexibility. It does not enable people to suddenly drive without any caution about the amount of time they are driving. I will certainly write to him with the exact numbers he seeks.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
Logistics is massively important to Leicestershire due to our location. I was down in Hinckley at DPD only two weeks ago having this very discussion about the acute, middle and long-term problems, and this plan helps to address that. One of the key issues from all the logistics companies that contact is me how they can feed things in to the Secretary of State. As he rightly points out, the answers will come from within the industry. What is the best way that they can get their message heard?
Grant Shapps
I welcome any logistics company contacting me directly. I also regularly meet the Road Haulage Association and Logistics UK, which are representative organisations for the haulage sector—I have done several times very recently and, as I said, over many years. As I say, I am very happy to hear directly from haulage companies in my hon. Friend’s constituency and those of other hon. Members about their first-hand experiences.
Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
My grandfather Terry worked as a lorry driver, having left the Marines, for over 20 years for Bowyers in the town of Trowbridge. He was a Marine—a veteran—and we have a fantastic veteran community in Stoke-on-Trent, Kidsgrove and Talke. I implore the Minister to share with us what discussions he has had with the Ministry of Defence and the Secretary of State about how to get our fantastic veterans into these jobs, filling these vacancies and getting the lorries moving on our roads.
Grant Shapps
I am very keen to do exactly as my hon. Friend suggests. That is why I funded Road to Logistics, which the Road Haulage Association has been leading on. The purpose of that plan is to bring former military personnel into this now excellent career, which is paying increasingly well.
Mr Speaker
I know that the hon. Lady was slightly late, but I am now happy to take her question.
Patricia Gibson
Thank you, Mr Speaker, and no discourtesy was intended—it was because of transport difficulties.
We have been told by Government Members that the HGV driver shortages and the consequential food and supply shortages have nothing to do with Brexit and that these challenges predate Brexit, although nobody can remember empty shelves before Brexit or indeed find them currently in any European country. Will the Secretary of State explain to what extent he thinks ending free movement and his Government’s hostile environment have helped or hindered the shortage of HGV drivers in the UK?
Grant Shapps
I do not want to repeat the last hour of this debate, but I have pointed out that there are 6 million EU citizens with pre-settled status, many of whom will either have the right to drive, if they already have their HGV licence, or may want to get it. We have operated a very generous, open programme—much more generous oftentimes than it is the other way around. I think we have already amply examined and proved that these problems are of a global nature, but this Government are trying to ensure that the supply chain to the UK continues as best as we can under those circumstances.
Afghanistan Policy
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
With permission, Mr Speaker—thank you for accommodating this statement today—I would like to make a statement on the Government’s response to the situation in Afghanistan and specifically the effort we are mounting to support Afghans resettling in the United Kingdom.
As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister set out to the House last week, Operation Pitting was the biggest UK military evacuation for over 70 years and enabled around 15,000 people to leave Afghanistan and get to safety in the UK. This is in addition to the families we have already welcomed under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy for those who served alongside our British forces and worked with the British Government. We owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.
The Home Office has been at the heart of the UK’s response to the fast-moving events in Afghanistan, and I pay tribute to the dedicated officials who have worked day and night to support this unprecedented mission. From Border Force officers on the ground in Kabul supporting our military and diplomats in extremely challenging circumstances to the UK Visas and Immigration staff in Liverpool, they worked alongside colleagues from across Government, the military, the police and our intelligence agencies. They conducted vital security checks, processed visa and passport applications and welcomed and supported evacuees.
We are determined to ensure that those evacuated here have the best possible start to life in the UK. That includes providing clarity about their immigration status, which is the subject of a policy statement that the Government are publishing today. We recognise the difficult, exceptional and unique circumstances in which many arrived in the UK, so we will be offering immediate indefinite leave to remain to Afghan nationals and their family members who were evacuated or who were called forward during Operation Pitting but will come to the UK after evacuation. This will provide certainty about their status, entitlement to benefits and right to work.
Our commitment to the people of Afghanistan is enduring. The UK’s humanitarian response is one of the most ambitious in the world to date and builds on our proud record of resettling more people than any other European country since 2015. The statement published today sets out details of the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, which will see up to 20,000 men, women and children resettled in the UK. The scheme will prioritise those who have assisted the UK efforts in Afghanistan and have stood up for values such as democracy, women’s rights and freedom of speech, and the rule of law, which could include judges, women’s rights activists and journalists, along with many others. The scheme will also prioritise vulnerable people, including women and girls at risk and members of minority groups at risk, such as ethnic and religious minorities and LGBT+ people.
Eligible people will be prioritised and referred for resettlement to the UK in one of three ways. First, some of those who arrived in the UK under the evacuation programme, which included individuals who were considered to be at particular risk, will be resettled under the scheme. Secondly, we will work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to identify and resettle refugees who have fled Afghanistan. This replicates the approach that the UK has taken in response to the conflict in Syria and complements the UK resettlement scheme, which resettles refugees from across the world. We will start the process as soon as possible following consultation with the UNHCR. Thirdly, we will work with international partners and non-governmental organisations in the region to put in place a referral process for those inside Afghanistan, where it is possible to arrange safe passage, and for those who have recently fled to other countries in the region.
The Afghan citizens resettlement scheme complements the existing Afghan relocations and assistance policy, which remains open; applications can be made from anywhere in the world. Approximately 7,000 Afghan locally employed staff who served alongside our armed forces in Afghanistan, and their families, have been relocated to the UK under ARAP. Those brought to the UK under ARAP or the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme will have certainty of status through indefinite leave to remain. They will be able to apply for British citizenship after five years under existing rules.
We could not have welcomed so many people to the United Kingdom under Operation Pitting without the support of local authorities. I have written today to all councils across the United Kingdom to set out our funding commitment to them. We will provide a complete package covering health, education and integration support costs for those on the ACRS and ARAP. Local authorities will receive a core tariff of more than £20,000 per person, which will be provided over three years to support resettled Afghans to integrate into British society and become self-sufficient more quickly. Funding will also be provided to support education, English language and health provision in the first year, and there will be a further £20 million of flexible funding in the current financial year to support local authorities with higher cost bases with any additional costs in the provision of services. I urge more local authorities to come forward to support our Afghan friends, and I ask colleagues across the House to relay the message to their councils, too; I am already very appreciative of efforts across the House to do so.
All those brought to the UK under ARAP and ACRS will have the right to work and be able to apply for public funds. The Government are amending legislation to ensure that new arrivals under the two routes can access benefits from day one, including social housing. The Department for Work and Pensions will also offer new arrivals tailored support to help them to become self-sufficient more quickly, and surgeries will be set up across the country to answer benefits and employment questions. However, the challenge of integrating a large number of people at a fast pace and helping them to rebuild their lives cannot be met by central and local government alone. We will be working with the private, voluntary and community sectors to harness our efforts across the whole of society.
The people who have come forward with offers of support have again shown their kindness and compassion. I know that many colleagues have seen such examples in their constituencies. That spirit of generosity is one of the things that make our country so special. We are creating a portal where people, organisations and businesses can register offers of support, and we are extending the community sponsorship scheme so that friends and neighbours, charities and faith groups can come together to support a family through the resettlement scheme.
Afghan nationals will also be able to make applications to come to the UK via one of our existing immigration routes. Family members of British citizens or those with indefinite leave to remain, or family members of refugees who do not qualify for the ACRS, can apply to come to the UK via the family routes or the family reunion rules respectively.
A number of Afghan nationals are already in the UK on an economic, work or study route, and we recognise that they may face difficulties in making a further application if they cannot obtain the correct documentation that they need to extend their stay. We will therefore take a concessionary approach for Afghan nationals similar to that which we took for Syrian nationals in 2015, which will allow us to waive certain document requirements in some circumstances. We will also remove the “no switching” rule on some routes for Afghan nationals, which means that there is no requirement to travel outside the UK to make an application at one of our global visa application centres. There is no change in the UK’s position that people can only claim asylum from within the UK. There are a number of claims already in the asylum system, and they will be considered in line with new country guidance, which will be published shortly. We also urge any Afghan nationals in the UK without lawful status to get in touch with the Home Office as soon as possible.
The shocking events in Afghanistan demand a comprehensive, compassionate and sensible approach. That is what the Afghan people who are starting their lives here deserve, it is what the British public expect, and it is what this Government will deliver. I commend my statement to the House.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for her statement, and for advance sight of it. I also thank her for the briefing that was given to me by her and the Security Minister, and I welcome her to the Dispatch Box. However, given this vital work of leading on the Afghanistan resettlement scheme, I must ask: where is the Home Secretary? We hear that it is the Minister for the Cabinet Office who chairs the Cabinet Committee on this. As Kabul fell, the Prime Minister was on holiday, the Foreign Secretary was on holiday, and now, as we try to deal with the consequences, we have an absent Home Secretary. It is not good enough, and things have to improve.
Members throughout the House and their caseworkers have worked around the clock to try to get people out of Afghanistan, and the fact that, as we heard, email inboxes were ignored was a dereliction of duty by Ministers. On 6 September, the Prime Minister told Members:
“every single email from colleagues is being responded to by close of play today.”—[Official Report, 6 September 2021; Vol. 700, c. 34.]
Even that promise was not fulfilled.
Last week, I met people who had recently left Afghanistan and were starting to build their lives here. It was a solemn privilege to do so. I witnessed the pride that they took in their service alongside British troops, I heard their praise for what the local council was doing in supporting them, and I saw their gratitude for the fact that they were in a place of safety. However, I also saw their pain for those who had been left behind, fearing persecution and fearing for their lives. My question to the Minister is: what specific plan do the Government have in place for those still in Afghanistan and desperate to escape? She said in her statement that she was starting a process
“as soon as possible following consultation with the UNHCR”,
but what advice does she have for Members across the House on what they should say to those who are contacting them about leaving Afghanistan now? What assessment has been made of the number of British passport holders still in Afghanistan? How many who would have been eligible under the ARAP scheme remain behind? Can the Minister also update the House on the progress made by the Home Office, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Ministry of Defence on assessing the viability of specific routes of safe passage to third countries for those fleeing Afghanistan? If people are able to escape, are this Government really going to impose a cap of 5,000 this year, and what is the justification for that figure?
I have spoken to Labour local authority leaders across the country who have come forward to help, and our local councils need support. The Prime Minister mentioned a figure of £200 million, and today the Minister has mentioned the core tariff of £20,520 per person, but that is over three years. Local councils are providing support now. When will that money start to be paid? When will the additional £20 million in flexible funding referred to by the Minister be available, and what will be the basis on which it is distributed so that it is fair to councils across the country?
We are also hearing about the Home Office placing large numbers of people in inappropriate hotel accommodation, sometimes for months at a time, without prior notice or indeed even engagement with local authorities in advance. Can the Minister confirm that there will be proper engagement with local authorities, and that such accommodation will never be used on a medium-term basis? For those already in the asylum system here in the United Kingdom, the Minister mentioned that new country guidance would be published shortly. When exactly will it be published, and why has there been such a delay in making it available?
I want to conclude with a message of thanks. Thank you to our troops, our civil servants and other frontline workers for their work on the evacuation of British and Afghan nationals. Thank you to those local authorities and charities that have come forward, and thank you to the British people for their generosity. The people of this country have stepped up when needed, but is it not time that this Government did the same?
Victoria Atkins
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. He made some very constructive points and others that I will perhaps leave for Hansard to consider. He is absolutely right to raise the point about email inboxes. I can assure colleagues that a “Dear Colleague” letter is on its way into inboxes—as I speak, I hope, but perhaps a little later today. I know that the question of correspondence has been a matter of great concern, and I completely understand that Members of Parliament expect their emails and inquiries to be dealt with in a timely manner.
I pray in aid the size of the task during those two weeks of emergency. We remember, of course, the scenes on our television sets. We set up a specific helpline in the Home Office during Operation Pitting to try to ensure that emergency cases were flagged to us. To put that in context, in the first 10 days, that helpline received more than 5.3 million attempted calls. We have also had many thousands of emails, not just to the Home Office but to the MOD and the FCDO. What I can tell colleagues on those emails on which they have not received specific updates thus far, is that we are in the process of logging those. This is one of the difficult messages that I have to deliver to the House, but I must issue a bit of a reality check. We cannot process cases in the usual way if people are in Afghanistan, because we have no Army or consular support there. We are in a very difficult situation. I know that it is difficult for constituents who have family still in Afghanistan about whom they are distressed and terrified, but I cannot provide Members of Parliament with information if I do not have it. We are hopeful that international efforts over the coming days, weeks and months will change that. There have been one or two flights out of Kabul, and we hope that will be built on over the coming days and weeks, but I am afraid that we as parliamentarians have to be frank with our constituents that, at this precise point in time, we cannot give specific updates on people within Afghanistan because of the precariousness of the security in that country.
The Prime Minister has said that 311 ARAP people are still in Afghanistan. Of course, as and when options and diplomatic levers work, plans can be put in place to deal with them. Having had the emergency of Operation Pitting, we have to deal with the deteriorating security circumstances in Afghanistan.
The right hon. Gentleman asked why there are 5,000 people in the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme. We have proposed that figure very deliberately because we know, through our experience of the Syrian resettlement scheme, that local areas and local communities can absorb, manage, integrate and welcome that number. Again, hon. Members will understand that, having had the mass evacuation through Operation Pitting, we are quickly trying to find homes for thousands of people. That is why we welcome voluntary suggestions from local authorities. We need the help of all our local councils to be able to offer these people permanent homes. We are trying to do that in a managed way so people are welcomed into this country in the usual measured and constructive way that we had under the Syrian scheme.
The 20,000 figure is over three years. That is a shorter period than the Syrian resettlement scheme, which was over five years, because we want to frontload the work that local authorities and others do to integrate people into our communities as quickly as possible.
I have met some of the people. I asked a woman what her hopes are for the future, and she said that she wants to study for her master’s degree so that she can start teaching maths in our schools as quickly as possible. We have already welcomed some wonderful people, and we want to get them into the jobs market and using the skills and qualifications that they already have to all our benefit.
Finally, every hon. Member who has a bridging hotel in their constituency will have had contact from my Home Office team to explain the process. There are some 68 hotels across the country, and I will not reveal locations and numbers. I hope the House understands why, because we want people to move quickly and we do not want to add complications. The bridging hotels are a temporary housing scenario, and we must encourage our local councils to offer permanent housing. The more offers we receive, the sooner people are out of that bridging accommodation. I am always open and willing to answer any questions that colleagues on both sides of the House may have on this.
Again, I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support for the principle of what we are trying to achieve. I welcome his scrutiny, but I very much hope that the House, together, will be able to give the people who have already been flown into our country, and equally the people who come here in the future, the warm welcome we want them all to have.
Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)
Last Friday, I had the pleasure of welcoming the family of one of my constituents from Afghanistan. Sadly, two of his relatives have been executed by the Taliban. Another very close relative was a senior figure in the previous Government. Sadly, this is where the dilemma comes, and I would be grateful for the Minister’s help. That relative hopes to be able to make it across the border to Pakistan, but he expects to be in hiding in Pakistan because he is in fear of his life.
Will the Minister please make it possible for hon. Members who are aware of such situations to act as a point of liaison between those who are in hiding and the high commission in Pakistan, so that we can ensure they have a path to escape that leaves them safe and helps them to avoid the danger that exists to them on both sides of the border? I very much hope we can help that relative get to the United Kingdom, and I would be grateful for all the help we can get from Ministers to do so.
Victoria Atkins
I thank my right hon. Friend for that; I suspect he has identified one of the most common questions I am going to face this afternoon. That is completely understandable, because he and every other Member of Parliament wants to help in the sorts of cases he has described.
One of the difficult messages I have to relay this afternoon is that because of the security situation in Afghanistan we have to be very careful about offering either encouragement or support for people who may be in a perilous situation in Afghanistan on making that journey to borders. We cannot, here today in the Chamber, understand the risks to those individuals themselves, particularly given the high profile, which my right hon. Friend has described, of some of the people we are talking about, and we do not know the situation this afternoon and this evening on the ground around borders. We have processes in the region, run by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Ministry of Defence, and the Defence Secretary has made it clear that his defence attachés in the region will be working very hard on such cases. But I am afraid we have to deal with the reality of the situation; much as we, as constituency MPs, would like to be, we are not in circumstances where we can persuade people to move or not move, because of the dangerousness they face. I ask everybody to refer their constituents who may have concerns to the gov.uk website, which will be updated as soon as we are able to do this. In addition, this afternoon colleagues will, through a “Dear colleague” letter, be receiving the online form that people who believe that they are eligible for ARAP should use for contact, so that the processes we are able to control are then put in place. We must, please, be very, very careful about the safety of these people.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
First, let me welcome the Minister to her new role and join her in paying tribute to all those involved in getting people to safety from Afghanistan. We know from the Syrian scheme that resettlement done well can save and transform lives, and that those who are resettled often go on to make brilliant contributions to our communities in return, so of course we want to work constructively to help deliver as many places for Afghans as possible. Equally, her Government must work constructively with partners here as well. It is welcome that local authorities now have more detail about the support they will receive, but when will the four-nations summit, agreed to by the Prime Minister, take place? That local authority support that was mentioned will be crucial. Does that tariff go at least as far as the support offered under the Syrian scheme? Were local authorities consulted about the fact that this would operate over three years, rather than five?
We will also be critical when that is required. Let us say unequivocally that we believe the number of resettlement places on offer is a long, long way below what events in Afghanistan require of us, in the context of more than 2 million Afghan refugees, with many more to come. Outside the 5,000 in the first year, the numbers put forward by the Home Office are vague aspirations, not detailed plans. Indeed, today the Minister referred to “up to 20,000”, so we could be talking about fewer. Can she at least confirm that 20,000 is the minimum number that will be resettled under the scheme? What are the prospects of frontloading the programme so that the initial 5,000 can also be increased? When will all this start?
On the Afghans already here, we need urgent clarity that they will be recognised as refugees. I am tempted to ask when the country guidance will be published, but do we really need the country guidance to tell us that people from Afghanistan should be recognised as refugees? Should that process not be expedited immediately? Will the Minister also revisit the tightly drawn refugee family reunion rules and ensure that those with family in the UK that might not otherwise qualify them for reunion—adult children, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins—can apply to join them here? If that does not happen, they are the people who will attempt to make it to the UK on their own initiative and who will then, under the Nationality and Borders Bill, be criminalised and jailed simply for seeking asylum here. The Minister spoke about a compassionate approach, but imagine prosecuting and imprisoning people fleeing the Taliban and seeking safety here with their family. Surely this is the moment that the Government must think again about those outrageous proposals.
Victoria Atkins
First, I thank the Scottish Government and, indeed, all the devolved Administrations for their constructive work with us so far. It genuinely is a great example of the United Kingdom really pulling together.
I very much hear some of the hon. Gentleman’s criticisms in respect of numbers. I suspect that he and I will not be able to find accommodation on that. We have been careful to ensure that those people whom we can welcome, we can welcome and integrate well, which is why, working with local authorities, we have settled on the 5,000 figure. I remind the hon. Gentleman that the ACRS, which is for members of civil society, vulnerable people and so on, is in addition to those who are welcomed under ARAP. Unless things have suddenly changed over the past 24 hours or so, it is truly one of the most ambitious schemes in the world, so we should be really proud of it.
On looking after people who have been evacuated here, the hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that the tariff applies throughout the devolved nations as well. There are additional funds for education and so on.
On the Nationality and Borders Bill, I would argue that the very generosity of our country, though the resettlement scheme, shows our commitment as a Government to ensuring that there are safe and legal rights, which act as a balance against those people traffickers who exploit people at great personal risk—we saw only this weekend terrible news from the channel—for their own criminal ends. We want to encourage people to use safe and legal routes and we want to go after those people traffickers.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
First, I pay enormous tribute not only to my hon. Friend the Minister but to the Home Secretary, whom I was texting barely half an hour before I came into the Chamber about an Afghan who is currently near a border, and she was personally sorting out the transit documents that I hope will enable him to come through. I also pay enormous tributes to the councils throughout the entire United Kingdom that have done enormous amounts to help us all to find accommodation for those in desperate need.
Does the Minister recognise that in many ways Afghanistan is many different communities, so people need to be looked at and addressed in different ways? What outreach has she done to the different community groups inside the United Kingdom? How is she looking to help those people who have links to various different elements in Afghan society to find their own home within that society here in the UK?
Victoria Atkins
I thank my hon. Friend for his absolute commitment to this issue. He has knowledge and expertise in respect of the region that I think it is fair to say few in the House possess: we are genuinely better informed when my hon. Friend stands to speak on Afghanistan and the implications in the region.
On my hon. Friend’s thanks to the Home Secretary, I join him in making that point about both the Home Secretary and, if I may say so, the Immigration Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), who has done extraordinary amounts of work behind the scenes. He never asks for credit or kudos but I am determined to give him credit in Hansard for everything he has done.
This weekend, I had the pleasure of trying to help some Opposition colleagues with their queries. This is a genuine team effort and we desperately want to help the people we can help. As part of that, we of course must include—and I am determined to do so—Afghan civil society in this country. I have already met many groups that have had helpful and constructive ideas about how we can all reach out and help people to integrate, and I am extremely grateful to them. This is an ongoing process and I very much look forward to working with such groups to ensure that we offer the warm welcome that the Prime Minister has promised.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I welcome the Minister’s personal commitment and the intervention of the Home Secretary and other Ministers in trying to solve individual cases, but she will be aware that many MPs across the House have been struggling to get similar help for their constituents, or for families of constituents, and are not getting the same response. May I press her on the situation of those whose lives are still at risk in Afghanistan because they worked with or for the UK Government, but were not directly employed by the UK Government? They have had no response from the ARAP scheme, or have been told that they are not eligible because they were not direct employees. Can she tell me whether they are now eligible for the resettlement scheme, or do they have to apply again from scratch? Can their applications be automatically considered by the resettlement scheme urgently, or be looked at again by the ARAP scheme? I have been made aware of too many cases where someone is either in hospital or whose mother has been killed who are in that situation now as a result of Taliban persecution.
Victoria Atkins
Again, I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Lady for her question. The nub of the problem with people who are still in-country is that we are in the situation that we are in. We have to deal with the reality as it is at the moment. We understand that there are 311 people left in-country in Afghanistan, but the Ministry of Defence, the FCDO and the Home Office have received emails, which we are logging in terms of the wider scheme. Not all the cases referred to us would be eligible under ARAP, but they are being logged and we are considering how best to use them in the future, mindful, of course, that organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have their own internationally mandated processes. We very much want to reach the right people—the vulnerable people who have stood up for western or British values—and to help them as we can within this scheme. I hope that she will appreciate that, as things becomes clear overseas, we will be able to provide more detail. I know that this is a snapshot in time, but I am trying to keep the House as updated as I can. I very much hope that “Dear Colleague” letters will be published this afternoon. That will help our staff, who have done incredible amounts of work over the past few weeks and whom we really must thank for all the pressures that they been under as well.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Does the Minister know that the Council for At-Risk Academics has been rescuing scholars under these dangerous circumstances since 1933? I appreciate the difficulties of those who are still trapped in hiding in Afghanistan, but out of the 16 who have research studentships or visiting fellowships waiting for them at British universities and who have been validated by the council, one has made it to the Netherlands and three, at considerable risk, have made it undocumented into Pakistan. Can she do everything possible to expedite the issuing of visas for those who have managed to cross the border and are now in Pakistan in particular?
Victoria Atkins
I seem to recall that my right hon. Friend asked the Prime Minister a question along those lines last week. May I ask him to liaise with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay, in relation to those wider immigration questions? Again, that invitation is open to Members across the House. We want to help them with the cases, but, please, there must be understanding that we will not be able to help everyone and we will not be able to give specific updates on individual cases if they are in Afghanistan.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
The Minister has talked about the real difficulties facing those who wish to apply from Afghanistan, but having listened very carefully to what she has said today, there are two things that I am not clear about. First, the impression was previously given that if people could get to the border and leave Afghanistan, they should do so. I am not clear what she is saying today about that in terms of the latest Government advice.
Secondly, let me pick up the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the Chair of the Select Committee, has raised. All of us have been referring to the Home Office many, many cases relating to people who are in Afghanistan at the moment. Will they have to make a fresh application under the scheme that she has announced today, or will those details be read across and considered under the scheme automatically? It would greatly assist many Members on both sides of the House to know what is it that we should be doing. Can we say that we have sent the Minister the details, she has them and will consider them under the new scheme, or do those people have to apply afresh?
Victoria Atkins
In relation to the right hon. Gentleman’s first question about what people should be doing, I am trying to reflect the rapidly changing security situation in Afghanistan, so I would ask any Member of Parliament to consider very carefully whether they feel able to, or comfortable, giving people advice about moving to borders, because, with the best will in the world, we cannot hope to have the sort of information that, for example, those on the ground, those working with the armed forces and so on will have. The advice at the moment is to look at the gov.uk website. That is our primary source of information. We need to bear in mind, of course, that with anything we talk about, there is the potential that others are watching—bad actors and so on. Indeed, Members of Parliament should bear that in mind when it comes to their own correspondence; we heard the experiences of a colleague last week in relation to a fraudulent attempt.
Let me turn to the right hon. Gentleman’s second question, which was about the process. ARAP is organised by the Ministry of Defence, which has its lists of people and so on. With the citizens scheme, we are trying a blended approach. We want to use the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as we have done under the Syrian scheme, but we recognise that that only deals with people who are out of country in refugee camps, by and large. We also want to look at civil society. We are not proposing to open this up as an applications process, because there are 40 million people living in Afghanistan, and I suspect that the overwhelming majority of them feel pretty vulnerable for various reasons at the moment.
We will be working with international organisations, including non-governmental organisations, to invite people forward to the other two parts of the scheme. Bear in mind, of course, that some of the 500—[Interruption.] I suspect that the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) will get his moment. Some of the 500 or so people who have been evacuated under Operation Pitting may be eligible under this scheme. As I said, we are having to take this step by step, but we wanted to keep the House as updated as we could today, so that it is aware of the direction of travel.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
I appreciate that the Minister is dealing with complicated and sensitive matters, and that she is anxious to give full answers to colleagues. She certainly is not avoiding questions, but is taking them head-on. Unfortunately, some of the questions are also rather long and complicated, so we have managed, in 40 minutes, to take questions from five Back Benchers. We will have to go a lot faster now, but in order that the Minister can give short answers, I need to have short and succinct questions. That way, we will cover everything eventually.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
I welcome the statement. Many of those fleeing the Taliban will be highly skilled people who will want to integrate rapidly into the workforce so that they can become contributors, not just supplicants. Will the Minister unpack a little the £20,520 per person in core funding that she announced, and tell us what proportion of that she envisages being used for further education to enable people, where necessary, to upskill? What conversations has she had with her ministerial colleagues at the Department for Education to see what more colleges in localities can do to ensure that these people are able to do what they aspire to do, which is to enter the workforce and be contributors?
Victoria Atkins
My right hon. Friend will be pleased to know that once we have dealt with the immediate emergency of moving 15,000 or so people from quarantine hotels into bridging accommodation—I hope and plan that that will be concluded this week—we can then start really to set in stone some of our plans for integration. There are all sorts of ideas, including equivalence qualifications involving the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that we get people into the jobs market as quickly as possible. Of course, we will also be measuring English language fluency to help those who are a little bit further from the jobs market towards the jobs market so that they can be truly independent and have their own futures here in the UK.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
Obviously, quite rightly, a lot of the discussion is around ARAP, but what about UK citizens and UK residents who are trapped? My case is of a woman with three tiny daughters who is stranded having cared for a relative and got caught by covid, and now she does not know what to do. How do I get help for her?
Victoria Atkins
If I have understood the hon. Lady correctly, the person she is describing is already within the asylum scheme—
Victoria Atkins
Will the hon. Lady give me the privilege of perhaps speaking to me afterwards, because I have misunderstood her question? I do apologise.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for this announcement. How will local authorities be supported in accommodating Afghan citizens, and how will the education system be supported, to help to facilitate the smooth transition of Afghan people into local communities throughout the UK?
Victoria Atkins
We have today announced £20,520 per person over the next three years. This is because we want to enable local councils to front-load their integration support. We have, in addition, up to £4,000 per child for education and associated tariffs for medical care. We want to ensure that people are moving into their permanent accommodation as quickly as possible. This is where the call for volunteers from our local authorities must be made strongly. We need permanent housing in order to settle people as quickly as possible.
Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
Hull is a city of sanctuary and has always stepped up to its responsibilities around asylum seekers and refugees, even though at times the Home Office has been rather high-handed in the way it has dealt with the local authorities. What exactly is the Minister going to do to ensure that all other local authorities step up to their responsibilities for asylum seekers and refugees under the UK resettlement scheme and, now, under the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme?
Victoria Atkins
I am not going to tread on the ministerial territory of the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), as that is not my role. However, in terms of Afghan resettlement, the letters have gone out today, my officials will be hitting the phones this week, and we will be very much trying to encourage as many local authorities as possible to sign up if they can. It need not be huge numbers per local authority, and, as others have said, these people can make a huge contribution to our local communities once they are settled in.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
My local authorities, Wealden District Council and Rother District Council, are taking part in welcoming our Afghan friends. The Minister references the three-year funding settlement. What assessment has she made of whether that will fully cover the cost of resettlement? Will she urge all local authorities to think of the contribution that these brave individuals will make not just to their local communities but to the economy?
Victoria Atkins
I thank my hon. Friend’s local authorities. They have worked very closely with my Department in recent weeks, and I am grateful for that. He is absolutely right on the last point. These are very skilled, highly qualified people who can be our doctors and our teachers, while some of them can—dare I say it?— help through standing for local councils. They can make a huge contribution. We have settled on the funding settlement very carefully because we want to try to encourage take-up as quickly as possible. We also have the additional fund of £20 million to help those authorities that are telling us some of the issues they have with housing. We want to try to make this as easy as possible for local authorities.
Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
I thank the Minister for her statement. I thank Vale of White Horse District Council and South Oxfordshire District Council, who have opened their arms and absolutely said that they will take as many as they possibly can. I am helping to support about 400 individuals at the moment, some of whom are from the Hazara Afghan community. The Minister mentioned that there were other routes available other than the resettlement scheme—because, let us face it, that is not going to be enough. There is one willing to sponsor their brother, give them a job and support them. Will the Government give a special dispensation so that that space is given to someone else equally vulnerable who may need it?
Victoria Atkins
I hope the hon. Lady will appreciate that I should not be making very significant decisions about immigration policy at the Dispatch Box, but I will take away her idea. We have tried, as I say, to construct this resettlement scheme alongside our existing system, going above and beyond what many countries around the world are doing. We are proud to do so and we want to encourage others to follow our lead. But of course the immigration system, as is, remains there for those who have perhaps sought asylum under the family reunion rules.
Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for her statement. Will she join me in commending Darlington Borough Council, which she recently met, for its commitment to support Afghan families, just as it supported Syrian families only a few years ago? Will she ensure that sufficient funds will be available to Darlington to meet its responsibilities?
Victoria Atkins
May I thank my hon. Friend, who is an absolute stalwart in speaking up not only for his constituency, but his local council? He is very much putting his constituency on the map. I am delighted to support the great offers of Darlington Borough Council and other councils across the country. I encourage them to do whatever they can to help. We should not forget that we can all play our part, because we have the portal open on gov.uk, where we can register offers of donations, volunteering, English language lessons—whatever we can manage. Also, for those who are able, there is the specific accommodation portal, where people can offer accommodation.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I have listened with care to the Minister’s statement. Is she aware of how many British residents and passport holders will be very shocked to learn that the Government can offer them no information on their relatives trapped in Afghanistan, let alone help them get their relatives to safety? Perhaps she should write to us and say she has no information. At least that would help us shed some light for our constituents. On the question of bridging hotels, many of them are entirely unsuitable, such as business hotels that have one single member of a family in every room. Can she assure the House about the maximum length of time individuals will be in this bridging accommodation?
Victoria Atkins
Again, I regret that the right hon. Lady did not hear what I said earlier, which is that for those people in Afghanistan at the moment, it is a very fast-moving situation. At this point in time, I am not able to signpost constituents and parliamentarians in the way that I would normally be able to do, and that is one of the tough messages I have had to deliver today from the Dispatch Box. That does not mean that that will remain the case forever, and that is why the work of the FCDO, the Ministry of Defence and others in trying to secure safe passage out of Afghanistan is so critical.
In terms of bridging hotels, we have yet to complete the transfer of everybody from quarantine to bridging hotels, but the more offers of permanent accommodation we have, the sooner we will be moving people out of bridging accommodation. This is why we have to do things methodically, and this is why we are being very careful about the numbers of people we can welcome in the future.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
I welcome the explicit recognition of the position of LGBT people in her statement, following the Prime Minister’s statement a week ago. The absence of LGBT people being an identified cohort during the course of Op Pitting means that I fear nobody made it out under the conditions of Op Pitting who would and should have succeeded as LGBT people to make their application. Through me and through our noble Friend, Lord Herbert of South Downs, the Prime Minister’s envoy, will she enable a specific point of contact within her Department who can advise us and the NGOs and others who are helping LGBT Afghans to make applications, so that applications can be successfully made and Border Force’s questions properly satisfied? I fully understand the restrictions my hon. Friend placed on the operational advice that she gave earlier to my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), but that help will be much appreciated at the application phase.
Victoria Atkins
I am happy to give my hon. Friend that assurance. We recognise the risk. We want to work with specialist organisations to ensure that we help the most vulnerable, which of course include minorities who are LGBT+.
Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)
The Minister talked in her statement about a referral process for those inside Afghanistan where it is possible to arrange safe passage, thus acknowledging that that is not always possible. Last week, the Home Office released proposals to engage in push-backs of boats in the channel carrying refugees and asylum seekers. Will she confirm that that policy means a boat carrying Afghan asylum seekers fleeing the Taliban who, as she said, could find no safe passage, would be forcibly pushed back from UK waters?
Victoria Atkins
We are setting out safe and legal routes for Afghans who need to be resettled. As the hon. Member will know, other countries across Europe through which people are making their journeys are safe countries, and we would strongly encourage people making their way into safe countries in Europe and elsewhere to apply for asylum in those countries. The resettlement schemes are about helping people in region, and we very much hope to help the numbers that we have talked about.
Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)
Last month, my constituent Mr Kamal contacted me as he was concerned for the welfare of his wife and four daughters in Afghanistan. His wife is an Afghan national, while all four of their children—aged seven, six, three and just four months—are British citizens. He, like any father, is desperately worried about his family, yet, despite my representations to the Home Office, I have received no response at all. What advice can the Minister provide to Mr Kamal and his family? Will she assure me that I will get a substantive answer by the end of the week?
Victoria Atkins
The hon. Gentleman describes an incredibly difficult case. If Mr Kamal’s family are in Afghanistan, I cannot give him a specific update on their safety and whereabouts, but I am happy to discuss the case with him after the statement because I want to see if we can do anything more.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
My constituents are children here under the vulnerable children’s resettlement scheme, and their families—Hazara families—in Kabul want to know what steps they need to take to make applications and whether they will fall under the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme, not least because the numbers under that scheme are so pitiful. The Minister talks about 5,000 people, which is one or two families per constituency. We really need to re-examine those numbers.
Victoria Atkins
I very much hope that the hon. Member is encouraging her local authority to volunteer permanent properties to help resettle families as she has described. On her specific case, if I have understood her correctly, she is talking about children, and she will know that children cannot sponsor adults to come to the United Kingdom under our wider asylum policy because of real concerns that children would be used by people with ill intent. However, if there are asylum matters in particular, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), stands ready to help in that application, if he can.
Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)
I thank the Minister for what she described as the difficult and unique circumstances faced by Afghan citizens. Can I ask her a narrow question about the concessionary approach to waive documents which she described? Will she please confirm that if an Afghan citizen is entitled to help, they will not be denied that help simply because they have been required to, say, burn a passport or other identity document—whether electronic or physical—to keep themselves alive?
Victoria Atkins
The right hon. Gentleman gives some powerful examples. The nature of the concession is that we are realistic about what some may have had to do to survive. I must, however, preface that with two caveats. First, security checks must be conducted—that goes without saying—and, secondly, the concession will have to be on a case-by-case basis, because we want to ensure that we are helping the vulnerable people whom we are aiming to help.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
To be honest, I just feel that this is a completely hope-less statement, in the sense that the UK Government are giving up on the vulnerable people in Afghanistan who stood by us. That is what it feels like, and what really angers me is that we seem to be going backwards every time a Minister comes to explain this. Last week, we were told by the Prime Minister that we were all going to get replies to our individual cases by last Monday, and then last Thursday a Government Minister came here and told us that we would all get individual answers to each of the individual cases by this Thursday. Now it sounds as though the Minister is saying, “Oh, no”, and all we are going to get is another blasted “Dear colleague” letter. That is not good enough. We need to be able to give answers to our constituents.
In particular—this was asked earlier, and it was answered in a different way last Thursday by a different Government Minister—if a person has applied through the ARAP scheme and has been told no, will they have to make another application to another Department and put in another form, or will the Government be doing what the Foreign Office told this House last Thursday, which is triaging these with no need for a further application?
Victoria Atkins
I simply disagree with the hon. Gentleman about his assessment of the Government’s position. I have tried to update the House today on our schemes. I have announced the funding now available for councils, which will be a significant step forward.
Victoria Atkins
The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but the reality for many councils is that we are in negotiations with them and they wanted, understandably, to know the funding. We have now been able to provide them with an answer, and we will be able to unlock more offers of help. On the wider issue of correspondence, as I have said, we will log emails as they have come in, but I cannot give updates that I do not have because of the security situation in Afghanistan. I hope the hon. Gentleman will deploy the energy he has shown in this Chamber to persuading his local council to offer more permanent housing.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
I was pleased to hear the Minister mention in her statement that judges and women’s rights activists may be among those who would get priority, but the situation for female judges on the ground in Afghanistan is dire. There are about 220 of them, and they are trapped there in immediate fear of their lives. These people are desperate, and they have been on the phone to colleagues in the United Kingdom in tears every night. Basically, these women are waiting to be killed, so my question for the Minister is this. She says in her statement that one of the ways the Government are going to implement the scheme is to
“work with international partners and non-governmental organisations in the region to put in place a referral process for those inside Afghanistan, where it is possible to arrange safe passage”.
Can she tell me whether these discussions are taking place and are taking place with the appropriate urgency in relation to the female judges trapped in Afghanistan, and can she confirm that these women will be welcome in the United Kingdom?
Victoria Atkins
I have already met the UNHCR to discuss with it that element of the scheme and how it can help with other parts of the scheme. Conversations with other NGOs are, of course, ongoing, and I will keep the House updated as progress is made.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
One of the urgent cases I am dealing with is that of a former Chevening scholar trapped in Kabul, who is very worried that he is not on the appropriate Government list because, strangely, he did not receive a call forward to the airport in the early days of the evacuation. Can the Minister assure me that she is talking to the FCDO about Chevening scholars and that, from the Home Office perspective, all former and current Chevening scholars will be supported by the Government? In particular, will the right paperwork be issued to him, so that if he does make the decision to go with his family to the border, he will know that he will be safe once he gets there?
Victoria Atkins
Yes, the Home Secretary has already, I think, addressed the House about Chevening scholarships. They will be honoured, and we are trying to make that happen, albeit with the practicalities the hon. Member has outlined if people are in Afghanistan.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I have written to three different Government Departments seven times since 23 August on behalf of a constituent of mine whose family members are in Afghanistan. They could have been helped, and they were not. On Thursday, I spoke to my constituent who told me that, on Wednesday, her uncle was murdered by the Taliban, and another relative is continuing to receive the most chilling threats on a daily basis. I am not asking the Minister for an update on their situation in Afghanistan; I know that perfectly well from first-hand accounts from my constituent. I am asking what she is doing to give them permission to travel to the UK so that they can take the first step on their journey to safety before, as my constituent said on Thursday, she loses her whole family.
Victoria Atkins
As the hon. Lady has outlined, the circumstances in Afghanistan are incredibly dangerous, and that is why we made such huge efforts to evacuate as many people as we possibly could in Operation Pitting. I cannot discuss individual cases with her—certainly not in the Chamber—but I hope that, having listened to the statement about the opening up of the scheme, she will see that if the situation changes in Afghanistan and we are able to get safe passage out, the cases that she and others have raised will be able to be evaluated. However, I cannot make case decisions on the hoof at the Dispatch Box, as she would understand.
Anum Qaisar-Javed (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
The Minister referred to the importance of learning the English language. In previous interviews she has referred to “western values”, and to the support that her Government will provide to Afghans. What support will her Government give to help Afghans preserve their language and culture when they come here? We know that refugees enrich society with their culture and language.
Victoria Atkins
That is precisely why I am working with Afghan civil society to ensure that we integrate people in a way that reflects the values we cherish so carefully as a country, while of course acknowledging the contribution they will make.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
The Minister spoke about the ways the scheme will prioritise those who have assisted UK efforts, but what does “prioritisation” actually mean? Those who will be admitted on to the list of 5,000 in the first year need to know whether they are being prioritised, as that may affect their decision to travel to the border, or the way that people respond in Afghanistan, as well as those refugees outside it. The Minister will know that the criteria she set out would probably just about meet the 4,500 relatives of my constituents, every one of whom would qualify on that basis—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. I know the hon. Gentleman has been waiting a long time, but we cannot have this. Members are meant to ask a question, and the Minister gives an answer. Not everyone has to ask all the questions that can be asked on this subject, just a question.
Barry Gardiner
My question is about what prioritisation means, who will be notified about it, how it will be determined, and whether there is any pre-filling of the lists, as is being rumoured in Whitehall.
Victoria Atkins
As I said, some of those evacuated during Op Pitting and who would be considered under the criteria of the scheme will form part of that scheme, but there are two other avenues through which people can be invited to take part, and I have referred to those in previous answers.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
How widely and generously will the definition of an “assisted UK effort” be applied? I have cases of two interpreters who were told that they did not qualify for ARAP because they worked for G4S rather than for the Army, but if they had been properly assessed, they could already be here. Will they now qualify?
Victoria Atkins
I ask the hon. Gentleman to write to the Minister for the Armed Forces.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
In trying to justify allowing only 5,000 refugees in through year one of resettlement scheme, the Minister said that that followed consultation with local authorities, based on capacity and assimilation. Will she publish the collated information that shows that, cumulatively, all local authorities in the UK responded that they could take only that figure of 5,000?
Victoria Atkins
The hon. Gentleman may not have heard when I referred to the fact that we were looking at the Syrian resettlement scheme, which is widely regarded as being a success. That scheme was resettling 5,000 people a year.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
I apologise to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) for not having called him earlier. In all honesty, I could not see him because of this screen. Let us hope they do not have to stay here very much longer.
Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)
I have a constituent who landed just before the blockade. Her father-in-law has been shot. She has got to the border a number of times. I have communicated with the embassy and with the Pakistani authorities to try to let her come through, but to no avail because the Afghans will not let her through on a British passport. Can we get through the Foreign Office, or the Home Office, some sort of indication to help those people? If not, can we use other available embassies to guide and support those people who are there with British passports?
Victoria Atkins
I am loth to give travel advice at the Dispatch Box, for the reasons I have given. Perhaps I should take that up with the hon. Gentleman after the statement to see whether we can find ways through.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
The ARAP scheme pledges to provide protection for Afghans who were employed by the British Government, but many of my constituents have relatives in Afghanistan who worked for the British indirectly, for instance as a driver for an Army interpreter. Those people are in hiding and are terrified. Will the Minister clarify whether such individuals will be prioritised for the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme?
Victoria Atkins
Again, I really cannot be expected to make decisions such as the hon. Member describes at the Dispatch Box. The ARAP scheme has been defined by the MOD. We are setting out the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme. If there are queries about eligibility, then I encourage her to look at the gov.uk website for greater guidance.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
This morning, a family with a very sick child, one of 300 people placed in a quarantine hotel in Shepherd’s Bush, were told to get on a coach to Stockport, despite having lodged an application for housing assistance in Hammersmith. On Saturday, 90 Afghan evacuees arrived at a bridging hotel in Fulham with no money, the clothes they stood up in, and no information about what was happening to them. A local charity, West London Welcome, and our council are trying to help. If we try to get through to the Home Office, it does not answer emails or phone calls. Is this what the Minister means by Operation Warm Welcome?
Victoria Atkins
On bridging accommodation, the hon. Gentleman will know, I hope, that we have had many thousands of people to rehouse out of quarantine very quickly. There are some 68 hotels being used around the country, and we have had to deal with those places as they are available. On provisions and other requirements, we have a scheme in place whereby the managers of the hotels have contacts with the Home Office to provide exactly the sorts of provisions that people need. In addition, local groups, charities and people have donated things that are available to hotels. If there is a particular problem in a hotel, the hon. Gentleman must please let me know, because we will nip it in the bud.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)
I thank the Minister for her statement, but my constituents and I grow increasingly worried the longer casework emails go unanswered. That is no criticism of all the hard-working civil servants who have worked around the clock. I have written to the Home Secretary again today to request updates on two cases where constituents have found their family members—one an 18-year-old woman—particularly vulnerable under the new regime. Can the Minister confirm what criteria the Home Office is using to assess vulnerability for applicants wishing to come to the UK and join their British family here?
Victoria Atkins
I do not want to have to repeat the answers I have given in relation to correspondence, because I know the pressures of time. As I say, there will be a “Dear colleague” in due course, and I hope that that will help to deal with some of the hon. Member’s correspondence.
Stephen Farry (North Down) (Alliance)
What reassurance can the Minister give to the 3,000 Afghans who were in our asylum system prior to the fall of Kabul? What lessons will she take from what other European countries are doing around a fast-track system? Crucially, can she give the assurance that under no circumstances will anyone be deported back to Afghanistan?
Victoria Atkins
We have said that there will be no more returns to Afghanistan. If someone is in the asylum system, they are supported, and their claim will remain within the asylum system as usual.
Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
First, let me place on the record the readiness and willingness, once again, of North Lanarkshire Council to stand forward for the Afghan refugees, just like we did for the Syrian refugees and, before that, for the Congolese when we welcomed them to North Lanarkshire. Will the Minister please heed the warnings by both the First Minister of Scotland and the leader of Glasgow City Council that the commitment to rehouse 20,000 in the long term and to resettle just 5,000 in the first year is clearly not sufficient? Clearly, in the context of the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding, a far more ambitious programme is required. It is always worth saying that in Scotland, refugees are welcome.
Victoria Atkins
I am very happy to thank councils across the United Kingdom that have played their part. As I say, I am very much looking forward to others joining our voluntary scheme. In terms of numbers, I will not repeat what I have already said. We just want to make sure that we are welcoming people in a structured and measured way, as we have in the past with the Syrian scheme. We very much look forward to working with partners across the United Kingdom to achieve that.
Bill Presented
Planning (Street Plans) Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
John Penrose, supported by Bob Blackman, Sir John Hayes, Danny Kruger, Mr Simon Clarke, Kevin Hollinrake and Stephen Hammond, presented a Bill to make provision about the creation and operation of street-level plans for local development; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 22 October, and to be printed (Bill 161).
Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill (Instruction)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
18:14 - The House divided: - Ayes: 192 / Noes: 323 - Question accordingly negatived.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Before the House resolves itself into Committee, I draw its attention to the motion on the Order Paper, in the name of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), to allow the Committee to consider amendments relating to Prorogation. This is an admissible instruction on an out-of-scope but cognate matter. [Laughter.] If hon. Members do not understand that, I suggest they turn to “Erskine May” for an explanation. This is an out-of-scope but cognate matter. It is subject to selection by the Chair. Mr Speaker has decided to select the motion, so I call Chris Bryant to move it.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That it be an Instruction to the Committee on the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill, That the Committee have leave to make provision relating to the prorogation of Parliament.
Normally an instruction motion of this kind is tabled by the Government themselves when they decide that a Bill they have introduced does not quite stretch far enough to allow it to include some things that they would like to debate. The reason I tabled it—I hope the Government think it is always good to debate all these matters and would therefore want the motion to be carried, which would enable us to debate the matter of Prorogation in Committee—is that the 2019 Prorogation was perhaps the biggest constitutional crisis we have had in the past 20 to 25 years. I see the former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Sir Geoffrey Cox), is in his place. I think he as scars on his back from that period. [Interruption.] No, he never has scars on his back. Maybe they are on his front instead. The point is simple: the nation felt at odds with itself in part because of a phenomenal constitutional row between the courts and Parliament about the nature of Prorogation.
To remind the House what happened, on 28 August 2019, the Prime Minister secured a prorogation proclamation from the Queen proroguing Parliament from 9 September to 14 October, a longer Prorogation than there had been for more than 150 years. Normally they last for just six days; this would have been for 34 days. The subsequent (R) Miller v. The Prime Minister and Cherry v. Advocate General for Scotland case ended up in the Supreme Court, which decided unanimously on 24 September that the Prorogation was justiciable and unlawful.
When Parliament returned, never having been prorogued, the Prorogation ceremony was expunged from the Journal of the House of Commons. I think that was the first time the Journal had been altered since 1621, when the King was so angry with the House for having debated the matter of his son’s potential marriage that he ordered the Clerk of the House to bring the Journal to him and tore out the offending page. So I think that 1621 and 2019 are the two times that the Journal has been disturbed in that way. Business continued as if the ceremony had never happened.
The Prime Minister—this is important to my argument—then argued to the court in 2019 that Prorogation was analogous to Dissolution. At the time, of course, Dissolution was not a prerogative power because of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. None the less, the Prime Minister argued in court that the courts should not interfere in the matter because Prorogation was a prerogative power and should not therefore be justiciable. I think it is bizarre if the Government now want to say that they do not think that Prorogation is analogous to Dissolution and that it should not be debated today.
Incidentally, we also learned from the papers that the Prime Minister gave to the Court—I think under some duress—back in 2019 that he considered the September sittings of Parliament merely to be a
“a rigmarole…to show…MPs are earning their crust”.
So at least all the hon. Members who are here today are earning their crust, by the Prime Minister’s definition.
The Court found, first, that the issue of the Prorogation itself was justiciable because it is not a proceeding in Parliament. The Prime Minister and the Government had tried to argue that it was a proceeding in Parliament and, consequently, under article 9 of the Bill of Rights and the equivalent legislation in the Scottish Parliament, it could not be considered by a court. However, the Supreme Court decided, in paragraph 68:
“The prorogation itself takes place in the House of Lords and in the presence of Members of both Houses. But it cannot sensibly be described as a ‘proceeding in Parliament’. It is not a decision of either House of Parliament. Quite the contrary: it is something which is imposed upon them from outside. It is not something upon which the Members of Parliament can speak or vote.”
This, to me, is the absolutely key point: it is not something upon which Members of either House can speak or vote. That is why I have tabled an amendment that can only be considered during the Committee stage of the Bill if this motion is agreed, which would allow a vote in the House of Commons before Prorogation could proceed. Why that is important is that, quite rightly, lots of Members have wanted to say that the courts should not be interfering in politics. The best way of making sure that they cannot interfere in Prorogation is to introduce—[Interruption.] I can see that the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) is being very pregnant; I will take his intervention in a moment. The best way to make sure that no court could consider the matter of Prorogation is to make it a proceeding in Parliament, and the best way to make it a proceeding in Parliament is to allow a vote. The only way we can allow a vote is if we allow this motion to go through, and then we can debate it in the Bill Committee.
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is extremely kind in giving way, although perhaps not quite accurate in describing my condition. On the question of Prorogation, would he mind turning his thoughts briefly to whether that was contained or referenced in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and how that Act relates to this Bill?
Chris Bryant
I am not sure that that is entirely relevant. Every time we introduce new legislation we choose to start, as it were, from scratch. It is true that this Bill repeals the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. I think the hon. Gentleman voted for that Act.
Chris Bryant
No, he did not—[Interruption.] He was still at school? I think that is a bit unfair on the hon. Gentleman. The point is that this was a major constitutional battle in 2019 and it would be odd of us not to consider it at all when we are dealing with these matters, which the Prime Minister himself declared were analogous.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman will know that many Government Members had serious concerns about Prorogation at the time of which he speaks, but does he not accept that we are now back in what we could describe as more normal times? That procedure, Prorogation, had never given this House any problems before and is unlikely ever to do so again.
Chris Bryant
Well now, for a start, I am not very keen on the concept of “normal” at all. I have tried to avoid that as much as I can in my 59 years. More importantly, I am not sure that we are living in normal times.
Are there ever normal times in political debate? Surely that is the whole point of constitutional settlements. We do them oddly in this country, because we do not have a written constitution, as the hon. Gentleman knows; we have bits and pieces of the constitution written in lots of different statutes. The danger of proceeding by statute law is that the constitution becomes a constant plaything of the Government of the day. I would always want our constitutional settlement to last at least a generation, if not several, but my anxiety is that we are fiddling with just one part of the equation, not all of it.
Some have argued, as the Government did before the Supreme Court, that a prerogative power is by definition limitless. That flies in the face of history. Successive cases across the centuries, starting in 1611, have proved that every prerogative power has to have a limit. Otherwise, Parliament would never sit; the Government could, in theory, say, “Right—we are going to use our prerogative power of Prorogation just to make Parliament never sit.” That was one of the key things that the Supreme Court found.
My anxiety is that if the Supreme Court has already determined, and it is settled law, that Prorogation is a justiciable matter, it will be justiciable again unless we introduce statute law to change it.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent and very interesting speech. One of the crucial issues is that we normally know that Prorogation is coming—it is generally known around here when it is likely to happen—but in his example it happened at the dead of night and it was very difficult to get information about it. He will know that, on a rumour, I phoned Buckingham Palace that very night to try to establish whether the Privy Council would be meeting the next day, as I had been told, in Scotland with Her Majesty. I discovered that the Leader of the House and others were quite likely to be on their way up to Balmoral; cameras were then sent to catch them at airports in the act of entering Scotland. It was done in a completely innovative way, and a future Government might decide to conduct themselves in exactly the same way.
Chris Bryant
The point is that other people might choose to bring other cases to the courts on the matter, unless Parliament chooses to discuss it and legislate on it. I would have thought it entirely in the Government’s interest to allow the debate later today and to come to a resolution on the matter.
Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)
I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman is correct that if new clause 3—his amendment to allow a vote on Prorogation—were agreed to, it would render Prorogation non-justiciable in future, and that that is the intention. However, may I ask a more prosaic question? If the motion that he is now moving to allow debate on the amendment is passed, will it not render the programme for the rest of the day null and void, as we will have something brand new and rather substantial to consider?
Chris Bryant
No, I do not think that that is right, but if the House decided not to consider the matter, the courts could in future legitimately decide that Parliament had decided that Prorogation is justiciable. That is the problem for the Government.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. Before the hon. Gentleman gives way, let me say for the sake of clarity that the programme for the rest of the day would not be null and void. If the hon. Gentleman’s motion is carried by the House, his subsequent amendments and new clauses can be debated; if it is not, they cannot. The position is quite clear; we want to make sure that it is clear.
Joanna Cherry
One of the most notable things after the outcome of the case was that the Prime Minister did not express any remorse for having unlawfully prorogued Parliament, so I would not be so confident that he would not try it again. What initially worried me slightly about the hon. Gentleman’s new clause was that the current Prime Minister, with his huge majority, could seek to prorogue Parliament for a dubious purpose. However, I note that the hon. Gentleman has put in a requirement that it cannot be for more than 10 days. Of course, what was so objectionable about the last Prorogation was that it was so lengthy and came at a time when Parliament had very important matters to debate, so I presume that the hon. Gentleman put that in to guard against the possibility of the current Prime Minister using the rather large majority that he has, at least in England, to force through another dubious Prorogation.
Chris Bryant
The hon. and learned Lady—who was, of course, the Cherry on the top of the icing in this case; it must have been one of her bigger successes in terms of parliamentary democracy—has read my mind better than I know it myself.
All that we have to bear in mind is what the Supreme Court said in its judgment on what the limit on the power to prorogue would be:
“A decision to prorogue Parliament (or to advise the monarch to prorogue Parliament) will be unlawful if the prorogation has the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions as a legislature and as the body responsible for the supervision of the executive. In such a situation the court will intervene if the effect is sufficiently serious to justify such an exceptional course.”
So everyone who votes against my motion, or against my new clause later if we are able to reach it, will be saying, basically, “Yes, courts, carry on. That is exactly what you should do. You should consider these matters. You should decide at every Prorogation whether the Government are acting lawfully or not.”
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. Does he share my concern at the fact that the Government Benches are filling up so rapidly, which suggests that many Members may be intending to vote against the motion? Perhaps if he takes a few more interventions it will give Members who want to vote in favour of his motion, so that we can actually have this debate, a bit more time in which to do so. It would be very ironic if the Government started quashing debate at this stage, not even allowing a debate to happen.
Chris Bryant
I have to say that in my 20 years in this House, I have quite often known Governments to quash debate. [Interruption.] The Government Deputy Chief Whip is pointing at me in a rather vulgar and insinuating way—and I can see through that mask! However, there is a serious point here. I am not going to go on for much longer, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be glad to know—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] You see, Madam Deputy Speaker: I know how to unite the Chamber.
Why does Prorogation matter? Although people—not hon. Members, but many others—often confuse it with a recess or an Adjournment, they are completely and utterly different. Prorogation suspends all business. It means that the Government are allowed to put again a question on a motion that has already been decided during that Session, and secure a different outcome if that is what they are trying to do. We know that that was one of the reasons why the 2019 Prorogation happened.
Prorogation suspends all questions. Any written questions that have not yet been answered have to be tabled again. Normally, for four weeks beforehand Ministers do not bother to reply, because they know that Members will have to submit the questions all over again.
Prorogation means that no Select Committee or other Committee of the House can meet or take evidence. That, incidentally, must surely be something we should be able to change. It means that the Parliament Act can be engaged. Of course that is what the Labour Government did in the 1945 to 1950 Parliament—to get through legislation under the 1911 Act. Unlike a recess, which is voted on, Prorogation is not voted on, but the Government still have all the power over it, because just as with a recess, only a Government Minister can table a motion or, indeed, table an amendment. No other Member is allowed to table an amendment to a Government motion for a recess.
So many different elements of the way we do our business which guarantee Back Benchers and Opposition Members an opportunity to engage in and initiate legislative processes are entirely reliant on Standing Orders. When the Government decide to suspend a Session, that starts the clock all over again, but it means that they are entirely in control of how many private Members’ days, Backbench days or Opposition days are provided. We know from our experience last week that the Government can suddenly pull an Opposition day because they do not want a vote on, for instance, universal credit and the cut of £20.
Joanna Cherry
I thought that the hon. Gentleman was getting towards the end, so I wanted to ask him to clarify something. Did I understand him correctly to say that if those on the Government Benches vote against his having the opportunity to put forward the new clause, they will be voting in favour of continued judicial scrutiny of Prorogations? Does that not rather go against the normal pattern on the Conservative Benches, which is to vote against judicial scrutiny in this Parliament? I doff my cap to the hon. Gentleman for being so smart!
Chris Bryant
I would not bother with that.
The hon. and learned Lady is absolutely right. This is the irony—or the hypocrisy—of the Government’s position. [Interruption.] I said “of the Government’s position”; I am being very careful.
I find it incomprehensible that the Government would not want to proceed in the direction of my new clause. It is the simplest way of making sure that Prorogation is a proceeding in Parliament, and there would be no need for the ouster clause in the Bill, which many people have suggested to us is unlikely to work and is a nugatory piece of legislation.
We should also bear in mind that the Commonwealth has shown us plenty of examples of Prorogation being fiercely contested. In Australia in 1975, the Governor-General, John Kerr, removed the Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and then prorogued Parliament before the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Labor party, could pass a motion of no confidence in Malcolm Fraser. That was a deliberate use of the Prorogation process to prevent proper scrutiny. In Canada in 2008, the Conservative Prime Minister of a minority Government, Stephen Harper, ordered a Prorogation to avoid a no confidence motion in himself—yet another example of the use of a process which I think is a means of trying to prevent proper parliamentary scrutiny.
One of the ironies of the situation that we have in the British constitution is that if the Bill goes forward as the Government plan and without the measure relating to Prorogation, there will be no real requirement that Parliament should ever sit. The Meeting of Parliament Act 1694 says that we should have Parliaments every three years; that is all that we would be relying on as a legislative means. It is true that the Bill of Rights requires taxation to be subject to Parliament’s sitting, and also requires that a standing Army must be endorsed every five years. However, the Supreme Court made the very good point that these practical considerations are scant reassurance, because Parliament could just sit very briefly to deal with those matters.
In short, Madam Deputy Speaker—or “in long”, actually—my point is simple: the best way to ensure that Prorogation is not abused by the Executive, and to ensure that the courts do not interfere in political processes that should remain within the political sphere, is to ensure that there is a vote in Parliament before Prorogation. The only way we can have that vote in Parliament before Prorogation is to debate it later today, and the only way we can do that is to vote in favour of my motion of instruction.
The Minister for the Constitution and Devolution (Chloe Smith)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship at this stage of the proceedings, Madam Deputy Speaker, when so much more still awaits us if only we have the chance to get to it.
The first point to make is that this is not the right place to debate Prorogation. This is a short and narrowly focused Bill concerning the ending of one Parliament and the beginning of a new one, and the process of getting from one to the other, not the ending of a parliamentary Session. Therefore, the Government’s view is that expanding the Bill to cover Prorogation would not be appropriate.
Owen Thompson
I just wanted to ask a brief question. If this is not the right place for this topic to be debated, where is the right place for it to be debated?
Chloe Smith
How wonderful to be pre-empted on a core remark that I was going to make anyway. What I ought to say first, however, is that while there is some similarity between the concepts of Prorogation and Dissolution—as the Clerks have observed in calling them “cognate matters”—in that they are both prerogative acts affecting the sitting of Parliament, they are, beyond that, quite distinct. Dissolution is the end of a Parliament before a general election, providing an opportunity for the electorate to exercise its judgment on the Government of the day. Prorogation is simply the formal ending of a parliamentary Session. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee wrote to me recently saying that there was
“no read across from prorogation and dissolution”,
and I agree with that.
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 expressly did not affect the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament. Our Bill to repeal that Act, which is what we are considering today in Committee, therefore does not touch on matters of Prorogation. To do that would significantly widen the scope of the Bill beyond the manifesto commitments of this side of the House and those of the other side of the House, who were clear in their manifesto that they wished to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. It would even go beyond the short title of this Bill. Therefore, it is inappropriate to put such measures in the Bill.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, but it is not wholly accurate to say that the Bill does not relate to Prorogation. If she has regard to clause 3 and its inclusion of the words “or purported” in relation to the exercise of prerogative powers, she will be aware that there are some who feel that that raises the question of justiciability in relation to the Miller and Cherry cases. Is that not in fact an instance where the Bill does touch on Prorogation?
Chloe Smith
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that thoughtful point, but I think he is incorrect. In my view, clause 3 does not do that. The intention of the clause is much more specifically related to Dissolution decisions, and it is my entire argument here from the Dispatch Box that we are dealing today with Dissolution, not with Prorogation, and that the two should be kept quite separate.
Mr Carmichael
That being the case, why do the Government’s own explanatory notes on the Bill refer to the Miller and Cherry cases?
Chloe Smith
Because clause 3 is careful, as the explanatory notes set out, to absorb recent case law, as I am sure the right hon. Gentleman would want us to do. I know that the hon. Member for Rhondda thinks that that is important, because he has given us a tour de force of the history in this area. The point still stands, none the less, that clause 3 is about Dissolution, having had regard to relevant case law. That does not make it about Prorogation, as much as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) might wish it to. It is not about Prorogation.
I ought to take this moment to reflect on what we are actually voting on today. The hon. Member for Rhondda has suggested that there might almost be a trap here. I hesitate to suggest that he is laying a trap for Government Members to vote on. That would hardly be in his character, I am sure. However, a few suggestions have been made in the Chamber this afternoon that, if Government Members were to vote against his motion right here, right now, we would be saying that Prorogation was in fact justiciable. I think I can answer that one fairly clearly in saying that we are voting on an instruction to this Committee here today that we should have leave to make provision relating to the Prorogation of Parliament. I am really doing nothing more there than reading from the Order Paper, so we can be quite clear what today’s vote consists of.
Chloe Smith
I will give way one last time, and I am sure the intervention will be good.
Patrick Grady
I wonder whether the Minister might just indulge the House and express the Government’s opinion on the hon. Member for Rhondda’s amendment, given that the Government seem to oppose our getting a chance to discuss it?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that this is a very narrow debate on the instruction. The Minister can of course speak about the content of the instruction on the matter of Prorogation, but not on the amendment itself.
Chris Bryant
Thank you. The question then is: if not now, when? That has still not been answered. If we are not to debate the matter today, I presume that the Government still believe that Prorogation should not be justiciable, so when are we going to discuss legislative measures to deal with Prorogation?
Chloe Smith
Well, indeed. “If not now, when” is always a good question, and better people than me have put it. This instruction has been laid by the hon. Gentleman, who goes back a long time in this House. He and I have had constitutional battles on the Floor of the House for about 10 years, and I am always delighted to do battle with him. I may concede to him in some cases that he is a better hon. Gentleman than I am. However, the point today, in answer to his question, is that his instruction seeks to widen the scope of the Bill considerably and at this stage I do not think that hon. Members could be fully clear about the extent of his vision for such a change. I do not think it is clear, beyond just the one amendment today, what he may have in mind to discuss about Prorogation. I do not think it is fully clear from this half hour of quite warm-tempered debate what other hon. Members and right hon. Members have in mind to change about Prorogation. This instruction could leave the field of Prorogation open of course to further debate—that is its point—amendment and qualification. Of course, that must be its point, but all of that is somewhat larger than is revealed by today’s amendment. I would be a little surprised if hon. Members wanted to vote with him on a motion that does not give any more time than that for consideration of a very important area of our constitution.
Let me point out how much time we have taken to get to what we are doing today on Dissolution. There have been manifesto commitments from both sides of the House, as I have said. There have been detailed reports from Committees of this House and the other place, as well as a high degree of consensus and many years of reflection on the operation of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. I do not believe that a great deal of realistic notice, ahead of the amendment and this instruction, exists in respect of Prorogation. For that reason, I suggest that now is not the time for that debate, and it is not for me to suggest another time for such a debate.
The hon. Member for Rhondda raised some other points that ought to be answered. There are compelling practical reasons why we do not need to go into the territory raised here today. He raised the spectre of a Government using Prorogation simply to keep on going, but the point needs to be made that any Government would want a new parliamentary Session to begin as soon as possible to pass their Queen’s Speech at the earliest opportunity and to have supply. Quite rightly, no Government can operate without supply and they therefore need Parliament to be in existence. No Government, whether the Government of the day or a future Government, would want to introduce hurdles between the end of one parliamentary Session and another. Their purpose would be to move the legislative programme forward so that they could deliver on their commitments to the electorate. These are fundamentally important points about how Governments and Parliament work together, and I think that that is a quite reasonable answer to the points that have been made today about whether a Government could indeed prorogue forever and whether they ought to be stopped in some way.
More broadly, the Sovereign exercises the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister and that has always been the case. What I think is coming into this debate on the instruction, and may come into the discussion later if this motion were to be passed, is the concept of introducing prescriptive statutory approaches into our flexible constitutional arrangements, and I would call that unnecessary and undesirable. The whole scheme of what we are doing in the Committee for this Bill is to remove constraining and inflexible schemes and return to flexible arrangements that work well.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Is it not the case that those who wish to reopen this issue are revisiting a very dark chapter in the history of our Parliament, when Parliament decided to stand against the wishes of the British people expressed in a democratic referendum? It required the British people to reassert their will and their decision in a general election to clear the air, but is it not great that we cleared the air?
Chloe Smith
The point is that we have an opportunity to clear the air in regard to legislation that is highly prescriptive and has not worked. That is the aim of today; it is not to extend at relatively short notice into a very large subject for debate, for which the ground has not been properly prepared by the hon. Member for Rhondda, although I admire his spirit in trying to do so. Instead, we ought to be able to move past this instruction to change the scope of the Bill and conduct our work through Committee, thus discharging at least two manifesto commitments from either side of the House and returning our constitutional arrangements to a form of stability that works.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
I will not detain the House for long but, because I was not able to intervene latterly on the Minister’s speech, I wish to put on record that the motion of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) is required to be passed for this House to debate this matter today. In the event that the Bill gets its Third Reading, it will go to the other place, where very different rules apply. In the other place, it is required only that the House should determine that the matter is in scope, whether or not the ex facie scope is achieved.
Essentially that means that, when the Bill goes to the other place, the unelected Chamber will be able to debate this matter. It is surely perverse that the Government should deny the elected Chamber the same opportunity.
Chris Bryant
I am sorry not for the tone but for the content of what the Minister said, not least because she is the only person who can grant additional time for debate. I cannot do it. I note that she has not provided any—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. I am going to pause the hon. Gentleman for a moment. Once again, because of the screen that is in the way, I could not see the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) on the Opposition Front Bench. If she wishes to comment on these matters, it is better that she does so before the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) concludes.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), as the House should be able to debate these issues. He started by saying he is Billy No Mates, but he will find he has an awful lot of mates in the House today.
There is no getting away from the fact that the 2019 constitutional crisis caused by the unlawful Prorogation of Parliament was a warning shot that we should legislate in this area to ensure that the courts cannot interfere in matters of Parliament. The most obvious way to do that is to debate and support my hon. Friend’s new clauses and amendments.
The Minister says it is not her place to decide when these matters should be decided, but that they are certainly not in this Bill. What is the point of having a Minister for the Constitution if she cannot decide that such an important constitutional matter be decided today?
Chris Bryant
Now for the second part. The Minister is also wrong to suggest that somebody else should be devising time for us to debate, on a legislative measure, the issue of Prorogation. In all honesty, the only people who can do that are Government Ministers. It would be entirely inappropriate for such legislation to come from the Back Benches or in a private Member’s Bill.
It is important that we discuss these matters. We not only had a constitutional crisis in 2019; we had one in 2010, too, which led to the coalition Government. We had not had a coalition Government for a long time, and the truth is that in politics everything that everybody thinks can never happen nearly always does end up happening in some shape or form. That is what constitutions should be ready for. The Minister says she could not imagine a Government would ever do a whole series of different things, including allowing a lengthy Prorogation. Well, there was one. It was in 2019 and it was led by the present Prime Minister, who wanted to prorogue Parliament for 34 days for illegal parliamentary reasons. That is why we got into that pickle in 2019.
Question put.
Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill
Monday 13th September 2021
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill 2021-22 View all Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill 2021-22 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 13 September 2021 - large print - (13 Sep 2021)
20:27 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 316 / Noes: 162 - Question accordingly agreed to.
20:46 - divided: - Ayes: 312 / Noes: 55 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Just before we begin the consideration, I should explain that although the Chair of the Committee would normally sit in a Clerk’s chair during the Committee stage, the Chair of proceedings will remain in the Speaker’s Chair while we still have the screens around the Table, about which, the House will note, I have complained several times today because they restrict the view of the Chair. That was all very well while we were working from a written list, but now that it is necessary for Members to catch the eye of the occupant of the Chair, it is also necessary for the occupant of the Chair to be able to see all Members. The person in the Speaker’s Chair will be carrying out the role not of Deputy Speaker but of Chairman of the Committee, and they should be addressed as Chairman, rather than as Deputy Speaker.
Clause 1
Repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Eleanor Laing)
With this it will be convenient to consider the following:
Clauses 2 and 3 stand part.
Amendment 2, in clause 4, page 2, line 3, leave out “it first met” and insert “of the most recent general election”
The intention of this amendment is to require that the last date for a general election is five years after the previous general election.
Clauses 4, 5 and 6 stand part.
New clause 1—Election timetable not to disregard Saturdays and Sundays and bank holidays—
‘(1) Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983 is amended as follows.
(2) In rule 2 (1), omit sub-paragraphs (a) and (b).”
The purpose of this new clause is to reduce the time between dissolution and the next meeting of Parliament, by including weekends and bank holidays within the parliamentary general election timetable.
New clause 2—Early parliamentary general elections—
‘(1) An early parliamentary general election may take place sooner than the automatic dissolution under section 4 of this Act only in accordance with this section.
(2) An early parliamentary general election is to take place only if the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (3).
(3) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (2) is—
(none) “That there shall be an early parliamentary general election.”
(4) Subsection (5) applies for the purposes of the Timetable in rule 1 in Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983.
(5) If a parliamentary general election is to take place as provided for by subsection (2), the polling day for the election is to be the day appointed by Her Majesty by proclamation on the recommendation of the Prime Minister which must be no later than 30 days after the date on which the House of Commons has passed the motion in the form set out in subsection (3).”
The intention of this new clause is to make dissolution subject to a vote of the House of Commons.
New clause 5—Calling of Parliament—
‘(1) The date for the first meeting of a new Parliament must be specified in any proclamation for the dissolution of a Parliament.
(2) The date specified in accordance with subsection (1) may not be later than the 14th day after polling day.”
The intention of this new clause is to require Parliament to meet, and a newly elected Commons to sit to elect a Speaker, within two weeks of a general election.
Amendment 3, in the Schedule, page 4, line 22, leave out “19th” and insert “12th”
The intention of this amendment is to shorten the period between dissolution of one Parliament and the first meeting of the next Parliament by reducing the general election campaign from 25 days to 18.
Amendment 4, page 7, line 15, after “subsection (2)” insert “and”
This is a drafting amendment consequential on Amendment 5.
Amendment 5, page 7, line 17, leave out from “(ii)” to end of line 19 and insert “omit paragraph (b)”
This amendment would ensure that the Secretary of State could not make regulations to combine a UK General Election and an extraordinary general election to the Senedd.
Schedule stand part.
The Minister for the Constitution and Devolution (Chloe Smith)
May I initially seek your guidance, Chairman? Would you like me to cover all the clause stand parts and to respond, as it were, in advance to amendments? Or would you like me to return to respond to hon. Members once they have spoken to their amendments?
The Chairman
That is a perfectly reasonable question from the Minister. As all matters are grouped in one group, she may, in her opening remarks, refer to all amendments and clauses standing part, but of course she will have an opportunity to answer points made by Members when they introduce their amendments and new clauses. Or should I say “he”—[Interruption.] I should say “they”, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has a new clause as well. It is perfectly in order for the Minister to now address everything that is on the amendment paper.
Chloe Smith
Thank you very much indeed, Dame Eleanor. I shall endeavour to do that, and I hope you will bear with me while I ensure that I cover all that material.
Let me begin at the beginning, with clause 1. There is consensus throughout the House that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 has proven to be not fit for purpose and has been damaging to effective and accountable government. The experience of 2019 in particular showed us that the Act was flawed and ran counter to core constitutional principles, and was therefore damaging to the flexible functioning of our constitution. It was unique legislation and it did not work. We saw how, in 2017, a Government who commanded a majority in the House of Commons were able to call an early general election with ease, irrespective of the Act’s intentions.
The events of 2019 then demonstrated how the 2011 Act could obstruct democracy by making it harder to hold a necessary election. The Act’s prescriptive constraints, such as the threshold of a supermajority requirement for a general election and the statutory motions of no confidence, created an untenable situation in which the Government could neither pass vital legislation through Parliament nor call a new election. The result was parliamentary paralysis at a critical time for our Government. The introduction of bespoke primary legislation that circumvented the Act and let us hold a general election in 2019 was the final indictment of the Act.
The Bill therefore repeals the 2011 Act and returns us to the tried and tested system whereby Parliament will automatically dissolve after five years, if it has not been dissolved earlier by the sovereign exercising that prerogative power at the request of the Prime Minister. The key argument is that in doing so it will help to deliver increased legal, constitutional and political certainty around the process for the dissolving of Parliament. Clause 1 repeals the 2011 Act and in doing so delivers, as I have already mentioned, on both a Government manifesto commitment and a Labour manifesto commitment to do so. I therefore commend the clause to the Committee.
Clause 2 makes express provision to revive the prerogative powers that relate to the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a new Parliament. That means that Parliament will, once more, be dissolved by the sovereign at the request of the Prime Minister. By doing this, the clause delivers on the Bill’s purpose, which is to reset the clock back to the pre-2011 position with as much clarity as possible. The clause is clear in its intention and in its effect. As the Joint Committee on the Fixed-term Parliaments Act put it, the drafting of clause 2 is
“sufficiently clear to give effect to the Government’s intention of returning to the constitutional position”
that existed prior to the passing of the 2011 Act.
Sir Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend help the House in respect of whether the Government acknowledge the existence of the Lascelles principles? If they do, what is the impact of clause 2 on those principles?
Chloe Smith
Of course the Government and I acknowledge the existence of those principles; they are a historical fact in and of themselves. I refer my right hon. and learned Friend to the fact that we have said consistently throughout the Bill’s preparation and progress so far that we believe that now is the time for the underpinning conventions of the prerogative power to be debated and, indeed, restated. The Government have contributed to that by publishing some Dissolution principles at the beginning of the Bill’s journey. We think those principles form part of a dialogue that continues not only between the Government and Parliament but with the wider public as well. I hope that the work of this Committee today and the work in the other place will together form part of the continuation of that historical tradition of there being an understanding of the conventions that underpin the prerogative.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Does not the fact that the Prime Minister requests that the monarch take steps so that an election can happen show an understanding of the Lascelles principles? Indeed, there could be other circumstances, yet unforeseen, in which a request is refused.
Chloe Smith
Yes, we believe that that is the case; that is the flexibility inherent within the constitutional arrangements that we seek to revive. That brings me back to the express purpose of clause 2, which delivers on the Bill’s purpose, which is, as I said, to reset back to the pre-2011 position with as much clarity as possible. We believe that is clear in our intention to revive the prerogative.
Naturally, I recognise that the revival of the prerogative has been subject to academic debate. For example, as Professor Mark Elliott, professor of public law at the University of Cambridge said:
“Given the scheme of the Bill, it is perfectly clear that the prerogative will be revived and that, from the entry into force of the Bill, the prerogative power of dissolution will once again be exercisable.”
Furthermore, even if any doubts remained from some of the academic debate that has taken place, as the former First Parliamentary Counsel, Sir Stephen Laws, said in his evidence to the Joint Committee, the academic debate is something of
“a red herring, because…it is perfectly plain that the intention of the Act is to restore the situation to what it was before the 2011 Act, and therefore the law will then be indistinguishable from what it was before”.
The Government are, then, confident of the intention and practical effect of the clause. A letter that I sent recently to my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) sets out why we believe that there is a sound legal basis for that position; I hope that Members may have had a chance to see that letter, which I publicised to right hon. and hon. Members. By making express provision to revive the prerogative powers, clause 2 returns us to the tried and tested constitutional arrangements, so I commend it to the Committee.
Clause 3 is necessary and proportionate for the avoidance of doubt and to preserve the long-standing position that the prerogative powers to dissolve one Parliament and call another are non-justiciable. Those prerogative powers are inherently political in nature and, as such, are not suitable for review by the courts. Any judgment on their exercise should be left to the electorate at the polling booth. That was the view of the courts, as expressed by, for example, Lord Roskill in the landmark GCHQ case in 1985: he considered that the courts are not the place to determine whether Parliament should be dissolved on one date or another. That position was recommended more recently in the independent review of administrative law, published in March this year, which noted that clause 3 can be regarded as a “codifying clause” that
“simply restates the position that everyone understood obtained before the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was passed”.
As I mentioned earlier, clause 3 has been drafted with regard for the direction of travel in case law. Over the years since the GCHQ case, some of the prerogative powers previously considered to be non-justiciable have been held by the courts to be justiciable. The purpose of the clause is therefore to be as clear as possible about the no-go sign around the dissolution and calling of Parliament. It is carefully drafted to respect the message from the courts that only
“the most clear and explicit words”
can exclude their jurisdiction. This is a matter for Parliament to decide; that view accords with the majority of the Joint Committee, which said that
“Parliament should be able to designate certain matters as ones which are to be resolved in the political rather than the judicial sphere”.
We have made our intentions clear so that the courts will understand that that is the clear will of Parliament. I therefore commend the clause to the Committee.
Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that one benefit of clause 3, as well as highlighting all the issues that she has just mentioned, is that it makes it abundantly clear that Parliament is supreme?
Chloe Smith
Yes, that is right. I am grateful to my hon. Friend and to all hon. and right hon. Members who served on the Joint Committee and spent a considerable amount of time looking at these issues. That is the kind of consideration that we ought to give to our constitutional affairs rather than taking them in a hurry—a point that I was making earlier. Let me acknowledge my hon. Friend’s point and thank him and others for the work that they did.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
On clause 3, may I take the Minister back to the inclusion of the word “purported” and, in particular, draw her attention to paragraph 166 and the comments of Baroness Hale in relation to the Joint Committee report? She says that
“it looks as if it is saying, “Well, even if what we did”—
that is what the Government did—
“was not within the power that you have been given by the statute, the courts can’t do anything about it.”
She goes on to say:
“If that is the case, the courts would be very worried about that, because it would mean that the Government—the Prime Minister—had done something that was, at least arguably, not within its powers.”
There is some force and logic in the argument of Lady Hale, is there not?
Chloe Smith
This is a good opportunity for me to be absolutely clear about the reference to the word “purported” in this clause. This has been included to take account of previous judicial decisions—in particular the cases of Anisminic Ltd v. the Foreign Compensation Commission 1969, and Privacy International v. the Investigatory Powers Tribunal 2019. In the latter, the expectation was expressed that the drafting legislation would have regard to the case law and ensure that the drafting made it clear if “purported” decisions—that is decisions that would be considered by a court to be invalid—were intended to be outside the jurisdiction of the courts. What clause 3 does is present an opportunity to Parliament to be absolutely clear on whether it thinks that such things should be outside the jurisdiction of the courts. It is the Government’s position and presentation that they ought to be, and I hope that hon. Members will join me in that.
Mr Carmichael
In the interests of clarity, is the Minister telling the House that the Government are asking Parliament to give them the power to do things that exceed the powers given to them and that nobody should be able to gainsay them?
Chloe Smith
I am proposing that the House understands the use of the phrase “purported”, which, clearly, the right hon. Gentleman does—I have no dispute with him on that point—and that hon. Members join us in acknowledging that it is right to be aware of the case law and to respond to it. The decision in front of us is whether purported decisions relating to this area should or should not be included in clause 3. It is our contention that they should be, because we believe that the entire area of dissolution and the calling of Parliament is intended to be outside the jurisdiction of the courts. That is a perfectly legitimate question to put to Parliament. It is for us here in this Chamber to decide on that, and the reason for doing so would be that we think that such decisions are political rather that judicial in their nature. Fundamentally, the check on the exercise of power is for the electorate to decide on rather than the courts. Therefore, as I have said, the function of clause 3 is to set that out very clearly. I will now move on to clause 4, which deals with five-year maximum terms.
The purpose here is to ensure that a Parliament lasts no longer than five years. We do that by providing that Parliament will automatically dissolve five years after it has first met. In doing so, the clause returns us to the general position before the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill was enacted. We are confident that five years is the appropriate length for the maximum parliamentary term. Our Parliaments have seldom lasted a full five years, and, in practice, they have often been dissolved sooner. In fact, we can see that parliamentary terms have very often developed their own rhythm. For example, from the history books, we can see that a strong Government seeking a fresh mandate might seek a Dissolution after four years. Anything less than four years is usually a sign of some political crisis or emergency. Often, Parliaments are dissolved out of political necessity rather than choice, to put a policy or political question to the electorate or to resolve a political crisis.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
But it is not actually five years; it is five years and a bit, is it not? As the Septennial Act 1716 did, it goes from the date of the first sitting of the new Parliament. It means that, if we stick with this, we will have the longest period from election to election of any democracy in the world. Would it not be better for the period from election to election to be at most five years?
Chloe Smith
The hon. Gentleman pre-empts my remarks in respect of his amendment, which I will endeavour to come to after I have worked through all the clauses.
The scheme that we are proposing is the right one and I will come in a moment to why I think that that is the case when compared with other technical methods of achieving a five-year term that the hon. Gentleman is thinking of. This clause provides for a maximum parliamentary term of five years from the date that Parliament first met, so we measure five years from the date of first meeting to the Dissolution of Parliament, and that is the Government’s proposition. We think that that provides the right balance of stability, flexibility and accountability that is entailed in returning to the arrangements that allow for a general election earlier than that. On that basis, I recommend that clause 4 stand part of the Bill.
I shall speak very briefly to clause 5. It introduces the schedule to the Bill, which makes provision for the consequential amendments that are needed to ensure that other legislation operates effectively once the 2011 Act has been repealed and we return to the status quo ante. The consequential amendments primarily reverse or alter legislative amendments made by the 2011 Act. They remove references to the Act in legislation and ensure that, after the repeal of the 2011 Act, other legislation that links to it still works. For example, in repealing the 2011 Act, they reflect the fact that there will no longer be fixed-term Parliaments, so the concept of an early general election would no longer exist in law.
Clause 5 also provides that the repeal of the 2011 Act by clause 1 does not affect the amendments and repeals made by the schedule to that Act. This ensures that essential provisions are not lost. It allows us to modify changes made by the 2011 Act and ensure the smooth running of elections by retaining sensible improvements made by that Act or subsequent to that Act. I know that those are some topics that we will come back to a little later as we progress through our debate this evening.
The schedule also makes a small number of minor changes to ensure the smooth running of elections. In short, this clause is necessary to ensure that electoral law and other related parts of the statute book continue to function smoothly. As such, I recommend that clause 5 stand part of the Bill.
Clause 6 is the one that we all know and love that deals with extent, early commencement and short title. It confirms that the territorial extent of the Bill is the United Kingdom, except for a very small number of amendments in the schedule where the extent is more limited. The clause ensures that the Bill has an early commencement, meaning that it comes into force on the day on which it receives Royal Assent, and it provides that the short title of the Bill will be the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2021.
That gives me an opportunity to explain that the Government have agreed with the recommendation of the Joint Committee that a Bill of constitutional significance that seeks to put in place arrangements that deliver legal, constitutional and political certainty around the process of dissolving one Parliament and calling another should be titled accordingly. The short title now reflects the purpose of the Bill and will help to ensure that it is clearly understood and that successive Parliaments are able to discern the intended effect of the legislation. I therefore propose that this clause stand part of the Bill. Mr Evans, would you like me also to make a remark about the schedule and then turn to the amendments?
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Nigel Evans)
indicated assent.
Chloe Smith
In that case, Mr Evans, I am going to carry on until you tell me otherwise. There is an amount to get through, but I hope to do so.
The schedule provides for a number of changes to primary and secondary legislation to ensure the effective operation of the statute book when the 2011 Act is repealed. These amendments primarily reverse or alter legislative amendments made by the 2011 Act. The schedule works with clause 6. As I have explained, we want to make sure that references to the 2011 Act work elsewhere in other legislation. There are some key changes in the schedule to draw to the attention of the House.
The first is to rule 1 of schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983, which sets out the election timetable. The Bill amends that rule to ensure that the trigger for the election process in the case of a parliamentary general election is the Dissolution of Parliament, following the recommendation of the FTPA Joint Committee.
The second change provides additional certainty in relation to the election process. The election writ is deemed to have been received the day after the Dissolution of Parliament. This will allow returning officers to begin arrangements the day after the election writs are issued, enabling all constituencies to begin making the necessary preparations, even in the event that the physical delivery of the writ is delayed. Similar deeming amendments are included for by-elections.
The third update is to section 20 of the Representation of the People Act 1985. Under the existing legislation, in the event of the demise of the Crown after Dissolution or up to seven days before, polling day is postponed by a fortnight. The 1985 Act provides no discretion or flexibility to further alter the date of the poll. This Bill provides limited discretion for the Prime Minister to move polling day up to seven days either side of this default 14-day postponement, by proclamation on the advice of the Privy Council. This is beneficial because it ensures that enough flexibility is built into the system should such specific and unlikely circumstances ever occur. There is also flexibility to move the date set for the first meeting of Parliament in such circumstances—again, by proclamation on the advice of the Privy Council.
The last key change that I will highlight in this section is to the Recall of MPs Act 2015, which is amended to ensure that there continues to be provision to prevent or terminate recall petitions close to a general election to avoid redundant by-elections. This means that there is no requirement to trigger a recall petition if the last possible polling day for a general election, based on Parliament running its full term, is less than six months away, and a recall petition is to be terminated when Parliament is dissolved. For the reasons that I have set out, I recommend that the schedule be the schedule to the Bill.
If it remains convenient to you, Mr Evans, I will now start to work my way through the amendments that have been tabled, but I remain at your disposal to return to the clauses if hon. Members would like me to respond after they have spoken to their amendments.
New clause 2 has been tabled by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). As I understand it, it seeks to provide a role for the House of Commons in approving an early general election by simple majority vote. This would adjust the arrangements that exist under the 2011 Act by removing the two-thirds majority requirement. It would in itself be a departure from the prior constitutional norm, whereby the Prime Minister could request an early Dissolution of Parliament in order to test the view of the electorate. As we have already begun to touch on in this afternoon’s debate, the deadlock and paralysis created by the 2011 Act did rather demonstrate why a prescriptive statutory approach does not work. Instead, what we are doing in the Bill is returning to a set of widely understood constitutional conventions and practices. Those tried and tested arrangements are the right ones, and this new clause would run against the grain of those arrangements.
It is, after all, a core underlying principle that the authority of the Government and the Prime Minister, as the sovereign’s principal adviser, are derived from the ability to command the confidence of the House of Commons. The 2011 Act attached confidence and the decision of the Prime Minister to call an election to statutory motions, which gave the Commons a direct say in Dissolution, but it is also possible to argue that those arrangements hindered the function of democracy by making it harder to have necessary elections. Instead, the House should indeed be able to express its view on confidence, but in a much freer manner. We do not need the prescriptive statutory approach of either the 2011 Act or, I fear, this new clause.
New clause 2(5) would require the Prime Minister to advise the sovereign on the date of the election within 30 days of the House approving a motion for an election. I would argue that this is not necessary. Under the Bill, once a general election has been called and Dissolution takes place, the election timetable in schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983 makes the provision for the timing of an election very clear. Again, rather than introducing prescriptive arrangements, we believe that we should return to tried and tested standards whereby it is a core principle that the Prime Minister must be able to command the confidence of the House of Commons. New measures around that concept are not needed.
Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)
If a Prime Minister were to request a Dissolution that was proper but was perceived to be for political advantage and was premature, would not the remedy be in the hands and judgment of the electorate?
Chloe Smith
Yes, that is precisely the point, and that underlies a number of our considerations. In the place of a prescriptive statutory scheme, we can place our trust instead in the ability of people to choose against the behaviour that they observe from parties in Parliament.
Let me turn to new clause 5, which is also in the name of the hon. Member for Rhondda. It would require the House to start sitting 14 days after a general election. Although I agree that Parliament should meet as soon as possible after polling day, it is not necessary to codify that in legislation. Fundamentally, this is a similar type of argument. It is difficult to reconcile more extensive codification with the scheme of the Bill, and I shall set out the reasons why.
First, we think it is unnecessary to allow for such a 14-day period. Before and under the 2011 Act, the date of the first meeting of Parliament was set by the sovereign on the advice of the Prime Minister. In practice, Parliament has met within one to two weeks of a general election on all but two occasions since 1950. There are compelling practical reasons for a new Government to call a new Parliament as soon as possible. As I put it earlier, no Government can manage without supply. As the Joint Committee put it,
“without…the authorisation of the Commons to spend money…a modern administration could manage months at best”.
Ultimately, having won an election, any new Government would want to assemble Parliament to pass their Queen’s Speech at the earlier opportunity, and be able to move on to legislation and supply.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
If the largest party was trying to get a coalition, that might take more than 14 days. Is there provision in the legislation to cover that?
Chloe Smith
The hon. Gentleman makes precisely the point that goes to the new clause, which is that a Government would, I would have thought, want to assemble faster than 14 days, but there can be occasions when more than 14 days may be needed. Therefore, both these arguments point to flexibility, and that is my principal concern about the new clause.
Chris Bryant
All right then, if it is the simplest way of doing it, what is the last date that the next general election can be held if all this is carried as the Minister says?
Chloe Smith
With respect, that is not the right quiz question—the right quiz question is whether, under the hon. Gentleman’s amendment, the period would be five years plus 25 days. That would, I believe, arise from his amendment, because he is not counting the length of the election campaign, whereas our provision is five years from first sitting to last sitting, so we are trying to measure the life of a Parliament. I am not trying to engage in maths problems; I simply think that this is the most sensible way to measure it, and I hope hon. Members might agree. [Interruption.] I am really not going to engage in maths questions beyond that. We need a clear and easily understood scheme. I think we are all agreed that it ought to be five years, and we are dealing with how to achieve that. The Government’s proposition is that it should be, as I say, from five years after Parliament has first met. That is important.
Let me turn to the pair of amendments that relate to the shortening of the election timetable: new clause 1 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and amendment 3 in the name of the hon. Member for Rhondda. I am absolutely sure that there will be some very strong arguments put in this area. To try to help the Committee, I will set out why we have our current timetable and then seek to address what I would anticipate to be some of the core arguments that right hon. and hon. Members will raise.
The current timetable was introduced in 2013 through the Electoral Administration Act 2006, which absorbed fundamental shifts brought about through having postal votes on demand and individual electoral registration. As I have explained, the Bill seeks to return us to the status quo ante while retaining sensible changes that have been made since 2011 to enable the smooth running of elections, which are, in my view, of benefit to voters. The current timetable is one of those changes. It provides a balance between allowing sufficient time to run the polls effectively and for the public to be well informed, while not preventing Parliament from avoiding sitting for any longer than is necessary, which is a very important consideration.
On the requirements for running polls effectively, the 25 days working days are necessary to deliver elections, which are now often more complex than at any other point in our history, for reasons, as I mentioned, to do with postal voting on demand, but also online individual electoral registration. That was a fundamental constitutional change that enabled increasingly higher numbers of last-minute applications. To illustrate that, at the most recent general election almost 660,000 applications were made on the last day possible. Before 2000, as I said, there was no postal voting on demand, and it has since grown in numbers to represent nearly 20% of registered electors. Both things increased the complexity and demands of an election timetable.
The amendments refer to weekends and bank holidays in the election period. Local authority electoral services teams who do this work are already often working weekends and overtime to make elections work successfully. I also note that elections do not just rely on local authorities and their staff; there is a significant commercial element to their delivery through many suppliers, including, but not limited to, the software for maintaining the registers, and the printing and postage of paperwork such as the poll cards, ballot papers and postal votes. There is very little room for error on all that. Creating and maintaining the capacity to deliver it can be extremely challenging, especially at short notice. Weekends and bank holidays are not necessarily in our gift.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
My hon. Friend is of course making an excellent speech. The intent behind the new clause, which I will explain more fully when I go through it in detail, is to do exactly what she was calling for earlier, which is to have a clearer and more easily understood scheme. At the moment, it is not clear and not easy to understand, because it states that election periods are 25 days when they may not be: the last election was 36 days. We need more transparency, and that is part of what the new clause is calling for.
Chloe Smith
Absolutely. This is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that we have not necessarily observed a 25 working day timetable. For example, the 2017 election, known to have been rather a long one, was considerably longer than that minimum statutory period. It is important, as my right hon. Friend says, to be as clear as possible on this point.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend feel that the debate on this presents the opportunity for a further piece of work on the period from when a Prime Minister dissolves Parliament to when the 25 days should start? I appreciate that this Bill is not really the appropriate moment for that, but does she agree that there should be further study and work to decide whether the timeframe should be tidied up more before we get to the 25 days?
Chloe Smith
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Some of what he refers to is not necessarily within a statutory scheme but within, for example, the processes of this House, but he makes a valuable point. We do need to look at the evidence in this area; that will clearly help us. There is already some written work that I would commend to right hon. and hon. Members. They could look at the most recent report of the Association of Electoral Administrators, which said, in July, that less time would be significantly problematic and that there was only so much that could be done at once. It made the point again in written evidence to the Joint Committee, saying that
“it would be catastrophic for everyone involved…if the statutory election period were to be shortened…It would create a significant risk of the election failing and not being delivered and increase the risk of disenfranchising potential electors”.
Alec Shelbrooke
Just for clarification on those comments, are the electoral services referring to the 25 working days, not a period leading up to that, and saying that they are confident that they can always achieve their work in the short campaign as defined, not relying on any period of time before the short campaign starts?
Chloe Smith
I believe that to be the case, although of course I would not wish to speak for the AEA. I really do commend its report to the Committee to enable it to see in much more detail the challenges that there are in delivering elections within the timetable that currently exists. To answer my right hon. Friend’s question, broadly yes—that set of comments is referring to the statutory timetable rather than any time before it.
Mr Goodwill
We would all wish to maximise participation in elections, and the practicalities of overseas voters, postal voters and voter registration are very important, but do we also need to look at the possibility that as campaigns go on and on, we might get campaign fatigue, which might well result in fewer people casting their ballots because they are sick to death of the election going on for what seems to be forever?
Chloe Smith
I am always sympathetic to that point. There is always a risk when any of us have to bang on too long that we simply get boring, and I can already apologise to the House for having taken 50 minutes of tonight’s Committee in trying to make my way through the material I am obliged to cover. My right hon. Friend makes a wise point, and it is one of the balances that have to be looked at in this discussion. That is one reason why he and others have tabled amendments.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
On the wider point about how quickly an election takes place, can I take it as read from the Minister that the Government will always immediately move a writ for a by-election, and not drag it on any longer than usual?
Chloe Smith
If only I had the ability to give the hon. Gentleman that promise, I think I would have promoted myself to Chief Whip and other positions in a single move. I do not think I should be drawn on the dark ways of the Chief Whip and the usual channels. Instead, I will take an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker).
Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)
I want to take my hon. Friend back to the point about 2013 and why the period became 25 working days. She mentioned postal votes and electronic registration, but surely the clue is in the title: electronic registration. Anything done electronically is supposed to be much quicker and clearer. Does the legislation also take into account future ways of voting, particularly for overseas voters who may want eventually to do it electronically?
Chloe Smith
Again, some incredibly thoughtful points are being put. My hon. Friend is right to observe that the introduction of online registration has enormously sped up how people can register, and he draws me to talk about two things. The first is to acknowledge what needs to be done to ensure that overseas voters can cast their ballots more easily. There is an entire field of working going on there, which we will discuss more in consideration of the Elections Bill—I look forward to seeing him in the debate—but a general point sits in the discussion of these amendments, which is how we ensure voters are getting what they need out of the election process.
Chloe Smith
I will not give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) again, if he will forgive me. I will give my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) a go.
Aaron Bell
My hon. Friend said a moment ago that she could not speak exactly for the AEA, but she will know from the open letter that it wrote to her that it wants even more time. It is proposing an extended 30-day timetable to
“increase capacity, introduce resilience and ensure electors are put first.”
That is all very well, but the point of an election is not to have the most perfect election imaginable, but to get the right result efficiently, so that everyone can cast their vote, but the country can be allowed to move on and resolve whatever tensions led to the election. The ever lengthening timetable is not in the national interest, let alone the interest of individual electors or individual candidates.
Chloe Smith
I am happy to confirm from this Dispatch Box that the Government’s position is to maintain the electoral timetable as it stands—I am not proposing an extension or reduction—but I draw the threads together as follows. We need to ensure that the system works for voters, and that includes them having enough time to register to vote, to receive their ballot papers, to return their ballot papers and to decide on the candidates in each constituency—we have a constituency-based system, after all. We also need to be able to make the same point about supporting candidates to fulfil their part of what needs to happen in an election timetable, both those who stand for parties and those who stand as independents. We have to think through these things if we legislate here.
In response to right hon. and hon. Members who have tabled the amendments, I suggest there is perhaps a space here for looking further into these issues. There would be an opportunity to have some research drawn together on the tensions between voter engagement, the resilience of polls and the needs of the country for a period when it does not have a Parliament or MPs able to help constituents. Although the Government continue to hold the powers needed to carry out essential business and respond to sudden, unexpected or distressing events, none the less the Government do after all need Parliament to be sitting. If needed, I will return to those points after right hon. and hon. Members have spoken, but I will leave new clause 1 and amendment 3 there.
Chloe Smith
I am afraid I have not got time to give way; I need to draw my remarks to a close. I look forward to the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr being able to say more about his amendment, which he has not yet had a chance to do. It would be rather good at this point if the Committee heard from others, rather than me. I draw my remarks to a close. I hope I have covered all the points on the new clauses, the schedule and the amendments. I commend the Bill as a whole, unamended, to the Committee.
Cat Smith
The Bill does two things: it repeals the Fixed-term Parliaments Act; and reinstates—or attempts to reinstate—the status quo that existed before 2011. The Labour party supports the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which we committed to in our 2019 manifesto, because the Act undermined motions of no-confidence and removed conventions around confidence motions. The concept of fixed terms, however, is not a bad one, and we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. When the Act was introduced, the then Prime Minister was clear that it transferred power away from the Prime Minister and to Parliament. By virtue of that, the Bill is clearly a power grab by a Prime Minister who thinks that one rule applies to him and the rest of us can just wish for it.
New clause 2, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), would make Dissolution subject to a vote in the House of Commons. At the heart of the new clause is the question whether a Government should have the power to decide when an election takes place or whether elections should be fixed. The democratic position to take is that terms should be fixed. Indeed, that is what happens in our local councils in England and in the Parliaments in Scotland and Wales. In fact, in most parliamentary democracies, Dissolution is controlled by the legislature with varying degrees of involvement from the Executive.
In the UK, with our strong tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, Parliament should be central to any decision to dissolve, for three main reasons. First, there is the electoral advantage. If only the Prime Minister knows when an election will be held, only the Prime Minister will know when spending limits kick in. That plays to the advantage of the incumbent political party. It is also possible to bury bad news by calling an election before such news hits. If, for instance, there was to be an inquiry on covid and they felt that would be bad news for them, they could choose to go early to avoid negative headlines. Secondly, a vote in Parliament for Dissolution would remove any possibility of dragging the Crown into the politics of the decision. I am sure no Members of the House would like to see Her Majesty dragged into that. Thirdly, it would render the Bill’s ouster clause unnecessary, whether that clause is effective or not. The easiest way to keep the courts out of Dissolution decisions is to leave Dissolution in Parliament’s hands. It is impossible to imagine the crack through which the courts could intervene in a duly recorded decision of the House of Commons on that matter.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the new clause is a much more effective way of keeping the courts out? The ouster clause is a bit like a red flag or saying to someone, “Don’t think of an elephant”—they will think of an elephant. It is saying to the courts, “You can’t touch this,” which would be a charter for clever lawyers and clever judges to start to think, “Where can we start to look at this?” rather than using the long-established, age-old way of deciding matters: a vote here in Parliament.
Alec Shelbrooke
I will not debate the points of politics with the hon. Lady. On her comments about using Parliament for Dissolution, we have had all of that. There are probably few Members of the public watching us in the Chamber tonight, but they certainly watched what happened in 2019. Surely when we have a Chamber in stalemate, the Government should be able to resign. She will recall how her then leader stood on Parliament Square to say that the Government should resign but then came in here and stopped them from resigning, which was incredible. Surely when Parliament is deadlocked, as it was then, the Government should be able to resign and that should just happen, not be stopped by Parliament.
Cat Smith
I agree with the heckling from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda. I think the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) is quite wrong and that the public are watching the debate with deep fascination. He underestimates the passion for constitutional legislation in this place. The point is that the new clause would remove the possibility of the courts being involved, and I think there is consensus across the Committee that that would be desirable. It strikes me that new clause 2 would be the most straightforward and easy way to do that. Of course, we know fine well that if the Government of the day can carry the House—in most cases, they can—there would be no issue in having a Dissolution. It would also avoid dragging the monarch into politics and remove the governing party’s electoral advantage. The new clause therefore strengthens the Bill, so I support it.
I turn to amendments 1 to 3 and new clause 1 on the length of an election campaign. It is impossible to look at the Bill without considering how it would move us to a position in which pretty much all elections will be unscheduled. I say “unscheduled” rather than “snap” because I recognise that an election period is very long; it certainly does not feel very snappy for candidates, voters or anyone campaigning. Unscheduled elections cause a problem for our electoral administrators. From having spoken to many of them and heard representations from the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators, it is clear that many close misses happen on the timetable, and a reduction of the timetable alongside the Bill, which could lead to more unscheduled elections, risks the public’s confidence in our democratic elections. For that reason, although it would be desirable to have shorter elections, I cannot support those amendments.
The Bill is not in a vacuum—we also have the Elections Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill before the House—and taken together, it is clearly part of a political power grab with a movement of power away from Parliament. It is a movement away from 650 Members to the hands of one man or woman who is Prime Minister, who will decide when the starting gun will be fired on an election. The Bill is, frankly, an overreaction to and misunderstanding of the causes of the gridlock in the 2019 Parliament. The principle of fixed terms is not wrong, although the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was clearly flawed. Prorogation should be in the hands of Parliament, not the Executive.
Mrs Miller
I rise to speak in particular to new clause 1 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill), my hon. Friends the Members for North West Cambridgeshire (Shailesh Vara), for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell), for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) and a number of others. It is well supported. As the Minister set out, this is an important Bill. I had the privilege of serving on the Joint Committee on the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, where we heard the most extraordinary body of evidence about the last 10 years. I must say that it was overwhelmingly in support of the Government’s direction, which should take us back to the status quo ante position so eloquently outlined by the Minister. However, the evidence sessions also revealed a number of gaps—things that the Bill might do but does not—particularly on general campaigns and their lengths.
The Minister talked about the importance of a clear and easily understood scheme, and I completely agree. Elections are incredibly important parts of our democratic process—the pillar of the process in many ways—and should be clear and easily understood. However, as I alluded to in my intervention, the length of general elections is neither clear nor easily understood, and one must dive into the mice type to find out what the rules are.
The legislation says that elections should be 25 days in length, but that is not actually what it means: it is 25 days plus high days and holidays, and in essence that means an awful lot longer.
Mrs Miller
If I could finish this point, I will then allow the hon. Member to intervene.
Another of the pieces of legislation deployed under the coalition Government was the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, section 14 of which extends the timetable of a general election from 17 to 25 working days. That neatly carves out bank holidays, weekends, high days and holidays, and anything else that might get in the way, when in fact all of us sitting here know that once the starting gun is fired, everybody—just everybody—is working their socks off in electoral offices up and down the country to make sure that we deliver the election on time. The provision is just not truthful, and it needs to be a better reflection of what goes on.
Chris Bryant
I think, therefore, that if the Bill goes through as the Government intend and we do not have the right hon. Member’s new clause or any other amendment, the last date that the next general election can be held is 23 January 2025. Is that her understanding?
Mrs Miller
Oh, the hon. Gentleman is getting me into the maths quiz with which he tried to tempt the Minister. I will leave the Government to decide that, because it is more in the Minister’s bailiwick than mine.
Alec Shelbrooke
Is not the essence of what my right hon. Friend is saying that it is exceptionally difficult to get elected to Parliament—we have all been through it—and it costs a lot of money? We tend to forget that candidates who have not been elected to this place more often than not give up work. Coming back to the point I made to my hon. Friend the Minister earlier, is there not a body of work to be done on the period between our Prime Minister calling an election and the short campaign starting? We must try to make it fair for those standing for Parliament for the first time, which can have an enormous financial cost.
Mrs Miller
My right hon. Friend makes a really important point. New clause 1 deals with the particular issue of the election campaign itself, but there is also the additional period of time that we colloquially call the wash-up, which can last for days or weeks, and it feels like months sometimes. Such a body of work could look at not only what is prescribed in legislation, but more broadly. I will go on to some of the issues I think we face by having overly long campaigns, of which I do not think there has been sufficient scrutiny.
However, before I do that let me say—and I am struggling to remember when you were elected, Mr Deputy Speaker—that I was elected in May 2005, as I am sure you remember, and when that general election was held the total length of the campaign was 23 days. It felt a lot longer for some of the reasons pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke). At the last general election it was a total of 36 days, and indeed in 2015 it was 37 days, so almost two weeks longer than when I was elected. My right hon. Friend talked about some of the issues facing new candidates, who have perhaps had to give up their work and are not being paid. It is not without an impact, yet so little work has been done to consider what the impact is.
Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
I was a new candidate at the last election, and I can absolutely attest that it was a wearying experience, as it is for the electorate. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that that piece of work also needs to study the effect on the likelihood of people to turn out to vote? I think Brenda from Bristol spoke for us all when she said, “Oh no, not another one”.
Mrs Miller
Of course, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. He has a wealth of knowledge on these issues, as I know from having served on a Bill Committee with him.
We are talking not only about the impact on people standing for election. By lengthening our campaigns by almost two weeks, a number of other issues start to come into play. There is two weeks less scrutiny of Government by this place, which is not an inconsiderable issue that we should look at, yet it is not part of a scheme of work to consider all of these different issues. There is the fact that purdah gets longer not just at national level, but at local level, so fewer decisions are being made by local government for longer, and in stifling decision making that also has an effect that is not being captured. There are not inconsiderable impacts on our economy with the potential risk to our economy, depending on the economic circumstances we face at the particular time. Indeed, there is the risk of an outside actor interfering in our democratic process. The length of elections matters to returning officers—that is for sure—but there are many other issues that we should be considering that it is not clear are being brought into play at the moment.
Aaron Bell
My right hon. Friend has given an excellent list of some of the reasons why a long campaign is not desirable, but the simple fact is that voters are without their MPs. If, for example, Operation Pitting had taken place during an election campaign, Members across the House who have been deluged by casework would not have been able to take up that casework in the midst of an election campaign. The longer the campaign, the more likely it is that something will occur during that campaign.
Mrs Miller
My hon. Friend has put his finger on something that is probably more inequitable than he has realised, because constituents who have a re-standing Member of Parliament can deal with casework, but those where such an individual is not standing again do not have that access to casework. He raises an incredibly important point that needs to be taken into account.
There is emerging academic research in the US and Sweden that recommends shortening the length of campaigns for some of the reasons that have been made in interventions about increasing voter turnout, yet the Cabinet Office, in the excellent work it does with its democratic engagement plan, is silent on this issue. I was really pleased to hear the comments made by the Minister from the Front Bench today. Indeed, I thank her enormously for the way she has engaged on this and for the meetings she has had with colleagues. It is clear that she is not silent on the issue—she has views and thoughts—but there is no formal assessment of the link between the length of an election, voter engagement and all the risks I have talked about to our broader democracy.
New clause 1 is very much a probing amendment, but it needs a very clear response from the Minister today. She is quite rightly concerned about things such as engaging overseas voters in participating in the electoral process in a much more comprehensive way through other pieces of legislation that she is bringing before this place, and that is laudable and an important objective. However, the issue there is not the length of campaigns, but the awareness of the need to register annually. In some ways, the length of campaigns is sometimes being used as a solution for what is not necessarily the problem we face.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
Does this point not really get to the heart of the matter of the performance, whether of local government or of other bodies, in always being prepared for an election? Many have elections in thirds, and they may have mayoral or police and crime commissioner elections. Local authorities ought to be prepared and to make sure that their ability to hold an election is always up to date?
Mrs Miller
That is a very important point. If one of the pillars of our democracy is elections, we should be prepared to have an election within a specified period at any point in the year. It should be mission critical, and I am surprised by some of the comments that have been made showing that that is not the case. Gone are the days when we ran out of salt because there was too much frost on the road. Hampshire County Council makes sure that we have a very large stock of salt to avert such a crisis. We should make sure that some other issues that have been a problem are dealt with as well.
I am very grateful to the Minister again for listening to these concerns so intently. Rather than my pushing new clause 1 to a vote, I hope she might indicate in her comments that the Government will be commissioning research about the impact of the length of general elections on our democracy—not just on voter participation, but on the broader democracy—so that we in this place can keep a close eye on how longer campaigns affect the quality of the democracy in our country. Perhaps this will form a foundation stone for the modernisation of UK elections more broadly—a thorny issue, I know—and perhaps she will report on the findings of that research as we start to discuss further legislation, including the Elections Bill in this place.
Craig Whittaker
That is the nub of these issues. Instead of extending elections because of their complexity, surely we should be considering alternative ways to allow people to vote differently to the way they currently vote.
Mrs Miller
My hon. Friend makes points that I am sure those listening to that debate will be pondering. In a day and age when electronic mail, not postal mail, is the norm, they will be asking what the Government are doing to ensure that our electoral system is modernised. I applaud the Government for all they are doing on voter identification. It is such an important thing but it has been sadly lacking. This is a reforming Government in that area, and I am sure my hon. Friend the Minister will do all she can to continue that reforming zeal in her work.
Let me pull together two other points that are allied to what we have been discussing. I think a great deal will be needed in returning to the status quo ante. The vast majority of Members do not remember the status quo ante—some of us do, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) and perhaps one or two others such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell, but there are not many of us left. Ensuring that the House and Members understand those conventions that are not formalised in law will be something of a challenge. I am sure the Minister is up to that challenge, but it is something we need to address. She has rightly made a number of comments on this issue—she has written a letter to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and there are pieces of correspondence and an opportunity for debate—but as we move forward we need a settled view of the conventions.
Finally, on the wash-up, the day that a Prime Minister announces a general election is not the start of the general election campaign, and hon. Members need to take a much closer look, perhaps through colleagues who sit on the relevant Committees, as to how we can get better control over what is considered in that wash-up session. There are often a few deals regarding what legislation will pass through Parliament before the election campaign, and perhaps that would be better done after the election, rather than before. We should be considering such matters, with a focus on shortening the election campaign to something that is not just best for one set of people, but best for our democracy.
Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
I will hopefully delight the Committee by trying to speed things up a little, and I will not detain Members for long.
I agree with the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) that the Bill smacks of a Government who are still smarting from the events of 2019. I suggest that perhaps anger and revenge are no way to govern, and hopefully the House will help the Government to look beyond their bruised pride and get to a situation far beyond this Bill. Although in and of itself clause 1 may look fairly innocuous, and when taken in isolation might even be seen as trivial and almost unimportant, I caution the Committee that when viewed alongside other legislation currently going through this place—the Elections Bill, for example, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill—we are witnessing a strategy on the part of the Government to centralise power and control with the Executive at the expense of this House. Some clauses in Bill, including clause 1, give more power to the Executive, strip parliamentarians of their powers, and deny the judiciary the ability to scrutinise what they are doing, while at the same time eroding the public’s right to protest against it. As has been said, this is an unashamed power grab by the Executive at the expense of this House, and we believe that that is how it will be seen in the context of that wider picture.
However intensely hon. Members may dislike the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, simply voting for the Bill this evening will not automatically return us to our position prior to 2011 when that Act was introduced. The Scottish National party has said it will oppose the Bill all the way through, and we will oppose it again tonight. New clause 2, and the idea that a general election could be called to dissolve Parliament and that that motion must be agreed by this House, is correct. It appears to me that if the Bill passes without new clause 2, the Prime Minister of the day will have full and unfettered control over the Dissolution of Parliament and the timing of any general election.
Patrick Grady
I wanted to make this point to the Minister. Not only will the Prime Minister have full power, but some of the clauses and consequential amendments in the Bill will have a profound effect on other aspects of the constitution. It specifically amends the Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 as a consequential amendment. That Act states that a referendum in Scotland cannot be held on the same date as a UK general election, but it is not the referendum that takes precedence; it is the UK general election. So if the Scottish Government set a date for a referendum, say in May 2023, under this Bill, it would be entirely within the Prime Minister’s power to set that date for a UK general election and consequently shift the date of the referendum in Scotland. We are handing a gross power to the UK Government as a consequence of the Bill.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Nigel Evans)
Was that the hon. Gentleman’s speech? Shall I cross him off the list?
Brendan O'Hara
I do not believe it was my hon. Friend’s speech, Mr Evans, but if it was, it was a perfectly good one and I thank him for it. The points he makes are absolutely valid.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
I guess that, like me, my hon. Friend finds it a bit perplexing, when sitting in this debate and looking at Conservative Members, who advocated for Brexit in their constituencies and for Parliament to take back control, that they will walk through the Lobby tonight to neuter Parliament. Do he and his constituents who voted against Brexit see the irony in what the Brexiteers will do tonight?
Brendan O'Hara
I am sure I am not the only person in this House who can see the irony of how taking back control supposedly has led us to a position where Parliament is being neutered by the Executive, and the people who were most loudly proclaiming “Take back control” are the people holding the scissors and doing the neutering—if that is not too much of an image, Mr Evans.
If the Bill passes, as well as there being no parliamentary or legal scrutiny, an active debate will still rage about whether the monarch’s prerogative powers would return to exactly as they were in 2011. I notice that, in her letter to the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Minister acknowledged that
“there remains a role for the sovereign in exceptional circumstances to refuse a Dissolution request.”
But the monarch’s prerogative powers are now being enshrined in statute, having been removed by statute; they are now being restored by statute. So what exactly are the exceptional circumstances in which the monarch can refuse a Dissolution request? How can the Lascelles principles, which we heard earlier were prerogative powers, now be statutory powers? I cannot see how this returns us to the position we were in in 2011.
Therefore, we have been and will continue to be extremely uneasy about the insertion of the ouster clause making the Government’s action in relation to the dissolution of Parliament non-justiciable. As I said, we share the concerns of many Members across the Chamber that the repeal of the Fixed-terms Parliaments Act would not automatically take us back to the position of 2012 and we need a lot more clarity about exactly what legal position we would be in.
The Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee pointed out in a letter to the Minister:
“The Fixed-terms Parliaments Act was passed and the consequences of this cannot simply be wished away.”
I note that, in her response to the Committee Chair, the Minister accepts that there is an academic debate about the issue, but she seems to believe the opinion of her academics that the courts
“will be required to act as if the Fixed-term Parliaments Act had never been enacted”
and that they will be
“required to pretend that it never happened.”
It is a ridiculous situation and an extremely unsatisfactory position in which we find ourselves. For years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) said, we have heard this Government talk about taking back control and the importance of parliamentary sovereignty. This is an early test of how this Parliament takes back that control, and the Executive are legislating to prevent it from happening. If the Bill is passed as it stands, Parliament and the judiciary, and arguably the monarch’s traditional role, will no longer be in play, and the decision to dissolve this place and call a general election will be entirely in the hands of the Prime Minister, who may call one when it is politically expedient so to do. That is not how a modern liberal democracy should function, and that is why we will not be supporting the Bill.
Back in January, both Lord Sumption and Baroness Hale were unequivocal in their evidence that the minimum safeguard required in the event of an ouster clause being put in place was the inclusion in the Bill of a time limit on the moving of writs for parliamentary elections. However, as it stands, there is no such provision in the Bill; six months on, the Government have not produced anything of the sort, and the original clause remains. In effect, that allows the Government to decide the length of a period of Prorogation, the gap between the Dissolution of Parliament and an election, and indeed the gap between an election and the first sitting of a Parliament. That is deeply worrying. The Government had an opportunity to take the advice of many learned people and improve the Bill. They refused to take that advice, and I fear that it is sinister and troubling that they did not.
Sir Geoffrey Cox
It is a great pleasure to follow so erudite and intelligible a speech from the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara).
I have an experience that is very rare in my political career—a sense of complete vindication. I voted against the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in 2011, when it was brought in, and I seem to recall saying then what I hear the Minister saying from the Front Bench now: that it would not work and that it was an abominable intrusion and distortion of our constitution. I see this Bill as a welcome correction that brings our constitution back to the fundamental principle, which has existed for many years, that, with the important exception that the monarch has the right to speak his or her mind at the time the Prime Minister requests a Dissolution, and in the last resort even perhaps to decline it—although it would not be known for many years that he or she had—it should be the case that the Prime Minister can advise Her Majesty to dissolve the House. We are at last returning to sanity and, with the pardon of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), to normality when it comes to the constitution.
However, I say to the Committee and the Minister that there is an issue that troubles me. It seems to me that, when we presented our manifesto to the country in 2019, we did not only promise that we would restore the balance of our constitution by repealing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. We presented the country then with a constitutional programme, or at least the willingness to look fundamentally at our constitution and to consider deeply whether we should restore to a more Conservative and a more traditional basis other aspects of our constitution, too.
In welcoming this Bill, therefore, I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that I hope that it is not the last measure that we will introduce in the portfolio that she occupies. At the moment, I look at our offering and I see this Bill, which I fully support, I see the Elections Bill, which I also support, and I see the Judicial Review and Courts Bill. I hope we are not going to be quite so timid as to present that as our sole offering to the country. In 1997, the Labour party was elected. One thing one can say about that Government is that they came in with a coherent, radical plan for the constitution, and they then enacted it with complete ruthlessness, and with complete disregard for Opposition voices. I was in the House some years later, and I recall vividly how the Labour party steamrollered its constitutional changes, including the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, through this House with very little by way of consideration and regard for alternative voices.
We now have a majority comparable to that, and I hope that we will not squander that opportunity. There are important things that we should now be doing. I have some sympathy with the plea this afternoon by the hon. Member for Rhondda that we should be considering Prorogation. So we should. We should be considering whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller No. 2 should stand. We should be considering whether other decisions of the Supreme Court should be allowed to stand. There comes to mind, for example, the Adams case, in which Mr Gerry Adams was effectively acquitted of his convictions in 1975 because the Supreme Court held that the Carltona principle in effect did not apply to the decision then taken. That, in my view, is a matter that this House ought to be reviewing.
I say to right hon. and hon. Members and to my friends on the Government Benches that we must not regard the constitution as an area that is too complicated for us to go into. We must not accept the liberal consensus, as it is no doubt called, upon which the new Labour Government in ’97 traded. We must not accept that these things are permanent features of our constitution. They were not introduced with our consent, and we have every right, with the mandate from the people that we now have, to reconsider them.
I say to the Minister that I applaud this Bill, and I applaud her particularly. I was impressed, if I may say so, throughout the course of her presentation by how deeply competent and how completely on top of her brief she was. Thank heavens for such a Minister.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. Sir Geoffrey, I have given a bit of latitude, but do you intend to speak to the clauses, new clauses or amendments?
Sir Geoffrey Cox
It is stand part that I am addressing, Mr Evans.
This Bill should warmly commend itself to those on both sides of the Committee. My only caution—my only plea—is: let this not be the last word we say upon the British constitution.
Chris Bryant
It is a delight to follow that Third Reading speech.
I have enjoyed today, not least because it is such a delight to be vindicated. I feel as if I have been saying the same things for 20 years. Some of what the Minister said today, if we put the word “not” in, was what she said 10 years ago, which is kind of entertaining but rather irritating.
I am not going to speak at length, but we have to go back to fundamental principles when we are talking about the constitution. I like Parliament sitting. It is good for Governments to face the scrutiny of the Commons elected. Long interruptions are a bad thing. We take a long time to get a Parliament going after a general election, and now, with a long general election, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) referred to, it can be several months that parliamentary scrutiny is effectively out of action, before Select Committees are fully set up and all the rest of it.
The Executive and the Parliament need to be in balance with one other. There is a real danger that we are moving in the direction of what I call an over-mighty Executive. The Leader of the House in particular has what I call a high theological understanding of government—the Government are always right, by definition. In our system, the Government have considerable power. That is why some have called it an elected dictatorship.
The constitution should always stand the test of time and the test of bad actors. We always presume we will have a good monarch. We have had bad monarchs in the past. We presume we will always have an honourable and good Prime Minister. We might have a bad Prime Minister, who might choose to—[Interruption.] I am being ironic here. We might have a Prime Minister who deliberately chose to subvert the constitution and use it to subvert democracy.
Aaron Bell
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)—the right hon. Member, I should say.
Aaron Bell
Not yet. I am sure it will come in time.
I will not repeat my Second Reading speech—this is the Committee stage—but I still welcome the Bill for all the reasons I gave on that day. I welcome the Government’s continued engagement with all of us who have an interest in it, in particular members of the Joint Committee on which I served with the hon. Member for Rhondda and many other Members, with whom I made friends and now sign amendments with. Perhaps the Whips will regret putting me on that Committee in the fullness of time.
I will turn to new clause 1, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), in a little while, but first I want to discuss the overall principles relating to Dissolution. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) said on Second Reading that the right place for a proper discussion of the principles was in Committee, so I think it is probably right, with your indulgence, Ms Winterton, that we have a little discussion about them. Perhaps the Minister can reflect on them in her closing remarks, too.
We heard about Tommy Lascelles and his principles from 1950. Younger viewers will remember him from “The Crown”, played by Pip Torrens, as the private secretary to Her Majesty, but at the time he was the private secretary to His Majesty. He was talking about the principles in another closely contested election period—1950 and 1951. Those principles are relevant today, but the second one about the national economy was widely considered to have fallen into abeyance. There are other principles that we should perhaps consider. It was the opinion of the Joint Committee that the Dissolution principles document issued by the Government did not go quite far enough and did not cover other aspects of Dissolution—the calling of the new Parliament and so on. I therefore ask the Minister to comment a little on the 20 principles in our report: on the overall paramount confidence in our system, what it means to lose the confidence of the House and how to determine that, and what the Prime Minister ought to be doing in certain circumstances, whether to offer the resignation of the Government or to request a Dissolution from the monarch, and when it would be more appropriate for the Prime Minister to resign. We said that it would be more appropriate if there had recently been a general election, if there was a new Prime Minister from that Member’s party, or if it appeared that another person might command the confidence of the House—that was, of course, the third of Lascelles’s principles. The work of the Committee in putting together a more complete list of principles around confidence ought to be reflected in the debate and I ask the Minister to reflect on that in her closing remarks.
Turning briefly to new clause 1, since I am a signatory to it with my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, I am grateful for the comments the Minister made from the Dispatch Box. I am also grateful for her engagement with those of us who signed new clause 1. I welcome the additional research we ought to see. As I said in my intervention on her earlier, the purpose of an election is not simply to have the most perfectly admirable election in the world, but to resolve things. The longer we take, the more people we can register and persuade to vote, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Chris Clarkson) said, eventually they might get bored and not vote. The point of an election is to resolve things. We want to make sure people vote—once and once only, as I said in my speech on the Elections Bill the other day—but the key purpose of an election is to let the country move on from a moment of tension, contest and electoral joust between opposing candidates in our constituencies. I do not think it serves anybody for that to go on a day longer than is truly necessary. That is why I was happy to put my name to new clause 1.
I listened to the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators. I understand that there are complications with going back to the status quo ante of 17 days as things stand, but I reflect on what my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) said. Rather than saying it cannot be done with the rules as they are, we should look at which rules we could change to get back to the status quo ante. The Bill takes us back to the status quo ante in so many ways and I welcome that, but the real key is to get everything back to how it was before. I remember, as a teenager, watching elections that were short, sharp and got the job done. It did not work for us in 1997 when I was a teenager, but it got the job done and let the country move on. That is what we should have with our elections. They should not be dragged out for months. For the reasons I have given and for the candidates too, we should look at ways to make them shorter, notwithstanding the arguments that have been made by the administrators.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)
Diolch yn fawr, Dame Rosie; it is a pleasure to contribute to this debate, to serve under your chairmanship and to speak to my amendments 4 and 5. I welcome the provisions in the Bill that put certain safeguards in place to protect against a clash between ordinary Westminster and Senedd elections. My amendments go one step further and would remove regulations from the Government of Wales Act 2006 that allow the Secretary of State to combine a UK general election with an extraordinary general election to the Senedd. Although these are probing amendments, I would like to set out why the possibility of even an extraordinary election to the Senedd taking place at the same time as a Westminster election is a cause for concern.
The introduction of the Elections Bill has put Wales and Westminster on a rapidly diverging path when it comes to empowering and engaging citizens in the democratic process. In Wales, 16 and 17-year-olds are allowed to vote in Senedd and local elections, rightly having a say over critical issues that affect their future. In Wales, any legal citizen, no matter their nationality, can vote in Senedd and local elections. It is telling that as Wales and, of course, Scotland extend their franchise, this place seeks to do the exact opposite. In Westminster elections, the introduction of mandatory ID cards risks placing an additional barrier between voters and democratic engagement, especially for younger people and minority groups.
This all comes at a time when the Conservative Government here are intent on slashing the number of Welsh MPs from 40 to 32. Not only is this part of a relentless anti-devolution power grab from our Senedd, but it will cause practical confusion, as many will find themselves living in different boundaries for the Senedd and Westminster. In addition, if both elections were held at the same time, headlines would inevitably be dominated by the Westminster election, prejudicing the national debate in Wales. Despite the fact that we will celebrate a quarter of a century of devolved Welsh governance in a few years’ time, there continues to be a lack of understanding about which tier of government is responsible for which policy area. Simultaneous elections would therefore only increase confusion, a phenomenon probably encouraged by some political parties.
I gladly admit that there has yet to be an extraordinary Senedd election to date, but it is not completely out of the realms of possibility. Indeed, further reforms to the Senedd may make this outcome more likely. For example, the expert panel report on Assembly electoral reform, chaired by the formidable Professor Laura McAllister, made a strong case for the introduction of the single transferable vote system—a system that could vastly improve how connected voters feel to the democratic process but which would make coalition Government in Wales inevitable. Although I believe such cross-party governance to be a good thing, it could increase the likelihood of an extraordinary election.
Patrick Grady
The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point in his speech and with his amendment. It is not entirely clear from the answer that he got from the Minister why the Government would not simply accept the proposal, for the same reason that I cited in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara)—the potential of a UK general election being used to manipulate the date of a referendum, the date of a Scottish election or the date of a Welsh election. Once again, it is the power grab that the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) spoke of.
Jonathan Edwards
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention and his point about the pre-eminence that Westminster would have over these major democratic events in Wales and Scotland.
Although these scenarios are currently hypothetical, we cannot but be vigilant when living in an age where the British Government had no shame, only a few years ago, in unlawfully proroguing this House to avoid scrutiny and parliamentary debate on the biggest political decision that the UK has faced in generations. I would appreciate it if the Minister, in closing, could shed some light on why the Secretary of State needs to retain the powers to combine extraordinary general elections to the Senedd on the same day as UK parliamentary general elections when provisions in section 5 of the Government of Wales Act allow the Senedd to dissolve itself and the Presiding Officer to propose a day to hold an election.
Before I bring my comments to a close, I would like to speak in support of other amendments and particularly new clauses 2 to 4, which would empower the legislature over the Executive and give a semblance of balance to a Bill that is inherently about enabling the Executive to dominate this House. A healthy democracy requires checks and balances between the Government and Parliament. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, which the Bill would repeal, was good for democracy as it strengthened the hand of this House in the governance of the UK.
The excuse for this Bill is the events of the 2017 to 2019 Parliament. Although I acknowledge that the current Prime Minister and his team skilfully used the deep deliberations of that time to present a Parliament in paralysis, I firmly believe that future historians will look very kindly on the role of this House during that period. Members of a legislature should never offer unequivocal support for the actions of an Executive. Our job is to scrutinise and challenge. During the period in question, this House was dealing with a hugely complex issue and carefully, through detailed deliberation, working its way through the various options. The tragedy of the events of the last Parliament is that the Opposition fell into the trap set by the Government by agreeing to the early election.
What we saw towards the end of the last Parliament was a Government willing to thrash parliamentary democracy to achieve their political goals. The amendments put forward by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) seek to insure us against such similar acts in future. If he chooses to divide the Committee on his amendments, he will have my support.
Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)
I wish to speak against new clause 2, Dame Rosie, and it is a pleasure to be called to speak after having served on the Joint Committee that examined the Bill. At its heart, the Bill resumes a position in our democracy that has served us well, restoring the process for dissolving Parliament to the situation that existed before 2011. I am therefore pleased to support the Government this evening as they seek to deliver on their manifesto pledge.
The measures that the Bill delivers will ensure that the Government must always have the confidence of the House of Commons while restoring the trust between the electorate, Government and the Commons. Political events of recent years have made it clear to all of us why this confidence and trust is so important. With the unprecedented events of Brexit and now covid-19, it has become increasingly clear that we must have flexibility on the timing of elections with the restoration of prerogative power to call elections as a result of crisis and change.
To my mind, the Government have clearly set out the legal argument for the source of power to dissolve Parliament. Professor Mark Elliott of the University of Cambridge observed in his evidence to the Joint Committee that clause 2 requires the courts to act as if the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act had never been enacted. I have spoken to many hon. Friends who served in the 2017 Parliament and they were incredibly frustrated with the dither and delay that covered this House in little glory in the run-up to the 2019 election.
During its 10-year existence, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 caused damage to our parliamentary democracy, undermining the confidence of the electorate, and brought about persistent parliamentary paralysis. Fundamentally, the Bill is a return to the tried-and-tested method that has defined our parliamentary democracy for centuries—one that our constituents will be able to trust. It was a pleasure to serve on the Joint Committee on this important Bill and I look forward to its passage through this place tonight.
Chris Green
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson), who captured many of the points so clearly and effectively. I welcome the Bill and fully intend to support it and the reversal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. That Act was designed to deal with the short-term problem of a coalition, which is a relatively frequent occurrence in our democracy but is certainly not something that we would wish to have generally, because it causes a great many problems, with accountability being one of the most significant concerns. Following a coalition Government, there is always a question about blame and who is responsible for what actions. One side claims all the good things and blames all the bad on the other. We do not want legislation that reflects those problematic times and deals with that situation as a permanent feature. People across the country understand our political system and actually quite value the way we do politics, including first-past-the-post and having a majority Government, as we have recognised over many years.
Elections are wonderful occasions for a whole range of reasons. They are a festival of democracy and, in many ways, are uplifting, although I recognise the negativity of long election campaigns. My right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) made a very good point by referring to election fatigue. I am therefore very sympathetic to new clause 1. Even though I and many others quite enjoy elections and the campaign trail, we have to reflect on the concern that my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) highlighted so well about the exclusionary qualities of a long election campaign: it is very difficult for many people to engage in it if they are not already in Parliament or do not have wider financial support to be an active candidate throughout. I hope that the Minister will reflect on the new clause even if it is not pressed to a vote at this stage.
Patrick Grady
The hon. Member says that there is election fatigue and that people are worried about when election campaigns begin, but surely the effect of the Bill will be that the next election campaign will start now because nobody except the Prime Minister will know the date of the next election.
Chris Green
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but I fundamentally disagree. In countries with fixed-term Parliaments, such as the United States of America, they legislate for two years and then campaign for two years, whereas if we do not know the time of the next general election, we do not know when we will start campaigning. Often, even Prime Ministers of the day do not know when the elections will be, because they are not fixed in time, so it is difficult for the Government to start campaigning. Actually, I think the Bill will reduce the campaign period.
There is a strong sense that once electors have made their decision, they have given their judgment not only on the political parties but, more importantly, on the candidates themselves. In constituencies, we are elected as individuals and then we form a Government among ourselves. It is not necessarily the largest party that will form a Government, because we might be in a coalition situation and other parties might seek that. With a fixed term, however, a party that is in the majority at the beginning of a Parliament may find, whether because of death, defection or fragmentation, that it is no longer able to function. Arguably, we have seen that recently.
I oppose new clause 2 because for Parliament to make the decision to permit an election would, in a sense, enable the House of Commons to hold the Government of the day to ransom. We saw that recently when the Government ought to have fallen and we ought to have had a general election. The British people ought to have been in a position to make a decision not only about the fundamental issue of Brexit but, more broadly, about how individuals here had represented the interests and concerns of their constituents, and then to return us to enact whatever manifesto we had come up with.
The idea that we could be in a position where the Opposition and perhaps fragments of the governing party could say, “No, we will just carry on as long as we see fit” would bring Parliament more and more into disrepute. We have to have the Prime Minister making these decisions. Fundamentally, who would fear facing the verdict of the people? It would be those who were doing a bad job, whether they were in opposition or in the Government of the day. I believe that the Prime Minister ought to make that decision within the five-year period.
Patrick Grady
I apologise, Dame Rosie, that I have been bobbing up and down this afternoon wanting to speak and not wanting to speak, but I think that some of our discussion on the new clauses needs to be teased out a little more. First, I would like to hear from the Minister in response to the point on which I tried to intervene on her, which was about the consequential effects, particularly with regard to referendums. The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) made a similar point about the ability of the UK Parliament essentially to take primacy over decisions already made by the devolved assemblies about the dates of elections and particularly of referendums.
Why could not the Bill have been structured in such a way that it simply stopped the Prime Minister from choosing a date on which a poll or plebiscite of some kind was already scheduled? Forcing polls or plebiscites in the devolved areas to be rescheduled instead entirely diminishes or takes away the idea that we are in some kind of union of equals and fundamentally reasserts the primacy of this place above all else. If that does not make the argument for the outcome of the referendum that I will be campaigning for, I do not know what does.
The point about setting the date of the election, which also relates to new clause 2, is particularly important. The effect will be not only that the Prime Minister alone will know the date of the next election, but that he will know all the consequent dates that fit alongside it, particularly the regulated periods, the short campaign and the long campaign. It will therefore affect the ability of parties and individual candidates—as the hon. Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) said, we are all individual candidates for election—to spend money and to decide when and how to do so.
That point relates to the Elections Bill, which is about to be considered in Committee, and speaks to the piecemeal approach that this Government are very slyly taking to what is actually a very serious package of constitutional reforms that undermine democratic protections and positions that people have enjoyed across these islands for some considerable time.
That was a bit too long for an intervention, Dame Rosie, so I have taken advantage of the fact that the Committee still had a bit of time to run. As the Minister was not willing to take my intervention, I hope that in her summing up she will be able to reply to some of my points.
Chloe Smith
As I was advised by the Chairman of Ways and Means at the time, I endeavoured to respond to all amendments at the beginning of the debate, so I have given what I hope was the bulk of my remarks. It remains for me to thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions, which have been comprehensive and thoughtful.
I assure my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) that I will look at commissioning research. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) that, as set out in the response to the Joint Committee’s report, there is ongoing dialogue to be had on conventions. I suggest to the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) that we might meet if he would like to go further over the detail that he requested; I will even extend that invitation to the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady). I assure them both that I am already discussing these matters with colleagues in the devolved Administrations.
I urge the Committee to agree that the clauses should stand part of the Bill and that the amendments are not necessary. I commend the Bill to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 2
Revival of prerogative powers to dissolve Parliament and to call a new Parliament
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Chloe Smith
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
I thank hon. and right hon. Members on both sides of the House for their careful scrutiny of the Bill throughout its passage, and I thank you and your colleagues for your chairmanship, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I am also grateful to all those who contributed in Committee and on Second Reading, and I particularly thank those who served on the Joint Committee on the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, whose expert scrutiny has informed our approach and improved the Bill.
We have been fortunate to have had an enriching debate today, including on the conventions that underpin the Dissolution of one Parliament and the calling of another. As I mentioned earlier, that dialogue will continue through the remaining stages of the Bill as it passes out of the elected House and goes into the other place. During its passage, the Government have at all times listened with care to the concerns raised and the thoughts posed, and I reassure the House that this is a focused, careful Bill that will return us to the long-standing constitutional arrangements that have served successive Governments and Parliaments and have ensured effective, responsive, accountable politics in which the voters are supreme. All the flexibility encapsulated in that is essential to our parliamentary democracy. This Bill restores that constitutional balance, and I commend it to the House.
Cat Smith
This Bill would have benefited from being amended in Committee. Although it is right and proper that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is repealed, as it was so clearly flawed, reverting to the status quo hands power to the Executive. Indeed, it is a power grab by a Tory party that believes there is one rule for it and another rule for everybody else.
This Bill should not be the Government’s priority during a global pandemic. While our doctors and nurses are having to wear bin bags, the Government are coming up with legislation to play to their own electoral advantage. However, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was clearly a flawed piece of legislation and the 2019 Labour manifesto committed to repealing it. Although the Bill could have been improved in Committee, and it is regrettable that it was not, we will be abstaining on Third Reading.
Mrs Miller
I bid this Bill well as it passes to the other place. On behalf of other members of the Joint Committee, I particularly thank the Minister for her incredible hard work throughout the passage of the Bill, despite the other challenges she was facing at the time. I personally thank her for her words in response to new clause 1. I look forward to talking to her further about the research she has undertaken to do on the length of elections.
Brendan O’Hara
Madam Deputy Speaker, I thank you and your colleagues, the Clerks and all hon. and right hon. Members who have taken part in what has been a good-natured debate.
Having said that, this is still a thoroughly bad piece of legislation, and nothing I have heard tonight has changed my mind.
Conservative Members seem determined, on a regular basis, to turn the clock back, in this case to a system deemed undesirable and out of touch more than a decade ago. As we have heard, politicians and academics are still arguing about whether it is even possible to believe that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 had never been enacted. We are being asked to pretend that it never happened. At the risk of showing my age, let me say that it is as though this Government have been taking advice from the scriptwriters of “Dallas”, who asked the world to pretend that Bobby Ewing had never died and they could just go back and pick up the storyline as though nothing had happened previously and anything that had happened in the past would have absolutely no consequence now. While that academic debate rages on and we are heading back to the situation prior to 2011, there can be no doubt that this Bill is little more than a brazen attempt by the Executive to entrench more and more powers with themselves, at the expense of this Parliament. I repeat: as bad as that is in and of itself, when it is viewed alongside what else is going through this place, we see that we are witnessing a full-on attack on our democracy. For that reason, we will be opposing the Bill on Third Reading.
Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third Time.
Business without Debate
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Delegated Legislation
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
With the leave of the House, we shall take motions 2 and 3 together.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Energy Conservation
That the draft Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information (Lighting Products) Regulations 2021, which were laid before this House on 1 July, be approved.
That the draft Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information (Amendment) Regulations 2021, which were laid before this House on 5 July, be approved.—(David Duguid.)
Question agreed to.
Madam Deputy Speaker
With the leave of the House, we shall take motions 4, 5 and 6 together.
Delegated Legislation (Committees)
Delegated Legislation (Safeguarding (Code of Practice) Measure)
Ordered,
That the Measure passed by the General Synod of the Church of England, entitled Safeguarding (Code of Practice) Measure (HC 689), a copy of which was laid before this House on 9 September, be referred to a Delegated Legislation Committee.
Delegated Legislation (Financial Assistance)
Ordered,
That the Motion in the name of Paul Scully relating to Financial Assistance shall be treated as if it related to an instrument subject to the provisions of Standing Order No. 118 (Delegated Legislation Committees) in respect of which notice has been given that the instrument be approved.
Business of the House
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Covid-19 Vaccinations: 12 to 15-year-olds
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
We now come to the statement from the Secretary of State—sorry, he is not here. Instead, it is the Minister for Covid Vaccine Deployment. It is a privilege to have you here, Minister.
The Minister for Covid Vaccine Deployment (Nadhim Zahawi)
I am grateful, Mr Speaker. With your permission, I would like to make a statement on our vaccination programme against covid-19.
We know that vaccinations are our best defence against the virus. Our jabs have already prevented over 112,000 deaths, more than 143,000 hospitalisations and over 24 million infections. They have built a vast wall of defence for the British people.
Earlier this year, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approved the covid-19 vaccines supplied by Pfizer and Moderna for 12 to 17-year-olds. It confirmed that both vaccines are safe and effective for this age group. Following that decision, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended vaccination for all 16 and 17-year-olds and for 12 to 15-year-olds with serious underlying health conditions. It next looked at whether we should extend our offer of vaccination to all 12 to 15-year-olds, which would have brought us into line with what is already happening in countries such as France, Spain, Italy, Israel and the United States of America. It concluded that there are health benefits of vaccinating this cohort, although they are finely balanced.
It was never in the JCVI’s remit to consider the wider impacts of vaccinations, such as the benefits for children in education or the mental health benefits that come from people knowing that they are protected from this deadly virus. It therefore advised that the Government may wish to seek further views on those wider impacts from the United Kingdom’s chief medical officers. The Secretary of State, together with the Health Ministers from the devolved nations, accepted that advice. Our CMOs consulted with clinical experts and public health professionals from across the United Kingdom, such as the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. They have also benefited from having data from the United States of America, Canada and Israel, where vaccines have already been offered to children aged 12 to 15 years old.
Early this morning, we received advice from the chief medical officers, along with our counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We have made that advice publicly available and deposited it in the Library at 2 pm today. The unanimous recommendation of the United Kingdom’s chief medical officers is to make a universal offer of one dose of the Pfizer vaccine to the 12 to 15-year-old age group, with further JCVI guidance needed before any decision on a second dose. They have been clear that they are making this recommendation on the basis of the benefits to children alone, and not on the benefits to adults or wider society. I can confirm that the Government have accepted the recommendation. We will now move with the same sense of urgency that we have had at every point in our vaccination programme.
As the chief medical officers reminded us today, whatever decision teenagers and parents take, they must be supported and not stigmatised in any way. We must continue to respect individual choice. As a father, the decisions that I take on behalf of my own children give me extra pause for thought. People who would not think twice about getting the jab for themselves will naturally have more questions when it comes to vaccinating their children. I completely understand that, but to those who remain undecided I want to say this: the MHRA is the best medical regulator in the world, and it has rigorously reviewed the safety of our vaccines and concluded that they are safe for 12 to 15-year-olds. We continue to have a comprehensive safety surveillance strategy in place across all age groups to monitor the safety of all the covid-19 vaccines that are approved for use in the United Kingdom.
It is important to remember that our teenagers have shown great public spirit at every point during this pandemic. They have stuck to the rules so that lives could be saved and people kept safe, and they have been some of the most enthusiastic proponents of vaccines. That is at least in part because they have experienced the damage that comes with outbreaks of covid-19. More than half of 16 and 17-year-olds across the United Kingdom have had the jab since becoming eligible just last month.
At every point in our vaccination programme, we have been guided by the best clinical advice. The advice that we have received from the four chief medical officers today sets out their view that 12 to 15-year-olds will benefit from vaccination against covid-19. We will follow that advice and continue on that vital path, which is making more and more people in this country safe. I commend this statement to the House.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to the Minister for advance sight of his statement. On behalf of the Opposition, I welcome the guidance today from the chief medical officers and the response of the Government tonight.
Children may not have been the face of this crisis but they have been among its biggest victims. Children have lost months in in-person learning, and have spent weeks cut off from friends and family. We still do not fully understand the long-term mental health implications of this, especially in poorer areas where deprivation already has widespread consequences for the health and wellbeing of our children. Being in school is not just about learning; children often access health services through school as well. I therefore particularly welcome the CMOs’ recognition of the importance of avoiding the disruption of being out of school in making this decision. We are also pleased that the Government have now made the decision, given that other nations have been vaccinating children for some months.
But many of our constituents will rightly have questions. Will the Minister explain to the House what the next stage in the children’s vaccination programme will look like? By what date does he anticipate that children will be vaccinated? On the roll-out, he will know that, for TB, HPV and children’s flu vaccinations in primary schools, it is often school nurses, health visitors and specialist vaccination teams who go to schools directly and vaccinate. Will that model be used in this case, or will children instead be asked to go to the vaccine hubs run by primary care because it is the Pfizer vaccine? Will it be the responsibility of the parents to arrange their child’s vaccination, or will the local NHS arrange it with schools, year group by year group, or class by class? Will the flu vaccine that is to be expanded to secondary school children this year be delivered at the same time as the covid vaccine, or at a separate time?
The Minister rightly said that vaccinating children is a benefit to those children but will also reduce transmission, and in that respect it is a benefit to wider society, but children and young people, and society itself, will in turn benefit if we drive up vaccination rates among adults. In the most deprived areas, fewer than 70% of the adult population are vaccinated; in the least deprived areas it is more than 90%. Among 25 to 30-year-olds, 55% are on their second dose; among 30 to 35-year-olds, 68% are on their second dose; and among 35 to 39-year-olds, 75% are on their second dose. What will he do to drive up vaccination rates among adults, because that is key to pushing down overall infection rates?
Of course, parents will want information. In the past, the Minister has suggested that this vaccination will not go ahead without the consent of parents, but he will know that the Gillick competence principle suggests that a child under 16 can consent to their treatment if the child is believed to have the understanding and intelligence to appreciate what is involved. Can he confirm what the Government’s position is in rolling out this vaccination and whether the consent of parents is necessary? In the past, he has said that it is necessary, as has the Secretary of State for Education; the CMOs seemed to suggest something else today at the press briefing.
There is nothing more precious for a parent than their child. We therefore support the approach of the Government today and welcome the advice and the recommendations of the chief medical officers. However, I hope the Minister will understand that parents, in coming to this decision, will want all the information they can possibly get hold of, and I hope the Government provide it.
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support, for his points about guidance to the parents and of course to the children, and for his points about the long-term mental health consequences of this pandemic for school-age children.
I can confirm to the right hon. Gentleman that the NHS—it is incredibly efficient and well-equipped, because it has been running the school age vaccination programme for many, many years for other vaccines—will be the primary vaccination infrastructure that we will use to deliver this vaccine. If there are schools where that is unable to be delivered, we will use the rest of the covid vaccine infrastructure, including vaccination centres, to deliver that in a safe and appropriate way. My point is to reassure him and parents up and down the country that it will be the school age vaccination programme that has run in schools. Teachers and parents are well-versed in that process.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about vaccine uptake. He will recall that I said at this Dispatch Box on 13 February, in launching the vaccine uptake programme, that the NHS continued to put effort and resource into making vaccines available and easily accessible to the most deprived communities and to all ethnic groups. We will continue to redouble our efforts, including with the booster programme, which will come later this month. We have had the interim advice from the JCVI on boosting for flu and covid. The uptake of both should increase the uptake in those communities. We have spent a lot of time looking at that.
The right hon. Gentleman asked an important question about the consent process, and I want to spend a little time on that. As with all vaccinations for children, parental consent will be sought. The consent process will be handled by each school in its usual way and will provide sufficient time for parents to provide their consent. Children aged 12 to 15 will also be provided with information, usually in the form of a leaflet for their own use and to share and discuss with their parents prior to the date of immunisation and the scheduled time for it. Parental, guardian or carer consent will be sought by the school age immunisation providers prior to vaccination, in line with other school vaccination programmes.
In the rare event that a parent does not consent, but the teenager wants to have the vaccine, there is a process by which the school age vaccination clinicians discuss this with initially the parent and the child to see whether they can reach consensus. If not, and the child is deemed to be Gillick competent, the vaccine will take place. That is very rare, but on the whole this is something that the NHS is very well versed in delivering for other vaccination programmes.
Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey) (Con)
This is an incredibly sensitive decision but, in an open society, the Government have done exactly the right thing, which is to be open. The narrow health benefits to children are marginal, but the broader health and social benefits are considerable. Most importantly, this is one of the last pieces of the jigsaw if we are going to be able to say we have done everything possible to stop another winter lockdown. However, the final piece of that jigsaw, learning from Israel, is to have booster jabs. Could the Minister tell the House when we will have a decision on boosters? Could he also confirm that we will have no problems with supply after the Valneva decision today and with flu jabs, if we are going to have this big expansion of jabbing later in the autumn?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his important question. He is right to identify that this is a sensitive issue, which is why it was right for the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to take its time to look at the data from other countries on first doses and second doses and for the chief medical officers to then do the work unimpeded which they needed to do. It is right that we follow their advice tonight.
On the booster campaign, we have received the interim advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation—it was published on 30 June this year— on a potential booster programme, including flu and covid vaccine. I can reassure my right hon. Friend that the decision on Valneva will not impact our booster vaccination programme. We await the final advice. The JCVI has received the data from the COV-Boost study, where we looked at all the different vaccine brands—in some instances, full doses and half doses—as to which is the best vaccine to boost with.
I assure him that later this month we will begin a major booster programme. On flu—of course, the flu programme has already begun, and I assure him that we have the supplies for a major programme for both—we are looking at the really ambitious number of 35 million and, when we get the final advice from JCVI, the booster programme will be equally ambitious.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
I, too, welcome the decision to vaccinate 12 to 15-year-olds. Scotland’s NHS is also primed to deliver vaccinations as quickly as possible, but it is a pity that there was a delay and that the opportunity to vaccinate during the summer holidays was missed. In Scotland, where our schools went back before English schools, we have seen a huge surge, and we are seeing the same rise in Northern Ireland and Wales. That may happen here as well. I wonder how much of the delay was down to the remit given to the JCVI, which seemed to focus on hospitalisation and death—quite rare, thankfully, among children—rather than considering the wider impacts of education and socialisation loss or of long covid, which we are seeing in young people and children. Was the delay about the remit? Was the JCVI given a narrow remit? Or was it about whether Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would be sufficient to allow the group to have been vaccinated in the summer?
There are rumours that there will be a U-turn tonight on yesterday’s U-turn on vaccine passports. I would be grateful for the Minister clarifying that. Whether that is the case or not, this chaos undermines public health messaging, creates confusion among the public and creates rejection of whatever decision finally comes.
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Lady asked a number of questions that I will try to address in order. She asked about the JCVI’s remit, which was very much around what it is clinically qualified to address. That is why it advised that the CMOs needed to look at the wider impact on children specifically. There was no issue at all around shortage of vaccines, and I am confident that we have the vaccine supply that we need for both this recommendation, which we are accepting, and the booster campaign.
It was important that the JCVI took its time and looked at both first-dose and second-dose data on the rare signal around myocarditis and pericarditis. The United Kingdom has sometimes been an outlier to other nations, but on the whole we have got these decisions right because we rely on that expert clinical advice. I hope that gives reassurance to families up and down the country.
On vaccine passports, the Secretary of State for Health made it clear that we will not go ahead with vaccine certification for nightclubs or other venues. No one—certainly not on the Government side—would have moved forward with that happily. [Interruption.] If we are to have a grown-up debate, it is important for the whole House to remember that the virus is still with us and that we all want the same thing: to transition it from pandemic to endemic status so that we can have a sustainable return to normality as quickly as possible.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
I have given many vaccines in my time, including hundreds of covid vaccines more recently, but I am not comfortable with vaccinating teenagers to prevent educational disruption. Under the current rules, no child needs to isolate if they are a contact. They do so only if they are a positive case and, for them, the maximum is eight days of schooling—and that is only if they catch coronavirus during term time. Half of children have already had it and are very unlikely to get it again. Does the Minister therefore really believe that vaccinating 3 million children to prevent an average of four days or less off school is reasonable?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s important question, and I thank her for the work she has done and continues to do on the vaccination programme. All I would say to her is that I think it is important that the Government accept the final decision—the unanimous decision—of the four chief medical officers for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and offer the vaccine. Of course, parental consent will be sought, but it is only right that we offer the one-dose vaccine to 12 to 15-year-olds as per the advice received today.
Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank the Minister for the statement. I have highlighted many times in this Chamber the low take-up among some communities, specifically our black and minority ethnic communities. They are the same communities that will be hesitant about their children coming forward. They will be the same communities, if the vaccines have to be administered in school, that will make sure their children do not go to school that day. So I want to know what additional support and information—in different languages and reaching out to those communities—there will be to properly inform them so that they can make the decision about whether or not their children are vaccinated.
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s question. Actually, on her final sentence about proper information, I think it is important not to stigmatise any parent whatsoever. It is right that we supply the information, and there will be an extensive information programme that the school-age vaccination team will deliver and work on with schools. The Minister for School Standards, who is sitting on my left, and his team, whom I have to commend, have been engaged throughout today in making sure that that information does get through to parents to make that decision.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
Given the earlier decision of the JCVI, the low risk to children and the fact that children are not significant vectors of transmitting this awful disease, will my hon. Friend ensure that the chief medical officer makes it very clear to parents who may be concerned about vaccinating their children why this needs to happen and what difference it will make to their children? The Secretary of State for Education has said that parental consent would “always”—always—be asked before they receive the vaccine, and I just want the Minister to clear that up because understandably, and rightly in my view, parents will want to be able to consent. Finally, could I ask him how much this will cost financially?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful to the Chair of the Education Committee, who has rightly been incredibly engaged in the process and the debate around it. I confirm to him that parents will be asked for their consent, and information will be made available to enable them fully to understand the recommendation of the chief medical officers for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I will happily write to him about the cost of this part of the vaccination programme.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The Minister is right to say that the virus is still with us. This morning, there were 91 people hospitalised in my local hospital trust compared with 25 on 1 June, and vaccination for 16-year-olds and above—double vaccination—remains stubbornly stuck at 50% in my local authority area. Apart from this measure, what does the Minister have in mind to address these serious issues?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for the hon. Member’s question. He raises an important issue, and he has raised it with me in the MPs briefings as well. One thing we continue to do is to have the evergreen offer so that people can come forward at any time. I can share with the House that in the past week, for example, in the first phase of groups 1 to 9—the most vulnerable as per the JCVI recommendation, as the House will recall—we still had 30,000 people come forward for their first dose, and out of the second phase of groups 10 to 12, we had 70,000. Therefore 100,000 people took advantage of the evergreen offer. As we embark—the planning is well under way—on the booster programme, we continue to drive up the evergreen offer for first-dose people to come forward.
The shadow Secretary of State mentioned his experience in his constituency and in his region about the drive to increase uptake among different ethnic groups. That continues to be our priority, and we continue to make sure that those communities get not just the information but access to the vaccines. We are making it as easy as possible for them to access the vaccine without an appointment: they can just walk in and get their jab.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
I listened carefully to the Minister’s answer to the Chair of the Health and Social Committee, and perhaps I may press him a little. He said that the Government have received only interim advice from the JCVI about the adult booster campaign, but this morning outside the House the Prime Minister said that the booster campaign would be going ahead and had already been approved. Have the Government received the final advice from the JCVI about the adult booster campaign, which it said could be different from its initial advice? Have the Government made a decision about the details of the adult booster campaign and whether it is indeed going ahead?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s important question. We have received interim advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which we have published, and it has now received the Cov-Boost data. The interim advice was about vaccinating the most vulnerable with a booster for covid and for flu. It is advising a two-stage process, and stage one is to offer the booster vaccines to those in the old 1 to 4 cohorts plus the immunocompromised, and then to groups 5 to 9. That is the right way to proceed. We have not yet received its final advice.[Official Report, 14 September 2021, Vol. 700, c. 8MC.] It could be different to the interim advice, but boosting preparations are well under way. Clearly that final advice is predicated on which vaccine delivers the highest level of protection and durability.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I have great sympathy for the Minister for having to come here to try to respond to the latest musings from the Prime Minister’s mind. I believe he is saying that when this morning the Prime Minister said that the programme was going ahead, the final advice had not been received and, indeed, while preparations are ongoing, there may be subsequent advice that once again changes everything. Is that what the Minister is saying? How does he expect people to have confidence when the information coming from the Government appears to be so arbitrary and constantly changing, with no real clarity or medical robustness to it at all?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s question, although I think there is an inherent unfairness in his final few words. The whole House, indeed the nation, would agree that this virus and pandemic have been challenging not just for this country and Government, but for the rest of the world. We have had to learn rapidly about the virus and how it behaves in the human body, and there has been the incredible work of the scientists who developed the vaccine, the NHS and everyone involved in the vaccine roll-out. The interim advice is important and has allowed us to have preparations well under way to deliver the covid booster programme. I am confident that the final advice, depending on the COV-Boost study, will allow us to boost the programme this month, and boost at scale.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
Who will be responsible for writing to give advice to medical professionals on the risk-benefit analysis of giving a relatively new vaccine to 12-year-olds? Will that be the Chief Medical Officer, or the JCVI? How will the Government ensure timely and well-explained advice to parents, who will be the first point of contact and who may feel anxious about giving advice for which they are not properly qualified?
Nadhim Zahawi
My right hon. Friend raises a really important question. Of course, it was the CMOs who led the further work that took place and who made the announcement today. Health is devolved, as he knows, so the chief medical officer for Scotland will take that on in ensuring that the system—whether it is primary care or other parts of the system—understands the advice in full. The school-age vaccination programme is the major element of this particular part of the vaccination programme. It is very well versed in working with parents and teachers, and of course with young people to make sure that they have all the information they need to be able to take it back to their parents, get the consent and get their vaccination on time.
Sammy Wilson
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Not too many people pretend to be me—not even in my own party.
I find the Minister’s statement rather bizarre. First, the main medical reason given for the decision is not to protect young people from covid but to protect their mental health, their educational wellbeing and their ability to associate in society. Does he accept, first, that the way this measure will be rolled out could lead to children being bullied, stigmatised and named on Instagram, Twitter and so on, because the whole school will know whether they go for a vaccine or not, and secondly, given that school principals can make the decision whether a group of individuals, a class or a year group is closed down if people are found to have tested positive in the school, that this is no guarantee that educational disadvantage will not be attacked either?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for the right hon. Member’s question. Actually, quite the opposite is the case. First, he will know that school bubbles have gone. The school-age vaccination programme and those clinicians are really very well equipped and very well versed in dealing with vaccines in schools, so this will not be a new thing for them. Their ability to gain consent and communicate exactly why the chief medical officers have gone ahead is, in my view, an important element of the decision to accept the recommendation tonight. So I would say quite the opposite: it is right that we accept the recommendation tonight.
As I said in my statement, no one—no parent or child—should be stigmatised for making a decision. We have been transparent all the way through this process, and we have been incredibly careful, as we have demonstrated. Many other countries now boast that their vaccination programmes have reached far higher numbers than ours. I have always said that this is not a race; it is about doing the right thing for children and adults to transition this virus from pandemic to endemic.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
I welcome my hon. Friend’s statement, but I want to return to the issue of where the children will make this decision. The reality is that we have parents taking responsibility for their children, and at the end of the day we say we are going to ask them whether or not they give responsibility for their child on this matter. However, where there is a dispute, we say that the school will decide whether or not that child has the capacity to make that decision. This is the point: the pressure will grow on the child. There is no way of legislating for this greater good concept that says, “The school may be in trouble, and your class may be in deep difficulty, if you do not take the vaccine.” I simply say to my hon. Friend that this is a real problem for us. It will lead to disputes in families and real problems about children’s mental health in the opposite direction, as they are put under pressure. I wonder whether he and the Government will think again about this. Without serious, clear guidance, it will lead to children being in a worse state than they would have been without the vaccine.
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s really important question. I want to spend a few seconds explaining this to the House, because it is really important. He mentioned that the decision would lead to teachers having to explain; actually, it is quite the opposite. It is not the teacher’s responsibility to do that; it is a qualified clinician’s. The school-age vaccination programme is very well equipped to do that in a discreet and careful way with parents and with the child. However, that will be on very rare occasions; the bulk of vaccinations will be conducted only if there is parental consent.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
It is really important that every parent has access to a supported conversation—we know that that is a very positive public health intervention—but it is important for every young person too, because they also want to be equipped with information. I see the Minister nodding. In light of that, and not just one new vaccine programme but a second one, can he explain the resourcing of staff to not only vaccinate but provide that information? In addition, can he explain why 11-year-olds are being excluded? Our secondary system runs from 11 upwards, as opposed to 12.
Nadhim Zahawi
Our regulator has only regulated the vaccines for 12 to 15-year-olds. I reiterate the point that the school-age vaccination programme and the infra-structure we have is very well versed in delivering vaccines and gaining consent. Of course, the NHS in England—the same is happening in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—has been thinking through exactly how the communication, the comms and the leaflets, will be provided to parents so that they have the information necessary to be able to make the decision for their child to be vaccinated.
Sir Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale West) (Con)
The Minister praised JCVI, quite rightly, but it is clear from the advice it gave recently that what was weighing most heavily on its mind was the lack of long-term evidence about the possible adverse reactions due to myocarditis following vaccination. As it said just 10 days ago:
“substantial uncertainty remains regarding the health risks associated with these adverse events.”
What has happened in the last 10 days to remove that uncertainty?
Nadhim Zahawi
The important thing to remember is that the JCVI’s advice was very much predicated on what it was clinically qualified to look at. It was its recommendation to the chief medical officers to then take a further look. My hon. Friend will recall that JCVI’s advice was that, on balance, it is beneficial for children to have the vaccine rather than not have the vaccine, but not enough to recommend a universal programme, hence its advice to CMOs to go further on that. The work the CMOs have done in recommending a single dose is very much predicated on the data they have seen. JCVI, by the way, were in the room during the deliberations from America and elsewhere on the myocarditis on the second dose.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
I welcome the statement from the Minister tonight. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) when he says that clear information will be key. I would just suggest that social media might be more effective with young people rather than leaflets. May I raise an issue around children with special educational needs? Some may already have been vaccinated because of vulnerabilities. Will the Minister outline what arrangements have been put in place for schools and cohorts of individual children with special educational needs? It will need a lot more effort and time to ensure we get them vaccinated.
Nadhim Zahawi
The right hon. Gentleman is quite right. A number of children with special educational needs would have been vaccinated already, because they would have come under the earlier JCVI recommendation. The school-age vaccination programme does pay particular and careful consideration to those schools, working with school leaders and making sure that parents are able to get all the information. I mentioned leaflets earlier, but of course there will be a digital information programme as well.
Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)
Given the known and unknown risks of vaccinating healthy children, and given that between 40% and 70% of children are estimated already to have covid antibodies, what plans does my hon. Friend have to offer antibody testing to children so that parents can make an informed decision about whether vaccination may be in their child’s best interests?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s important question. As we now accept the recommendation from the chief medical officers of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, it is also right for us to look at the question that she raised. I will happily write back to her after this statement.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
The Minister will be aware that some estimates suggest that a staggering 900 million days of face-to-face schooling have been lost since the start of the pandemic. In that context, I welcome the Government’s decision today, but children’s vaccination is only one part of the puzzle—so are improved ventilation, funding for air purifiers in classrooms and, in some crowded environments, continuing with face coverings. Given that two Department for Education Ministers are sitting on the Front Bench alongside him—the Minister for School Standards, the right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb) and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford)—will he press his colleagues to provide that funding for schools so that they can remain open safely for as many children as possible? Will the Government give us a cast-iron guarantee that we will not see any school closures this winter?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s support for tonight’s decision. The Department for Education is rolling out, I think, 300,000 carbon dioxide monitors. It is very important that ventilation is very much part of what we do as we transition this virus from pandemic to endemic status.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
May I come back to the issue of parental consent and, in doing so, declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests? I welcome the fact that this will be done with parental consent, because all the pressures would be far greater if it were left up to individual children, with all the peer pressure and stigma that that could bring. Will the Minister tell us what the situation will be for children in care? Will the default position be, as corporate parents, that all children in the care system will be vaccinated? What then happens if the birth parent or the long-term foster carer has an objection to that?
Nadhim Zahawi
I thank my hon. Friend for his important question. The deemed carer for that child will be requested to give that consent.
Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)
Is it not clear, first, that many other countries have been vaccinating this age range for some time; secondly, that school classes have been engines for transmission; and thirdly, that this is not in the end a medical decision, but about wider social welfare? That has been plain for some time, well before the school holidays. In those circumstances, the timing of this announcement is odd. Given the fact that prevarication, delay and hesitation, which the Government have been guilty of, can simply lead to further transmission, is this not a bit late?
Nadhim Zahawi
I hope I addressed that question earlier. I think quite the opposite, and the reason I say that is that it is right that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has taken its time. It has looked at data from other countries that proceeded with this vaccination programme and has looked at data not just on first dose, but on second dose, which has only recently been made available. It is much better to be careful than to proceed with a vaccination programme in a way that may not be appropriate. We have some of the best clinical advice in the world. It is only right that we listen to that and proceed as carefully as we can as we transition this virus from pandemic to endemic.
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
Just returning to stigmatisation, will the Minister guarantee that a child’s ability to receive an education equally with their peers will never be linked to their vaccination status?
Nadhim Zahawi
My hon. Friend asks a really important question around vaccination status. I can certainly say to him that that will not be used in any way. The whole purpose of this is to accept the clinical advice and to protect children. It was remiss of me, in response to an earlier question, not to say that the CMOs looked very specifically at the mental health and other implications for the child, not for the rest of society.
Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)
Is the Minister concerned that some children’s hospitals are seeing winter levels of respiratory syncytial virus, another virus that affects young children? What will he do to ensure that those who are clinically extremely vulnerable are continually monitored so that they can access the flu vaccine and the covid vaccine in a timely manner without overlap?
Nadhim Zahawi
That is a matter that we spend a lot of time on, and I know that the NHS and school-age vaccination programmes have been working hard on it. We have operationalised flu vaccination, but the other vaccines, as the hon. Lady quite rightly reminds the House, are equally important for children’s health.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
To what extent does the vaccination of a child reduce his or her liability to transmit the virus to a vulnerable person such as an elderly grandparent?
Nadhim Zahawi
I will happily write to my right hon. Friend with the data that the JCVI and the CMOs have looked at. Suffice it to say that the data that I have looked at from the United Kingdom, where we have not embarked on a children’s vaccination programme but are about to, is that 60% of those who are double-vaccinated do not become infected with the delta variant, which is the dominant variant at the moment, and therefore cannot transmit and infect others; 40% can.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The Minister mentioned the booster programme. Will he publish all the scientific evidence on which any wider booster plan is based? Will he consider the message that a population-wide booster programme might risk sending to other countries: the sense that everyone has to do it? We know that supplies of the vaccine are not limitless, so that could be an absolute disaster for countries in Africa, for example, where only 2% of people are fully vaccinated. Will he consider prioritising vaccines that are within their shelf life, for example, and giving them to COVAX? As he and others have said many times, none of us is safe until we all are.
Nadhim Zahawi
Just as we published the JCVI’s interim advice on 30 June, we will absolutely do the same with the final advice. We have now delivered more than 9 million doses, through COVAX or bilaterally, out of the 100 million that we planned to deliver. We went further when we received a request from our Australian colleagues: we delivered 4 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine that they needed immediately, and we can take that back when we think we need it for our booster programme. The hon. Lady quite rightly highlights the issue of vaccinating with the rest of the world, which is an important part of our work with the vaccines taskforce.
I reassure the House and families listening at home that, as far as the interim advice or any final advice allows, I am confident that we will have vaccines available to boost all those whom the JCVI recommends we should boost.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
I am deeply uncomfortable with this decision. I think that when the JCVI made a decision on the application of the vaccine on clinical grounds it was in the right place—but the Government now have the answer that they want from the experts, so we are where we are.
Parents like me and our constituents will have many, many questions asked of them by their children, probably at bedtime. What will be their route for answering those questions? Where will they get the information? Just saying that the MHRA is the best regulator in the world will not cut it with my daughter. Will people be able to have conversations with their family doctor? At the moment—let’s face it—that is quite challenging. Can the Minister guarantee that we will be able to ring up and have a real-life conversation, not with an answerphone but with our family doctor, to ask questions about the very, very big move announced today?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s question, but I would just slightly push back. He said that the Government have the answer that we want; that is actually incorrect, because I can tell him that the Government made it very clear that the JCVI and the chief medical officers had to base their decision on the work that they do, unimpeded and unencumbered in any way, and they have made that decision today. I can reassure him that the information provided through the school-age vaccination programme infrastructure will be made available both online and as hard copy—in leaflets—so that parents have all the information that they need, as well as the ability to consent; and, of course, that information will also be available to the children.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
I heard the Minister’s earlier answer about assistance for schools with ventilators and air purification. The time to roll that out would have been during the summer holidays, in preparation for the return to school. Yet again, we seem to be way behind the pace of what is going on. May I urge the Minister to talk to his colleague the Minister for School Standards, the right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), who is sitting next to him, to get some urgency into the assistance for schools with this issue?
Nadhim Zahawi
I think it worth reminding the House that ventilation guidance has been there from the very beginning for schools and school leavers to implement, but the roll-out is happening as we speak. Our colleagues in the Department for Education are working right now to get those pieces of equipment into schools as quickly as possible.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I have great respect for my hon. Friend as the vaccines Minister, but I find what he has announced this evening deeply troubling. I think it will pit parents against parents and parents against teachers, with a poor child stuck in the middle wondering what to do. There will be very little benefit to the child, and there is a lack of long-term data on the potential harm. However, what concerns me above all is that the Gillick doctrine of treating children without parental consent will become the norm for a range of medical procedures.
Nadhim Zahawi
Let me, again, slightly push back on that. It is not teachers who are being asked to do this; it is our clinicians, who are well trained and incredibly capable because they do the same thing year in, year out for the purpose of school-age vaccination programmes. They will be offering the vaccines, and ensuring that parents have enough time to read the information and then give their consent before a vaccination takes place.
This is very much not about a situation involving division. I think—I hope—my hon. Friend agrees that throughout the vaccine deployment programme that we began in earnest back on 8 December last year with Pfizer-BioNTech and continued on 4 January with the AstraZeneca vaccine, we have endeavoured never to stigmatise anyone and to provide as much information and transparency as possible, which has led to the highest level of vaccine positivity in the world. I believe that according to the Office for National Statistics data on vaccine positivity in the UK, more than 90% of adults have said that they are very likely to take the vaccine, or have already taken it.
Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab)
Many children will be anxious and worried on hearing the news that they will be receiving a vaccination, and I share the concern expressed about that by a number of Members this evening. How will the Minister be working with schools and teachers to ensure that children are informed about the vaccine in an age-appropriate and sensitive way?
Nadhim Zahawi
It is important to remember that the clinicians who deliver the school-age vaccination programme around the country are very well equipped to deliver information about these vaccines, as they do in respect of others. The information will of course be made available to parents, and, as I have said, the consent procedure will be followed very closely. The infrastructure is not new; it is not something novel about which we might have to hesitate and worry. It is already there, and it is well able to deliver this programme.
Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)
There is a great danger in politics that we sometimes make decisions while looking in the rear-view mirror rather than at what is truly the current picture. I have grave concerns about this policy and the fact that the chief medical officers have made their decision on the basis of the educational impact rather than the health of the children at clinical level. I disapprove of this decision incredibly strongly, and I wonder what we can we do to ensure that this kind of thing does not happen again, because I firmly believe that this is a very dark day for our country. Is it going to end with vaccinating five-year-olds when there is no clinical need? This is not about teachers or education. The virus is endemic now; there is not a pandemic any more. We have to get real, and I hope that the Government will reconsider.
Nadhim Zahawi
I remind the House that the chief medical officers looked at the mental health impact on children before making their decision today. That was an important aspect of their deliberations, and as I have said, the JCVI was in the room as well as the royal colleges. It is also important to remind the House that vaccination will be voluntary, and that no parent or child should be stigmatised in any way. As with our vaccination programme, this is about making all the information available and letting people make their mind up as to whether they want their child to be vaccinated.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Can the Minister confirm that, as with all medical decisions for under 16-year-olds, the decision will always lie with the parent or the person with parental responsibility, and not with the child? Will the Minister state clearly for all to hear that this Government will continue to embrace autonomy and not enforce mandatory vaccination at any time, as has been done in communist regimes to the detriment of freedom and democracy?
Nadhim Zahawi
I remind the hon. Gentleman of the answers I gave earlier on consent. Parental consent will be sought, and the school-age vaccination programme is very well equipped to do that. The consent process is being handled by each school in its usual way and will provide sufficient time for parents to provide their consent. Children aged 12 to 15 will also be provided with information, usually in the form of a leaflet, for their own use and to share and discuss with their parents. The consent of the parent, guardian or carer will be sought by the school. In the rare circumstances in which a parent withholds consent but the child wants to be vaccinated, the child has to be deemed competent by the clinicians after consultation between the child and the parent. If that consultation is unsuccessful, the child has to be deemed to be Gillick competent. That has been the law of the land for other vaccination programmes, and in those circumstances the vaccination would proceed.
Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
My hon. Friend has again cited Gillick competence as a reason why parental consent can be overridden, but many people will think that this situation is very different from the fundamental basis of the Gillick competence. This is a widespread programme with all the issues of pressure and peer pressure that may arise from it, and we have had only a few months to understand the implications of this vaccine for people’s health. Also, the Minister himself has said that there is not much evidence on the long-term implications. Can he advise the House what legal assessment he has undertaken to support the Gillick competence in this case?
Nadhim Zahawi
The Government have taken copious legal advice on this issue. I remind the House that on the rare occasions when there is a difference of opinion and a parent withholds consent when their child wants to be vaccinated, the clinician will bring together in consultation the child and the parents to try to reach consensus before they move on to the question of Gillick competence.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
Following the answer that my hon. Friend the Minister gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) earlier, could he outline the concrete steps that the Government will be taking, particularly within educational settings but also in wider society, to guarantee that no unvaccinated child will be treated any differently from a vaccinated one?
Nadhim Zahawi
There will be no question of discriminating in any way between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Vaccinations are voluntary and will remain so.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
My hon. Friend acknowledges there is a small hazard with the vaccine programme, which is why there is one jab for these younger children. Will he confirm that all families will have access to their trusted family GP to get advice and understanding on the hazards before they are expected to make a decision on this important matter?
Nadhim Zahawi
The best way for parents and families to make that decision is through the tried and tested process of the school age vaccination programme, and through schools sharing information and having a consent form that parents have to sign and return before the vaccination programme is scheduled.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I thank the Minister for his statement.
Levelling-up Agenda in the North
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to examine in this House a phrase that so many of us have heard over the past year. However, perhaps little real thought has been given as to what it actually means. “Levelling up” is the latest catchphrase, the latest rhetorical device, to emanate from the Government Back and Front Benches, but what does it actually mean and, perhaps more importantly, what should it mean?
After last week’s debacle of national insurance rises and universal credit cuts, many people are questioning whether the Government are serious about helping areas that they see as having been left behind. The truth is that that has never been part of the levelling-up agenda. Levelling up, as the Government see it, is simply to pour steel and concrete into shiny infrastructure projects in communities in the north and in the midlands, but there is no plan to tackle the grotesque inequalities that have been allowed to develop over decades in our country.
It is true that in the odd constituency a number of projects of that nature are being lined up. There have been campaigns to reinstate passenger services on the Ashington, Blyth and Tyne line since they were removed in 1964. It was the Labour-led Northumberland County Council between 2013 and 2017 that got the ball rolling on the line’s reinstatement, and we are all happy, across every party, to see the work begin to take shape, but restoring passenger services to the line will not help local communities if it takes people away from our high streets into north Tyneside and Newcastle. Nor will it open up the world to those who continue to be attacked by central Government and who are unlikely to be able to afford to use the new line. Nor will it solve the issues of isolation for those in communities such as North Blyth or Cambois who, despite living less than 3 miles from one of the new stations, have a bus service that does not run before 9 am and ends just after 2 pm.
Wansbeck also happens to be one of the very special communities that is set to receive one of the Government’s magical new hospitals. Northgate, near Morpeth, is to have a new wing built. It is simply a transfer of services from another local hospital, but under the new Tory propaganda it counts as a new hospital. For heaven’s sake.
Areas such as the one I represent have not simply been left behind; they have been actively held back, and pouring money into infrastructure, while welcome, is simply not enough. Children from my constituency and from constituencies across the north of England have no less potential than those from more prosperous parts of this nation, but they face so many more obstacles to realising it. Levelling up, as an objective, should be measured by the extent to which it removes those barriers. The less socially mobile an area is, the more likely it is that such communities cannot reach their full potential. According to the Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission:
“London and its commuter belt is pulling away from the rest of the country”.
Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is a powerful advocate for his constituency and his area. Does he accept that the whole of the north is in a similar position and that the whole of this younger generation faces a bleak future, as has been indicated by the commission, while they watch the growth of wealth to exponential levels in the City of London and elsewhere? Does he agree that only a massive change—perhaps a wealth tax—to redistribute money to the north is the way forward?
Ian Lavery
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and of course I would agree with those sentiments. I would certainly agree to use some form of wealth tax, which would benefit people in this country.
The commission said that
“three regions—Yorkshire and the Humber, the North East and the West Midlands—have no social mobility hotspots at all.”
In line with what my hon. Friend has just said, that means that a child born in poverty in somewhere like the Wansbeck constituency, which is the sixth worst area for social mobility in England, will very likely live and die in poverty, through no fault of their own.
Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that, according to last year’s Marmot report, life expectancy is significantly lower in the north-east, including in my constituency? Does he agree that we have an awful long way to go, given the decades that we have been left behind?
Ian Lavery
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and I will be coming on to the Marmot report later in my contribution, because it is extremely important.
Life expectancy is unbelievably different in various parts of this country and levelling up should be about tackling the likes of life expectancy. Between 2014-15 and 2019-20, the north-east saw child poverty increase from 25% to 37%, with figures in my constituency mirroring the regional average. The Minister might wish to venture an answer as to why children have fewer opportunities and child poverty is on the rise under this Conservative Government. Almost two thirds of the children in my constituency living in poverty come from a working family. Never mind the rhetoric about people not working and about how the only way to get out of poverty is by working—almost two thirds of the kids in my constituency living in poverty come from working families. But the Government are still pushing ahead with their cuts to universal credit that will take money out of these families’ pockets, and more than £7 million a year out of the local economy. They are pursuing a double whammy that will see low-paid families in work taxed to fix childcare, rather than the millionaires and the Tory donors. The Minister has to tell us: does he think that this is fair? How does he think it is fair?
I now come to Michael Marmot’s report, a decade after the 2010 publication. It lays bare the neglect our communities have faced over a decade. As my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) mentioned, life expectancy has stalled, something not seen since the early 1900s, and it remains lowest in the north and the midlands. The regions with industrial pasts and entrenched poverty have become hotspots for low healthy life expectancy. As the Marmot report put it, people in more deprived areas spend
“more of their shorter lives in ill health”
than those in less deprived areas. I am sure the Minister will wish to address the fact that people in constituencies that have been purposely held back have lower life expectancies and lower healthy life expectancies than those in other parts of the country.
It is perhaps a sign of the Government’s cruelty that they are now looking into feedback on plans to align prescription charge exemptions to pensionable age. What a retrograde step that would be. In real terms, they are looking to push the charge of being poorly after a lifetime of hard work on to people who will be ill for longer and live shorter lives.
Given a decade of Tory underfunding in the guise of austerity, it is no surprise that the covid impact has been felt more greatly in poorer communities. Marmot’s most recent report, which focused on Greater Manchester, showed a covid mortality rate 25% higher than England’s average.
NHS waiting lists have exploded over the past decade and have now grown to a record 5.45 million. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that the backlog could reach 14 million if urgent action is not taken soon. At the same time, A&E waiting times have grown and the number of people not seen within the four-hour target has been increasing for more than a decade. People in our communities are in poorer health, stuck on waiting lists and being charged for medication. Perhaps the Minister would like to explain to the people in our constituencies why that is the case.
Depression is much more prevalent in northern constituencies. The 10 seats with the highest levels of the disease are mostly in the north-west or the wider north. The 10 seats with the lowest levels of depression are all in London. Deprivation plays a huge part in depression and mental health more generally. Suicide rates for men and women are the highest in Yorkshire and the Humber, while the lowest rates for men are in London. For men living in more deprived communities, the risk of suicide increases, particularly for middle-aged men. How does the Minister plan to use levelling up to tackle these huge issues in our communities?
At one time, having a job was seen as a route out of poverty; sadly, for too many this is not the case. Communities in the north and the midlands have the lowest levels of earnings, higher temporary employment and higher levels of zero-hours contracts, and suffer the scourge of bogus self-employment. All those things have rocketed in the past decade. Minister, how will the Government use levelling up to ban zero-hours contracts and bogus self-employment?
In the past year, workers in held-back communities have been disproportionately hit by covid. The north-east had by far the lowest percentage of workers who were able to work from home in the past year and a half. Only a few weeks ago, the north-east chamber of commerce was urging the Government to intervene as unemployment remains among the highest in the UK. With furlough set to be removed at the end of this month, the picture right across the UK is likely to get much worse.
More than a third of all workers in the north-east are classified as key workers. They have carried this country on their backs during this unprecedented pandemic. Care workers, supermarket staff and cleaners are paid less than the real living wage. What are the Government going to do to raise their pay—to level up in the true sense of the term?
In education, a decade of Tory rule has seen per-pupil spending dwindle by nearly 10%. The Institute of Fiscal Studies is clear that pupils in more disadvantaged areas have been hit the hardest—surprise, surprise.
The current plans go nowhere near redressing what has been cut and are disproportionally weighted to more affluent areas. Earlier this year, a Department for Education study revealed that pupils in the north-east fell further behind than those in any other region. Changes to the way pupil premium funding is allocated by amending the date at which free school meals are counted has left one school in my constituency £88,700 worse off. I say to the Minister that, when schools in the most deprived areas are getting fewer funds allocated than those in the more affluent areas, how on earth can that be classed as levelling up? What will he do about it?
The scourge of pensioner poverty is once again on the rise across the UK. It is entirely possible that, given the Government’s drive to increase the state pension age in the relatively near future, average life expectancy in large parts of the UK will be lower than the state pension age. That would hammer people in constituencies such as mine where male life expectancy in good areas hovers around 65 to 70 years of age. What will the Government do to stop those with the lowest healthy life expectancy and the lowest life expectancy from being taken out of a pension system that they have paid into all their lives—week in, week out—from their employment? They might not even get a halfpenny because of the level of life expectancy in their area. They might not get a halfpenny back from what they have put in. Is that levelling up? I do not think that that is really what is meant by levelling up.
The much trumpeted social care plans not only fail workers, but do nothing to protect the assets of people in constituencies such as mine. In many parts, average house prices are much lower than the £100,000 set by the Government. How can levelling up mean that people in held-back constituencies such as mine lose their modest assets that they have worked their whole lives for to pay for care, while those in richer parts of the country pass on their wealth to their children? We could go on and on.
Bus services have been slashed in the north, but the cost of travel has increased massively. In London, bus fares are capped at £1.55, and a day of bus travel in the capital is capped at a total of £4.65 a day. Travelling in my constituency between Morpeth and Ashington, which is roughly 6 miles, costs £6.40.
Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)
I thank my good friend for giving way and congratulate him on securing this important debate. In my first Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister assured me that he would look into the details of plans to extend the Metrolink tram system into my constituency of Stockport. I have not heard a word since. Does he agree that we need action and investment from the Government rather than empty promises and warm words?
Ian Lavery
Absolutely. I thank my friend for that intervention. I think I mentioned early on in my contribution that levelling should not be rhetorical. Levelling up is a serious issue and we need to know how the Government will actually level up.
On climate change, the costs are being passed on to working families, while those who continue to pollute are getting away scot free. As I say, I could go on and on. The phrase “levelling up” is not going away, but it means little in the mouths of Conservatives more interested in pointing at shiny infrastructure projects than in the prosperous futures of people in communities that have, for so long, been held back. The funding being considered is simply not enough; it is a sticking plaster over a severed limb. By almost all measures, those areas of our country that have been held back by the Government trail those from more prosperous parts of the country. This has been further exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis and its dismal handling by the Tory Government. We simply cannot afford for levelling up to be abused in the same manner, with cosy contracts for infrastructure investment handed to the same people while at the same time poverty, education, health outcomes and opportunities continue to suffer.
I do not think anyone would argue that billionaires should be profiting from a crisis like a pandemic, but during the course of the last 18 months the global wealth of billionaires rose by more than £5 trillion. So when Labour wins the next election, let us have a backdated super tax on the spivs and Tory donors who have enriched themselves with Government cash, pocketed through the last year of hell while ordinary people have paid the price.
As Frances O’Grady said today at the TUC,
“levelling up means nothing if they freeze key workers’ pay, slash Universal Credit, and the number of kids in poverty soars.”
I echo her challenge to the Government: if levelling up is more than rhetoric, it must mean a levelling up in the workplace, in our communities and ending the scourge of child poverty.
The Minister for Regional Growth and Local Government (Luke Hall)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) on securing this important debate. He has highlighted a number of issues that I agree are of utmost importance to the north and his constituents. I also thank other hon. Members for their interventions. I am pleased to have the chance to talk about our levelling-up agenda and specifically about levelling up in the north of England. It is a goal that is shared by the hon. Member for Wansbeck, me, everyone across the Government and, I am sure, everyone across the House.
Levelling up means ensuring that opportunity is spread more evenly across the country and that investment is targeted more fairly, so that we can build a fairer, stronger and more united kingdom after this pandemic. Tackling the regional imbalances and inequality that the hon. Gentleman spoke about is at the heart of this Government’s manifesto and what we are trying to achieve.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
My hon. Friend has touched on the important issue of rebalancing inequalities. Transport and the regeneration of our town centres are key to this. I therefore thank the Government for the electrification plans between Bolton and Wigan and for their huge commitment to Bolton’s towns fund.
Luke Hall
My hon. Friend is a champion for his constituents. I am grateful to him for putting that point on the record. We are trying to achieve improvement in living standards and to grow the private sector, especially in those parts of the country where it is weak, such as the former industrial areas that have been left behind by Governments of all colours for far too long.
The Prime Minister spoke in July about the Government’s central mission, which is to level up and unite our country. The hon. Member for Wansbeck is quite right to speak about the issue so passionately, in the way that we also have. We have made levelling up a central part of our work and our economic strategy, and will publish a White Paper later this year, setting out bold, new, substantive policy interventions to tackle some of the key challenges.
Wherever people are born or grow up, they should have the opportunity to succeed in life without having to leave their home town to do it. But we cannot achieve that goal without recognising the significant economic, social and regional disparities that currently exist. Some 50% of the population of London have graduate-level qualifications, compared with 33% in the north of England. The hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) was right to point out that healthy life expectancy in Blackpool, in Middlesbrough and in her constituency can be up to 10 years shorter than in some parts of the south-east of England. Those are just a few examples of the inequalities that we want to address, and which are a central focus for my Department and the Government as a whole.
We are continuing significant investment to this cause, with a once-in-a-generation wave of funding into areas that have been historically underserved for far too long—not just in England, but also in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Our £4.8 billion levelling-up fund and £220 million community renewal fund are both UK-wide, ensuring that all parts of the United Kingdom benefit from this investment. The levelling up fund will be investing in that infrastructure, which we believe is so important in different parts of the country. It makes a real difference to town centres and to high streets in bringing jobs and opportunity to different parts of our country, whether that is about upgrading local transport or investing in cultural and heritage assets. In the north of England, 38 places, including Northumberland, have been identified as top priority areas for the fund, and each of those areas will be receiving capacity funding as well.
The community renewal fund, meanwhile, is supporting communities and people in need of support, piloting programmes and new approaches to target investment in skills, communities, places and local businesses, and supporting people into employment—many of the things that the hon. Gentleman talked about. We have signed heads of terms on all our 101 town deals, bringing £2.5 billion of investment into towns across the country. Of those, 43 are in the north of England, with over £1 billion of investment combined. Take the work that we are doing in Barrow. The £25 million towns deal in Barrow includes a new learning quarter that will transform the local educational offer in the town. Almost one in four adults in that town have no qualifications at all, but this project will equip a new generation with the skills that they need to compete in a truly global economy. This is levelling up in action and what we want to see replicated right across the country.
However, it is not just about the investment. It is about ensuring that we have strong, local leadership that helps to deliver—that powers productivity and growth in different parts of the country, backed up by strong leaders fighting for their areas on the national stage. That is why we are committed to levelling up powers across the north too, building on the biggest transfer of powers to local areas since the second world war. Following the elections in May in West Yorkshire, over 63% of the north’s population is now represented by combined authority mayors. That is what we are trying to achieve—empowering local communities and devolving skills, money and power to local leaders to address these local blackspots to support and drive the regeneration of town centres and high streets and permanently rebalance some of the regional imbalances in our country. Local leaders have shown what is possible in that regard.
The levelling-up agenda spreads right across the different parts of the work we are doing. In Blyth, we invested over £20 million as part of the towns fund to help to foster regeneration, stimulate investment and deliver vital infrastructure that is so needed. That is in addition to the £11 million through the future high streets fund that we are delivering there too. Through the getting building fund, we are supporting offshore renewable projects in Blyth, while the borderlands growth deal aims to bring fresh investment to the borderlands area. As part of that deal, Northumberland will receive over £12 million to support growth and investment, and a further £17 million has been committed to support the green energy sector in the borderlands too, subject to the final business case sign-off. On the connectivity the hon. Gentleman talked about, we can see the £4 million of investment to upgrade to superfast broadband delivery to homes and businesses, while the deal is also supporting projects that focus on heritage.
Of course the hon. Gentleman is right that creating an equitable future for children, regardless of where they grew up, is a key part of levelling up that requires a holistic approach from right across Government. That is why some of the funds that I have been talking about are so important. We are delivering in skills, communities, places and businesses, supporting people into employment. Both getting people into work and progressing them in work is a key part of what we are doing, working with the Department for Work and Pensions in delivering its plan for jobs. The DWP has local teams that specialise in partnership working, supporting people just as he talked about, creating links to communities to understand their needs and provide specific—
Luke Hall
I cannot give way because the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) took too much of the time—I do apologise.
Our supporting families programme through the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is just one example of how we are working together, bringing agencies together to deliver for families who need that extra support. We are boosting jobs and investing in communities, including by establishing freeports right across the country, with eight in England and three in the north of England—in Teesside, Humber and Liverpool city region. That will create jobs and address some of the imbalances right across the country.
The north is at the forefront of our work to drive net zero, as the hon. Member for Wansbeck talked about, as the home of innovation work in carbon, capture and storage and so many other areas, too. Whether it is the work we are doing with the Department for Education on the “Skills for Jobs” White Paper and the lifetime skills guarantee, our devolution of the adult education budget—more than £308 million this year—or the money we are redistributing for the local government finance settlement, with £240 million of equalisation this year, we are straining every sinew to support the north of England and level up right across the country.
I am grateful to hon. Members for their contributions today. I will reflect on the important points that have been made and which I realise have been raised in the right spirit, and I am always happy to discuss them further. We believe that all parts of the UK should have the means to positively shape their own future. That is more important now than ever, as we look forward to the road to recovery.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Immunities and Privileges) Order 2021
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Chair
Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when not speaking, which is in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please give each other and the staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room. Speaking notes should be emailed to hansardnotes@parliament.uk, and any officials in the Public Gallery should communicate with Members electronically.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (James Duddridge)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Immunities and Privileges) Order 2021.
The instrument before us today was laid on 7 July in accordance with section 10(1) of the International Organisations Act 1968 and confers privileges and immunities in order support COP26. The draft order is required so that the UK can comply fully with the obligations of the host country agreement, which was negotiated with the secretariat of the United Nations framework convention on climate change.
The conference represents a unique opportunity to demonstrate the UK’s global climate leadership. During the COP26 talks, teams of negotiators, Government representatives, businesses and citizens will work together to solve the deeper problems around COP and the four priorities of mitigation, adaptation, climate finance and co-operation. We will welcome participants to Glasgow and recognise the need for them to be able to perform their functions freely and openly. I am able to confirm that we have reached an agreement to confer privileges and immunities on only three categories of participants: UN officials who do not already enjoy them; delegation members and observer states, otherwise known as “the parties”; and core personnel from the Clean Development Mechanism, the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and the Global Environment Facility.
To be clear, the order covers only acts performed in the course of official duties. It does not grant personal immunity, nor does it extend to British nationals, permanent residents, or spouses and partners. That is in line with other Government-to-Government conferences such as the G7 and Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, both of which the UK recently hosted.
We have agreed with the UN a robust framework that will remain in place during the conference. It provides a balance between our desire to limit the granting of privileges and immunities and COP’s founding principles that all participants should, quite rightly, be able to voice their legitimate opinions without fear of legal repercussions. It also avoids setting an unwelcome precedent for UN conferences held in countries that lack the level of personal freedoms we in the UK are so proud to enjoy, particularly around the freedom of assembly. I commend the draft order to the Committee.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to see in you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. The official Opposition will of course not be opposing this statutory instrument, because it simply forms the standard process around events of this nature, as the Minister set out. I do, however, have some questions, particularly given some concerns around the organisation of the conference and covid regulations, and because is important to understand the legal privileges and immunities.
The Minister set out the categories included in the order. Will he say how many attendees will be covered by the categories of UN officials, delegations and observers—“the parties”—and the CDM, the Adaptation Fund and others? He will also be aware of the concerns expressed by the Least Developed Countries Group as recently as 10 September. This was not only about their demands at this COP for fair and ambitious action to meet the 1.5° pathway and mobilising scaled-up support for many of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which are right and substantial, but their ability to participate in the conference, which is crucial to ensuring that their voices are heard and that pressure is put to bear on some of the world’s bigger emitters. If we are seeking the ambitious outcomes that the Government and the COP President have set out, how will we ensure that that group is able to participate?
The group stated on 10 September:
“We need assurances from the UK that COP26 will be fully inclusive and fair. Our countries and our people are among the worst affected by climate change – we must not be excluded from talks deciding how the world will deal with this crisis, determining the fate of our lives and livelihoods.”
The Minister will be aware that 20 countries from the group are currently on the UK’s travel red list, which comes with significant legal implications if red list quarantine rules are broken. Will he set out what support is being given to ensure that delegations can be both covid-safe and not excluded from participation? What methods are being put in place for other methods of participation? What support is available for quarantine arrangements and fees? The costs for small delegations that do not have the monetary resources at their disposal that we would have when sending a delegation to the G7 or other conferences will be substantial.
The 20 countries in the group includes many in sub-Saharan Africa, which comes under the normal portfolio that the Minister and I cover and includes crucial countries affected by climate change, such as Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Burundi, the DRC, which is critical given its rainforests and the implications of climate change, and also Afghanistan. Is the Minister aware of whether any Afghan delegation will attend the COP given the indeterminate status of its current regime? We have heard what the Foreign Secretary has said about that, so what are the implications for the types of immunities and privileges being granted under this order?
What proportion of the official delegations does the Minister believe are attached to NGO or activist groups? That could include those who have diplomatic status or others.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. I do not want to delay proceedings, and I understand the need for this draft order. I was going to ask the Minister this question, but he was too quick for me, so I thought I could ask it through my hon. Friend.
Most people will remember the disquiet in this country around the death of Harry Dunn and the fact that Anne Sacoolas was able to claim diplomatic immunity and return to the States without facing any consequences. Am I right in thinking that the provisions around immunities and privileges under article 5 would mean that if there was a serious road traffic incident, perhaps resulting in a death, the individual responsible would be secure from any consequences? Is that what we are approving?
Stephen Doughty
My hon. Friend raises an important point. I have referred to covid laws and regulations, but the order applies to the conduct of delegations in many other respects, so I hope that the Minister will answer that question.
My last question relates to the delegations from the British overseas territories. Concerns have been raised with me by several overseas territories about the size of their delegation, and they feel that they could be more included in the COP process. I assume that they will not come under one of the categories of exemption because they are a part of the UK family, but clarification on that from the Minister would be useful. What does he understand to be their status at the conference?
Our overseas territories not only play a critical in terms of our contribution to global environmental and sustainability targets, particularly given the often pristine marine environments of these island states, but will be directly affected by climate change. In last week’s Westminster Hall debate I mentioned the British Virgin Islands, which suffered seriously during the hurricane of 2017, but it has lost as a result of Brexit some funding for climate change adaptation and resilience. However, it is likely that the islands will, tragically, face more hurricanes because of our warming environment.
Finally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s message is clear, and the unequivocal evidence is that we are in an emergency. It is right that the summit has an ambitious agenda, but that requires the participation of the countries and individuals who are most affected by climate change and will live with the consequences the longest. As I said, the Opposition will not oppose this draft order and its broad principles, but I hope the Minister will be able to answer my detailed questions.
Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)
I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation of the statutory instrument, which the SNP will also not oppose. It is very much part of the standard procedure for such events. However, articles 4 to 10, which give effect to certain legal measures, do not apply to Scotland and will be covered by a separate SI that requires the approval of the Scottish Parliament because policing and justice are of course devolved matters and part of Scotland’s independent legal system. That is a reminder not only of Scotland’s distinct nature and the need for it to be recognised at COP, but of the truly international nature of the effort to tackle climate change and of the need for the UK Government to do more to engage with the international community. I am grateful for what we have heard today.
James Duddridge
I thank hon. Members for their constructive support for this SI. As for the number of people attending, the total is around 25,000, although others will clearly go along to fringe events. Approximately 12,500 people will be subject to the privileges and immunities—that is to say that they will be within the secure blue zone. I am sure that Glasgow will be full of many other activities outside the zone, but they are quite rightly not covered by the privileges and immunities. That perhaps answers the question of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak. In fact, I am unsure whether there will be any vehicles in the blue zone. The privileges and immunities cover only the principal individuals, not their wives, husbands and families, and only within that secure area and only if they are doing their actual job—not driving, for example. The definition is narrow, partly because of the issue he raises.
The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth talked about participation. It is important that as many parties participate as possible. The UN owns the list—it is a UN conference in the United Kingdom—so participation is a matter for the UN. It is arranging double vaccination for those coming, although take-up is low largely because attendees are likely to be double vaccinated already.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the overseas territories, for which I was Minister with responsibility from 2014 to 2016. They are not officially parties to the agreement because they are not nation states, but the smaller islands clearly suffer worse from climate change and should be fully engaged. I will do everything to assist and help in that.
I do not have a full list of delegations, but certainly all the African countries that the hon. Gentleman and I communicate with have been invited and encouraged, and they are coming at various levels. I am therefore not concerned about the level of representation. He asked whether Afghanistan would be represented; I am not sighted of that matter, but I am happy to find out and send on that information.
NGOs and activists are outside the blue zone and will not be covered by the privileges and immunities legislation. I thank the Committee for this constructive sitting.
Question put and agreed to.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Steps etc.) (England) (Revocation and Amendment) Regulations 2021
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-isolation) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-isolation) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2021
(3 years, 1 month ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
I can confirm that we are quorate. Before we begin, can I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking? This is in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room. Members should send their speaking notes by email to hansardnotes@parliament.uk. Similarly, officials in the Gallery should communicate electronically with Ministers.
The Minister for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health (Ms Nadine Dorries)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Steps etc.) (England) (Revocation and Amendment) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021, No. 848).
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to consider the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-isolation) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021, No. 851) and the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-isolation) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021, No. 864).
Ms Dorries
The regulations lifted most of the legal restrictions when we moved to step 4 of the road map on 19 July and eased the self-isolation requirements from 16 August to allow those who are fully vaccinated and a number of other groups to be exempt from self-isolation if they are the close contact of a positive case. These are significant milestones in our country’s journey as we learn to live with the virus. We have certainly come a long way since the Prime Minister set out the details of the Government’s road map out of lockdown in February.
Moving to step 4 and easing a huge number of restrictions was a great progress. It is testament to the grit and determination of the public and to the expertise and dedication of all those involved in our country’s response to the virus and the phenomenal vaccination programme.
The Government’s road map charted a cautious approach to easing lockdown, guided by the data rather than the dates. When we moved to step 4 on 19 July, most restrictions enforced in law were replaced with guidance. Businesses are now open across all sectors. All remaining limits on social contact have been removed and there are no restrictions on how many people can meet in any setting. We are seeing our communities thriving again, with familiar social, sporting and community events returning to our English summertime. It was wonderful to spend treasured time with family, friends and loved ones without legal restrictions on our social contacts.
While we are enjoying those freedoms, we know that this is not yet a return to normal. The pandemic is not over, and the virus will remain part of our lives. We must continue to act carefully to protect ourselves and those around us. The test, trace and isolate system remains one of our best defences against the virus and it is one of the key ways in which we can protect ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.
Owing to the steady progress we have made and the tremendous success of the vaccination programme, we have been able to make important changes to ease the self-isolation requirements from 16 August while maintaining vital measures to reduce spread of the virus. The amendments to the self-isolation regulations that we are debating today allow those who are fully vaccinated and a number of other groups to be exempt from self-isolation if they are the close contact of a positive case. That includes an exemption for close contacts who can evidence that they are unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons. That is because we recognise that some groups are not able to be fully vaccinated.
The exemption further includes close contacts of those under the age of 18. We know the risk of covid-19 to children is very low and there are also unquantified harms to children’s educational, emotional and social outcomes as a result of self-isolation. We have ensured that the amendment also provides for an exemption for individuals who have been named contacts who have taken part in, or who are taking part in, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s approved trial for covid-19 vaccines.
Although the requirement to self-isolate has changed for those groups, it is still important that the close contacts of a positive case act with caution. Close contacts who are exempt from self-isolation are advised to take a polymerase chain reaction test as soon as possible to check whether they have the virus. They are also advised to consider other precautions, such as wearing a face covering in enclosed spaces and limiting contact with others, particularly those who are clinically extremely vulnerable. It is important to remember that anyone who develops symptoms should self-isolate immediately and take a PCR test. Anyone, whether double vaccinated or not, who goes on to test positive for the virus is legally required to self-isolate.
The measures allow us to continue to manage the virus proportionately and effectively. We know that self-isolation can be difficult. I sympathise with respect to the burden and the challenges that self-isolation creates. Since September last year, the Government have provided councils with £280 million to provide support payments to those who may face financial hardship as a result of self-isolation. Between March and September this year, we provided up to £100 million to councils to offer practical support to those who most need it in the community. We know that thousands of people have benefitted from that support.
We continue to review the self-isolation regulations and guidance, and shortly we will update Parliament on plans for autumn and winter. Although we are undoubtedly in a better place than when we embarked on the road map out of lockdown in February, I echo my earlier statement that this is not yet a return to normal. We must all continue to act carefully and to follow the latest guidance to protect ourselves and those around us—for example, by getting tested when showing symptoms and self-isolating if required, ensuring good ventilation when meeting indoors, and getting the vaccine.
While the lifting of restrictions and the easing of some requirements to self-isolate have been welcomed by many, I know that some people may feel nervous, particularly those who are immuno-suppressed or immuno-compromised. We continue to bolster our vaccine wall of defence against the virus and to follow the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. We are now offering vaccines to 16 and 17-year-olds and extensive planning for a booster vaccination programme is well under way.
This is the biggest and most successful vaccination programme this country has ever seen. It is a staggering achievement that over 80% of individuals aged 16 or over in the UK have received two doses of a covid-19 vaccine. It is estimated that the vaccines have so far directly prevented more than 143,600 hospitalisations. Estimates of the direct and indirect impact of the vaccination programme suggest that the vaccines have saved more than 105,900 lives.
As we enjoy our hard-fought-for freedoms, we can look to the future with a sense of optimism. However, we know that the autumn and winter months will be challenging. We cannot rule out the possibility of the Government needing to take further measures to manage the virus during periods of high risk, including this autumn and winter. We will, as far as possible, avoid reimposing social and economic restrictions, but that cannot be ruled out entirely as they might be needed. We continue to monitor the situation closely, informed by the latest data and scientific evidence, to ensure that the NHS does not face unsustainable pressure.
Finally, I am sure members of the Committee will join me in extending immense gratitude to all those involved in the vaccination and the test, trace and isolate programmes—the NHS, the social care sector and wider support services, including the many volunteers who have helped us get to this point and who continue to support our country’s response in this next phase.
It is a matter of regret that we are debating the regulations only now. It was essential to introduce them at the earliest opportunity, and we have always been clear that restrictions would be in place only for as long as they were needed. The content of each step of the road map has the prior approval of Parliament and we debated the oral statements setting out the shape of step 4, as well as that announcing the move to step 4. As ever, I welcome the scrutiny of Parliament and the valuable contributions of hon. Members to that end. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
What a pleasure it is to serve under your chairwomanship, Ms McDonagh.
At the time of restrictions lifting, we opposed, and still oppose, the decision to remove the requirement to wear a face covering indoors and on public transport. Risk of transmission inside a crowded bus or train will be incredibly high. Last week, the Office for National Statistics believed that one in 70 of us in England had covid. The capacity of a double-decker bus is about 70, and a full tube or train carriage can carry up to 140 passengers, which means that last week each full carriage could have contained two infected passengers, with little ventilation and no legal requirement to wear a mask.
With no requirement to wear a mask coming from the Government, mask-wearing has dropped considerably. However, people learning to drive and their instructors are still required to wear a mask inside cars, although we do not require people to wear masks on a crowded bus. That makes no sense.
The explanatory memorandum to the statutory instrument states:
“The rationale for revoking these regulations is that the success of the vaccination programme means that at Step 4 we can move away from strict legal restrictions and towards personal responsibility and informed judgement.”
What assessment has been made of the rates of infection in areas where it is still compulsory to wear face coverings on public transport—for example, here in London?
We supported the removal of some restrictions on gatherings, but the Government did not have to go so far, so fast. The announcement that all limits were being removed again came too late, meaning that businesses were left to scramble owing to confusing and contradictory advice. Ministers have passed the buck to businesses and individuals with vague and unclear guidance encouraging, but not mandating, the use of masks, as well as the NHS covid pass.
The Government’s explanatory document states:
“Our assessment of the risks is not fundamentally changed by new Variants of Concern”,
but what about the rate of deaths and hospitalisations? There is talk of an October lockdown. What impact have these changes had on the rate of infection? Bars and restaurants have resumed service as normal, but what public health assessment has been made of transmission rates since social distancing was scrapped and face coverings were deemed not to be necessary?
Due to the unpredictability of the virus, it would be negligent completely to remove the ability to reinstate any restrictions if required locally, so we are pleased that regulation 3 powers for local authorities are being extended. However, the Government must back up local authorities with a proper package of support should they impose restrictions. Allowing local authorities to limit the capacity of venues and allowing them to mandate certain social distancing measures may become essential in preventing localised spreads. That may not have seemed necessary over recent weeks, but with cases, deaths and hospital admissions all rising, some local authorities might be forced to impose measures and the Government must—absolutely must—support those businesses and councils.
With contact tracing now voluntary, and with the requirement to book a table before entering premises removed, we are in the dangerously perilous position of not really knowing who is entering venues. During the summer, there has not as yet been a requirement for further restrictions, but with the winter months closing in, this type of contact tracing might become invaluable in battling a fourth wave if we are indeed to avoid lockdowns.
Removing that requirement altogether has meant that its importance has been lost to most people, and reapplying it would be an uphill task. It must also be said that while contact tracing in establishments could have been used effectively to target specific outbreaks of the virus, we know the Government did not really use the data and instead relied on the test and trace app. For a multi-billion pound test and trace system, I would have expected far more for my money.
There is no longer a need for people to check in at bars and restaurants, but is there contact tracing data that can be shared with us? How many new cases of covid have had their contacts successfully reached? One of the most important aspects of any contact tracing system is ensuring that anyone identified as a close contact of someone with the virus self-isolates as a precaution. However, the roll-out of the vaccine coinciding with the reopening of the economy requires that to be adapted.
We supported removing from people who were double-vaccinated and had come into contact with someone with covid the requirement to self-isolate, unless they returned a positive test, but that could have been done sooner. The Government had no real logic behind their chosen date in August and they still cannot explain why they chose 16 August when Wales and Scotland had removed the requirement a week earlier, enabling thousands of non-infected people to get to work. Someone who has been double-vaccinated is far less likely to get a serious infection from covid, and transmissibility is reduced as well.
Paragraph 7.7 of the explanatory note to the self-isolation statutory instrument stated that
“public health modelling suggests that the rise in case numbers we are experiencing will have peaked by mid-August so introducing this change then will reduce the risk of transmission, hospitalisations and deaths.”
However, that was not the case. Instead, cases continued to rise. What further assessment has been made of case rates? Following the scrapping of self-isolation among the vaccinated, what assessment has been made of the direction of travel of such cases? There is also an exemption from self-isolation for children. We are still early in the school year, but what assessment has so far been made of the spread of covid in schools this term?
Although we will not oppose the regulations, our concerns regarding certain aspects of them have been put on the record. I hope the Minister can provide answers to my questions. Fundamentally, these decisions must be driven by data and science, not pressure groups and lobbyists.
This has been an incredibly difficult time for everybody, and we understand how challenging it has been for people to self-isolate and to manage work with their children at home, but we must state that we know cases are on the rise. It is incredibly difficult to predict how case numbers will proceed over the winter months, so I would welcome answers to my questions so that we can ensure that the public are kept as safe as possible.
Ms Dorries
I was trying to look up some of the more specific answers to questions, particularly the one about children as vectors, or transmitters, in education settings. I will write to the hon. Lady with that answer, particularly on young children, but as she knows, children in school settings are vectors rather more than they display infection themselves. However, there are more specific answers, and I will get the data and the numbers to her.
I thank everybody who has attended the debate and thank the hon. Lady for her thoughtful contribution. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the move to step 4 of the Government’s road map out of lockdown and the easing of self-isolation requirements are significant achievements that have been welcomed by many across the country. We have charted a cautious approach to easing lockdown. Normally, when I am in this place putting forward restrictions, I am beaten down by the Opposition, so it is interesting to be easing restrictions while still having to deal, quite rightly, with the arguments on the other side.
We have charted a cautious approach and we have been guided by the data. We have always been guided by the data in everything we have done with the aims of avoiding a surge in cases putting unsustainable pressure on the NHS and saving more lives. That is, fundamentally, at the root of everything we have done throughout the pandemic. Moving to step 4 does not mark the end of the pandemic, and our test, trace and isolate system remains essential in tackling variants of concern and ensuring we are not putting unsustainable pressure on the NHS. The UK has conducted more than 274 million covid tests and reached more than 15.9 million people who either tested positive or were in contact with someone who had tested positive, who may otherwise have spread the virus.
Sensibly adapting the self-isolation regulations to allow those who are fully vaccinated and a number of other groups to be exempt from self-isolation if they are the close contact of a positive case is an important step as we learn to live with the virus. These changes ensure self-isolation is targeted on those who have the virus or who are most at risk.
Throughout the pandemic, our objective has been to protect lives and livelihoods, and that remains our priority as we face the months ahead. We have moved to a new phase of the Government’s response to the pandemic as the country learns to live with the virus. It will continue to circulate at home and abroad, and this winter covid-19, combined with a resurgence of influenza and other respiratory diseases, may cause additional strain on top of normal winter pressures on the NHS. As the Government set out in the guidance “COVID-19 Response: Summer 2021”, we may need to take further measures to manage the virus during periods of high risk, including this autumn and winter. It is the job of a responsible Government to make the contingency plans for such scenarios, and we are doing just that.
The Government are assessing the country’s preparedness for autumn and winter, and, as part of that, will consider whether to continue or to strengthen public and business guidance. We will, as far as possible, avoid reimposing social and economic restrictions, but those cannot be ruled out entirely if they are needed. We will update Parliament on plans for autumn and winter shortly, and we will of course continue to keep the data under review and monitor the latest available science. We have always been clear: restrictions would be in place for only as long as they were absolutely necessary. We will keep any remaining restrictions under close review and remove them when it is safe to do so.
I recognise that, for some, the easing of restrictions is worrying, particularly those who are extremely clinically vulnerable or otherwise at greater risk from the virus. The Government advise that people should remain cautious given the continued risk. This is not a return to normal, as I said in my opening remarks. While cases are high, everybody needs to continue to be cautious and to make informed decisions to manage the risk to themselves and to others. I think that speaks to the hon. Lady’s question about public transport and the wearing of face coverings.
I once again thank everyone for the sacrifices they have made over this period despite the hardships covid has imposed. Everyone has continued to act carefully and proportionately to manage the risks to themselves and to others. I would like to take a moment to reflect, as I did earlier, on the tremendous efforts and achievements of everyone involved. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
HEALTH PROTECTION (CORONAVIRUS, RESTRICTIONS) (SELF-ISOLATION) (ENGLAND) (AMENDMENT) REGULATIONS 2021
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-isolation) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021, No. 851).—(Ms Dorries.)
HEALTH PROTECTION (CORONAVIRUS, RESTRICTIONS) (SELF-ISOLATION) (ENGLAND) (AMENDMENT) (No. 2) REGULATIONS 2021
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-isolation) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021, No. 864).—(Ms Dorries.)
Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Amendment) (No. 2) (High-Risk Countries) Regulations 2021
(3 years, 1 month ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
I remind colleagues that Mr Speaker has encouraged Members to wear face coverings in Committee when they are not speaking. Hansard colleagues will be grateful if Members send speaking notes to hansardnotes@parliament.uk.
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Amendment) (No. 2) (High-Risk Countries) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021, No. 827).
May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham?
The Government recognise the threat that economic crime poses to the UK and are committed to combating money laundering and terrorist financing. Illicit finance causes significant social and economic cost through its links to serious and organised crime. It is a threat to our national security and risks damaging our international reputation as a fair and open rules-based economy. It also undermines the integrity and stability of our financial sector and can reduce opportunities for legitimate business in the UK. That is why the Government are focused on making the UK an inhospitable environment for illicit finance. We have taken significant action to tackle money laundering and terrorism financing and have strengthened the whole system response to economic crime.
Underpinning those efforts are the money laundering regulations—a key part of our legislative framework—that set out a number of measures that certain businesses must take to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. They include the need for businesses to identify and verify the people and organisations with whom they have a business relationship or for whom they facilitate transactions. In addition, they require that financial institutions and other regulated businesses conduct additional checks or enhanced due diligence on business relationships and transactions involving high-risk third countries that have been identified as having strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regimes and posing a significant threat to the UK’s financial system. The statutory instrument under discussion updates the list of countries that are specified as high risk in the money laundering regulations.
At present, the UK’s list of high-risk third countries specified in the money laundering regulations mirrors that identified in February by the Financial Action Task Force, the global standard setter for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing. The Financial Action Task Force carries out periodic reviews and regularly updates its list. As a result, following the conclusion of a FATF plenary in June this year, it updated its public list of jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies to reflect changing risks and circumstances in these jurisdictions and in the global economy.
This instrument will therefore amend the money laundering regulations to update the UK’s list of high-risk third countries to mirror the latest FATF public list, ensuring that the UK’s list is responsive to the latest threats emanating from high-risk countries with inadequate counter-illicit finance systems and that the UK remains at the forefront of global standards on money laundering and terrorist financing. This update is an integral part of helping to protect our national security and the UK’s international reputation, businesses and financial systems from money launderers and terrorist financiers.
I thank Members for examining this important measure that will update the UK’s high-risk third countries list. Businesses that fall under the scope of the money laundering regulations and that deal with such countries will be required to take extra security measures. This amendment will enable the money laundering regulations to continue to work as effectively as possible to protect the UK’s financial systems. It will allow the UK to continue to play its full part in the fight against economic crime and I hope that colleagues will join me in supporting it.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
Thank you for your chairmanship today, Sir Graham.
I am grateful for the Minister’s explanation of the measure and of the criteria for including countries on the list, which is updated periodically and relies heavily on the work of the Financial Action Task Force. We shall not, of course, oppose this today because we believe that it is important to have the strongest anti-money laundering regime and to take the strongest measures possible. That is very much in the public interest. It is not easy, because regulators have to keep track of evolving practice among those who try to get round the law.
There is a particular duty on the UK to take the issue seriously given the size and global reach of our financial services sector. Anything that suggest slackness on our part—anything that involves UK institutions and anything where it appears that the regulators have taken their eye off the ball—is bad for public confidence in the UK’s financial services sector. Sadly, UK institutions have been named quite a lot in recent years in stories about illicit finance.
We see from the regulations that the picture changes over time, with some countries coming off the list and others being put on to it. For example, Ghana has been removed from the list, but Haiti, Malta, the Philippines and South Sudan have been added. Malta is an EU member state. One would hope that high standards of governance and supervision were in place. Can the Minister explain further why Malta has been added to the list?
More notably, Afghanistan is not on the list. Is that because the measure was drafted in July, before the Taliban takeover? If so, have the Government taken measures on money laundering and terrorist financing since the Taliban assumed control on 15 August? A brief look at the Government’s consolidated list of financial sanctions targets shows that there are 135 Afghans on it, a number of whom have assumed positions of significant power in the Afghan Government. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the new Afghan Government’s interior Minister, is on the UK consolidated sanctions list. He is also on the FBI’s most wanted list, because—according to Reuters—of his links to suicide attacks and al-Qaeda. There are others, too.
How do the Government intend to respond to the formation of the Afghan Government and money laundering and terrorist financing? We do not want to do things that hurt the Afghan people, but what will the Treasury, regulators and, indeed, the Government as a whole do to ensure that funds are not channelled to terrorist organisations as a result of the Taliban takeover?
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham.
I will certainly support the statutory instrument, although like the shadow spokesperson, the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East, I have some questions and observations. It is absolutely right that decisions are based on the best economic intelligence that can be gathered and, if possible, made on a global basis. It does not work if one or two countries apply sanctions but no one else does, any more than it does if one or two countries dodge the sanctions that everyone else tries to apply. It is important to ensure that our allies throughout the world work with or are exposed to the same rules as we are.
When we last debated money laundering regulations I mentioned something that I shall mention again because it should give us all a bit of a kick. Of the 24 high-risk third party countries on the list, seven are members of the British Commonwealth, including one, Zimbabwe, where there are historical concerns about the rule of law as well as money laundering. One country on the list is a British overseas territory.
In some of those countries, the problems with the lack of proper financial regulation—with being seen worldwide as havens for all kinds of dodgy financial dealings—have been present since the days of direct rule and the British empire. The problems were created 100 years ago, or perhaps more recently, and we are now trying to clear up the mess left behind by our imperial forefathers. It is as good an example as any of the maxim that, in international affairs, what we do to other people we very often end up doing to ourselves.
The right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East mentioned one or two examples that are clearly going in the wrong direction. We cannot afford to be complacent. Many Governments and widely respected non-governmental organisations have been saying for a number of years that they are concerned about the direction in which financial regulation in the United Kingdom is going. Perhaps more accurately, they are concerned that it is not going in the right direction as fast as the bad guys are trying to pull in the wrong direction.
The Government consultation on their company regulation contained a lot of positives, and I certainly look forward to seeing what draft legislation emerges from it. The response that the SNP submitted in 2019 included two key points. The United Kingdom needs a robust and transparent system of company registration, which we do not have just now. The system of company registration is not working. It must be crystal clear who owns companies, who benefits from them and who is pulling the strings.
We need other legislation on Scottish limited partnerships, which we know have been used and abused to facilitate money laundering and all the criminal and terrorist activities that it supports.
We will support the regulations today, but, as I heard myself saying last week—doubtless I will hear myself saying the same on other financial regulation legislation over the coming weeks and months—this is a small step in the right direction that does not go nearly far enough. Will the Minister tell us when the substantial weaknesses in company registration legislation will be sorted out? My concern is that if we are not careful we could start to see the United Kingdom appear on some people’s suggestions for additions to, if not a red list, an amber list. Give the extent to which the United Kingdom’s economy and, indeed, Scotland’s economy rely on our reputation as a trustworthy place to do financial business, we cannot afford to take that risk.
John Glen
I am happy to address Members’ points.
It is the Government’s view that the amendment will ensure that UK legislation remains up to date and continues to protect the financial system from the threat by jurisdictions with inadequate money laundering and terrorist financing. The amendment enables the UK to remain in line with international standards on money laundering and terrorist financing, allowing it to continue to play its full part in the fight against economic crime. I agree with the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East and the hon. Member for Glenrothes about the need to retain high standards in our financial services regulation—the consistent duty I have put on our regulators in conversations with them, week in, week out.
The right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East was absolutely right when he said that, because of the size and sophisticated nature of financial services in the United Kingdom, keeping to those high standards will always be an imperative for us. He asked me to comment on the listing of Malta and Afghanistan. At the June 2021 FATF plenary, FATF collectively agreed to include Malta on its list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring. As this is one of the FATF public lists that the UK list mirrors, Malta will be added to the UK’s list of high-risk third countries. The outstanding issues that Malta must address are outlined in FATF’s publicly available statement.
The hon. Member for Glenrothes made a point about this country’s past. FATF’s rules and processes are searching, rigorous and extensive. The British Government receive extensive lobbying on these matters but we defer to the rigour of the process, no matter how uncomfortable it might be given the strong relationships we might otherwise have. Part of today’s upgrading following the June decisions goes ahead of where the EU is on a number of these issues, and I am pleased that we are applying the highest standards.
The right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East made a number of points about Afghanistan and the challenges that exist. Afghanistan is not currently identified on any of FATF’s public lists, but it is important to note that the money laundering regulations require enhanced due diligence in a range of situations that present a high risk of money laundering or terrorist financing, not just where a transaction or business relationship involves a country that is listed as high risk. When assessing whether there is a high risk of money laundering or terrorist financing, the regulated sector must take a number of factors into consideration, including geographical risk where countries have been identified by credible sources and alerts from supervisory and regulatory bodies.
There are at present various sanctions in place in relation to Afghanistan that include members of the Taliban. Targeted sanctions impose an asset freeze, including making directly or indirectly available funds or economic resources to or for the benefit of designated individuals or entities. Under the UN’s existing Afghanistan sanctions regime, 135 designated individuals are linked to the Taliban or the Haqqani network—which as Members will know is a UK-designated and proscribed organisation closely linked to the Taliban—and four Afghan Hawala businesses. Several other designated groups and individuals with links or possible links to the Taliban are also designated under the UN al-Qaeda/Daesh regime, UNSCR 1267.
As anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing supervisors, the Financial Conduct Authority and HMRC reminded obliged firms in their recent alerts about potential financial crime risks from Afghanistan and about their obligations to ensure that they appropriately monitor and assess transactions with Afghanistan to mitigate the risk of their firms being exploited for money laundering or terrorist financing purposes and to implement sanctions screening. Similarly, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, which sits within the Treasury, issued an alert reminding businesses that UN sanctions are already in place against individuals and entities associated with the Taliban. The alert advised businesses to exercise caution given the changing environment and reminded them of the continued existing obligations to carry out customer due diligence and implement sanction screening.
FATF will continue to analyse countries at risk and will likely look at those matters during its next plenary, which I believe is in October. The United Kingdom will play an active part in that conversation.
Mr McFadden
If we were to think of a country at greatest risk of being used for terrorist financing, Afghanistan and its new Government would be high in our thoughts. The Minister tells the Committee that the list is based on FATF’s work. I understand that, but presumably the Government have the power to go beyond FATF and say, “We think Afghanistan should be on the list.” Is there anything to stop the Government adding Afghanistan to the list, according to their own timetable, before FATF looks at the issue again?
John Glen
The purpose of this statutory instrument is to update according to the last assessment. We would not want, as a response to immediate events and without analysis or rigour, to add additional countries. I have explained at some length the considerable sanctions regime against proscribed individuals and the upgrading of the advice on its obligations to the regulated sector from HMRC and the FCA. Other jurisdictions such as the EU are not even upgraded to the list that I hope the Committee will agree to today. We do not rule anything out in the future, but we believe that FATF is rigorous. Indeed, the UK experienced rigorous analysis in 2018. We stand by the assessment and will see what it will do in October.
The hon. Member for Glenrothes mentioned wider issues with Scottish limited partnerships. The registration numbers thereof have diminished significantly recently, but as this is a BEIS competence I hope he will not mind my writing to him on it. I hope that satisfies the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Ministerial Correction
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Pow
The Government are moving on the issue, which I am sure hon. Friends and hon. Members will understand, because we are moving towards a recyclable, reusable, compostable era, with all plastic waste hopefully being of that nature by 2025…We have already introduced one of the toughest bans on microbeads and microplastics anywhere.
[Official Report, 8 September 2021, Vol. 700, c. 158WH.]
Letter of correction from the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow):
Errors have been identified in my contribution to the debate.
The correct information should have been:
Rebecca Pow
The Government are moving on the issue, which I am sure hon. Friends and hon. Members will understand, because we are moving towards a recyclable, reusable, compostable era, with all plastic packaging waste hopefully being of that nature by 2025…We have already introduced one of the toughest bans on microbeads anywhere.
Petition
Financial Conduct Authority
Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Third sitting)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Committee consisted of the following Members:
Chairs: † Sir Christopher Chope, Judith Cummins
† Bacon, Gareth (Orpington) (Con)
† Britcliffe, Sara (Hyndburn) (Con)
† Bruce, Fiona (Congleton) (Con)
† Donelan, Michelle (Minister for Universities)
† Glindon, Mary (North Tyneside) (Lab)
† Hardy, Emma (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
† Hayes, Sir John (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
† Holden, Mr Richard (North West Durham) (Con)
† Johnston, David (Wantage) (Con)
† Jones, Mr Kevan (North Durham) (Lab)
† McDonnell, John (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
† Nichols, Charlotte (Warrington North) (Lab)
† Russell-Moyle, Lloyd (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
† Simmonds, David (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
† Tomlinson, Michael (Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury)
Webb, Suzanne (Stourbridge) (Con)
† Western, Matt (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Kevin Maddison, Seb Newman, Committee Clerks
† attended the Committee
Witnesses:
Professor Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
Professor Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics, School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent (also Associate Fellow at Chatham House and Director of the Legatum Institute’s Centre for UK Prosperity)
Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future
Nicola Dandridge, Chief Executive, Office for Students
Public Bill Committee
Monday 13 September 2021
(Afternoon)
[Sir Christopher Chope in the Chair]
Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill
The Committee deliberated in private.
Examination of Witnesses
Professor Eric Kaufmann and Professor Matthew Goodwin gave evidence.
The Chair
Good afternoon. We will now hear oral evidence from Professor Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Professor Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Q181 Good afternoon to you both. Thank you for joining us today, and for your submissions. I have several questions to start with. Academic freedom is much referred to, and I have always viewed it as something of a privilege. Perhaps you could describe your definition, and why it has such an important status.
Professor Kaufmann: The right to question received wisdom, the right of academics to question—
The Chair
I am afraid the acoustics in this room are very poor. Do you think that you could speak up as though you were addressing a hall of 500 students?
Professor Kaufmann: I have not done that in a while. The freedom of academics to test and question received wisdom, including public commentary and extramural speech, is how I would define academic freedom. It needs to be protected to a greater extent, perhaps, than in other professions to allow academics really to challenge convention without risking a detriment. The special thing about universities is that you can do that.
Matt Western
Q Is that something that you earn as an academic?
Professor Kaufmann: No, it is something that you have as an academic. It needs to be protected. If it is something that you have to earn, that would suggest that there are two tiers. I think that even a temporary, adjunct academic should have it.
Professor Goodwin: I would agree. I would define academic freedom as the ability to challenge conventional wisdom, to voice unpopular opinions and to go against the grain without suffering adverse consequences from within your institution.
Matt Western
Q This question is for Professor Kaufmann. About 50 years ago, during the Red Lion Square disorders, Warwick University student Kevin Gately was sadly killed in trouble between fascists and a group called Liberation. He was the first person to die in public disorder for 55 years. Does the legislation protect our students of today and tomorrow, to avoid those sorts of confrontations in future?
Professor Kaufmann: I do not think anyone can predict. That is a public order question and the determination of the risk would have to be made by the police, for example. I think this is quite far from the situation that has given rise to the need for the Bill. It is not really a public order Bill; it is much more about protecting the everyday rights of academics to speak out, speak their beliefs and research without detriment. Yes, if there is likely to be some kind of public order incident, the police will have to give advice on that.
Matt Western
Q That protest was about no-platforming, so I think it is related to the legislation—I am not raising a random thing with you. Do you see in the Bill consequences for the future of free speech and hate speech on our campuses?
Professor Kaufmann: The Bill will have a very important effect. Sometimes the point is missed when we focus in on a few incidents of no-platforming. Really, the big, big issue here is the monumental chilling effect that academics feel: in a UCU-sponsored study, 35% of academics—UCU members—said that they felt restricted in saying what they believe. That is 35,000 academics. In a King’s study, 25% of students claim that they will not say what they believe—that is 500,000 people. We are talking about an absolutely massive problem here, and I think it is very important to get that point across. Issues around no-platforming are the tip of a vast iceberg of chilling effects and self-censorship that I believe is distorting the truth-seeking mission of the university. The university has to be a place where we can pursue truths, even if they go against conventions and mores of the time. The no-platforming incidence is really the crux of the issue, which the Bill will address.
Matt Western
Q Professor Goodwin, we have heard a lot about self-censoring. I am not an academic or a scholar of Freud, but he suggested that we all self-censor all the time, so what is the issue here?
Professor Goodwin: I will speak from personal experience to give you an idea. I publicly accepted the vote for Brexit in an environment where only around 10% of academics either supported Brexit or tend to support conservative or right-wing political parties, and that really makes me an outlier. The only reason why I, and colleagues who might hold gender critical views or a more nuanced interpretation of British history, have been able to speak up about some of those issues is because we have often been professors with job security and tenure, and are very difficult to sack.
If you are a junior academic or are on a fixed-term contract, speaking out about issues that go against the monoculture in many of our universities comes with very real consequences, and I know that from the many emails that I have received from junior academics and members of staff at universities who simply feel unable to voice their true views on those issues because they are fearful of what will happen to their careers. Indeed, in some cases—including friends of mine—they have been sacked or disinvited from workshops. As Professor Kaufmann points out, the temptation in this debate is to say, “There are only a few cases. Isn’t this about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut?” When you are looking at rigorous and robust surveys that suggest that one in three academics are self-censoring, that is a very big problem in a country that has long prided itself on having some of the best universities in the world, which are based on viewpoint diversity—being able to challenge, critique and voice unpopular opinions. However, many of my colleagues do not feel able to do that, as you heard last week and as I am sure you will hear this week, as well.
Matt Western
Q Do you not think that we are all outliers in one way or another?
Professor Goodwin: When you look at institutions that lean very heavily in one particular direction— 75%, 80% leaning toward the left of the political spectrum— we know from research that those kinds of monocultures also encourage people to become more radical over time; Cass Sunstein, for example, has written a book about that.
However, we are also dealing with institutions that are responsible for the next generation. I would want my students to disagree with me on a whole range of issues, but I would also want them to be exposed to very different viewpoints throughout their university experience: viewpoints on the left, on the right, from above and from below. Ultimately, that is what gives us the ability to think critically and it strengthens our democracy. At the moment, however, we know clearly from the King’s study—I think you are speaking to the author later— that a quarter of all university students in the UK are self-censoring, which is a very depressing statistic.
Matt Western
Q You have talked of the fear of many left-wing academics of normalisation, whereby giving a platform to fascists and the like would normalise their views. Whether or not their views become normalised, would you be prepared to see an overt fascist speak on your campus and, if so, how do you think that would square with university management’s myriad duties to student welfare and social cohesion?
Professor Goodwin: I can speak from personal experience; I have invited people from across the political spectrum to speak to my students over the years. I have had Conservative, Labour and UK Independence party candidates come to speak to students. I would have invited somebody from the British National party or the National Front, were they available.
Those experiences taught me and demonstrated very clearly that students are more than capable of being exposed to a range of different views and of challenging those views, because ultimately we are here to develop critical thinkers; we are not here to put students in ideological monocultures that only give them one view of the world.
One thing I would say, which I think is a very important point for this Committee, is this: if you look at the United States and at levels of trust in universities in America over the last 10 years, you will see that they have declined significantly, as this debate has become very polarised. The last thing that I think we would want in the UK is to repeat that experience, because people are increasingly looking at higher education institutions as being very political institutions—being very lopsided. It would be a great shame if that were to happen in this country.
Matt Western
Q Professor Kaufmann, I will put a question to you, if I may. In the Policy Exchange report that you co-authored, a very negligible number of academics were ready to support a dismissal campaign; according to my notes, the figure was 12.5%. If so few are willing to support such campaigns, are right-leaning academics’ fears about cancel culture not just a backlash reaction to a general left-leaning academy?
Professor Kaufmann: That is a really good point: very few academics—only about one in 10—are willing to support a given cancel campaign, which is good news.
The problem, in a way, is that all it really takes is only a very small minority of radical activists to get, let us say, an attack on a gender critical feminist. I mean, these are small, tightly organised networks, but they are able to move mountains because nobody necessarily wants to stand up to them.
Most academics are not in favour of this stuff, but they are also scared to stand up to it, because if you stand up to people who are attacking gender critical feminists, you might be labelled as a transphobe. You are not a transphobe, but by critiquing people who claim to be acting for the benefit of the trans community, you fear that that aura will stick to you. What happened at Cambridge, with Arif Ahmed, is instructive. You have heard from him, and essentially he struggled to get 25 signatures of people who were willing to put something to a vote on whether to change the wording of the university’s policy. Once it was put to the vote, it passed by 80%.
There is a lot of reluctance; people do not want to stick their heads above the parapet. That is the issue that we face. I have looked at survey data on this: an academic individual is actually more pro-free speech than a non-academic individual, when you account for their ideology; a far leftist who is not an academic is less supportive of free speech than a far leftist academic.
The issue, however, is that in the university we have such a skew, because most of these claims of coming from the far left. Because they make up 25% to 30% of academic staff in the social sciences and humanities and because they make up a significant share of students, we are going to see a lot more of these challenges to free speech. It is not because academics are any more anti-free speech than non-academics—in fact, it is the reverse. It is just that it is a function of the ideological distribution of academics. That is why we see more of these events in universities.
Matt Western
Q I have a final question for Professor Kaufmann. Why is it that, as you made clear in your October 2020 article for UnHerd, active mobilisation by representative Government is necessary to reverse critical race theory’s grip on elite institutions? Is not a softer approach more desirable?
Professor Kaufmann: On critical race theory?
Matt Western
Yes.
Professor Kaufmann: I never endorsed any Government action on critical race theory in universities—only in schools where the teaching is compulsory and you have to pass the element. In a university, it absolutely should be taught; people are free to take it and to teach it. It is a different thing: you are dealing with adults. In a school where every pupil has to be taught critical race theory, we have a compelled speech issue, a freedom of conscience issue.
I think critical race theory is a conspiracy theory. I am quite open about that. However, there is high critical race theory, which is interesting, is worth teaching and has some insights. The vulgar critical race theory that is appearing in schools and some diversity training, where they separate pupils by race and say that some are oppressors and some are oppressed, is nonsense. However, in a university classroom, people are free to take what they want and teach what they want. In schools, where we are not dealing with adults and it is compulsory, there is a freedom of conscience issue. I make that distinction very clearly.
The Minister for Universities (Michelle Donelan)
Q Thank you both for coming in. Professor Kaufmann, in the Policy Exchange paper you co-authored you recommended a statutory tort. I wanted to ask you why you think that that is so important, and how you think it will work in conjunction with the Office for Students complaints scheme.
Professor Kaufmann: It is important for academics who might find themselves in a situation in which they are disciplined for speech to have recourse against their institution if that institution is not upholding their rights to freedom of speech. The point of the statutory tort is simply to allow an avenue for those with grievances that cannot be met within their institutions. Very often, I am sad to say, many institutions are not doing a successful job of upholding this right for many academics —hence the need for recourse to the court system.
Michelle Donelan
Q This is a question for both of you. How do you think that we can best ensure an atmosphere on campus that allows difficult and controversial topics to be discussed while maintaining an inclusive environment?
Professor Goodwin: From my experience, this debate is already actually beginning to bring about some important culture change. The shift from protecting to promoting is incredibly important. Universities are, by their nature, very bureaucratic organisations, and, once this change gives a signal about the renewed importance of protecting academic freedom, it will have a profound impact on universities. I can speak from experience of my university, the University of Kent, which is already having a vigorous debate about academic freedom and I am sure will emerge as a sector leader in promoting academic freedom. It is reassuring to see the way in which this national discussion is already bringing about change.
For many of my colleagues, who have in some cases been sacked, disinvited, intimated, harassed, undermined and mocked, this piece of legislation is very important, for obvious reasons. We are not talking about small numbers, as Professor Kaufmann points out. I know from personal experience that having the ability to go to an external entity to ensure that cases are explored and examined will play a critical role in ensuring viewpoint diversity within the sector. I think it is already having an impact, and I suspect that, much like the legislation around equalities, we will probably find that within a few years universities will suddenly be arranging league tables of academic freedom and all the kinds of things that tend to come with changes that are brought about by law.
There is a massive opportunity to emerge globally as a leader in the promotion of academic freedom in a debate that is global. The Canadians, the French and the Americans are talking about it, and nobody has really got a hold of it and demonstrated what it means in practice, so I think there is an opportunity for the UK to be that model.
Michelle Donelan
Q Professor Kaufmann, did you want to come in on that?
Professor Kaufmann: I am Canadian, and it is interesting to look at what has happened in the province of Ontario. Ontario and Alberta have both adopted elements of this kind of legislation, and it has been very ineffective because it has not gone the same distance that this legislation has. In the province of Ontario, all universities have to adopt a sort of Chicago principles-style free speech document and issue an annual free speech report, and there is an ombudsman for complaints. However, there is not anything like a director of academic freedom to spearhead the process, so even though there is an ombudsman, that individual is in fact not on board with this agenda. Therefore, when people have made complaints, they have gone nowhere.
It is incredibly important, therefore, to have a director of academic freedom who believes in promoting academic freedom, can see this through and can proactively make sure the legislation is applied. That is an absolutely critical part of this legislation. That is one of the reasons that this is so path-breaking. William McNally, who is a professor in a Canadian university called Wilfrid Laurier, looks at the UK and says, “I wish we could have something like the UK’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.” I think this could very well be world-leading.
Michelle Donelan
Q My last question is to both of you. What is the biggest threat, as you perceive it, to freedom of speech in our universities?
Professor Goodwin: I think there are multiple threats relating to debates we are having around the role of China; indeed, that was in the newspapers again over the weekend, relating to the University of Cambridge. We also have parallel issues around the ability of gender-critical academics, some of whom you heard from last week, to be able just to conduct themselves on campus without requiring security, which is an incredible state of affairs for anyone to be in. There is also the ability of some of our colleagues in history and psychology to challenge conventional wisdom on issues ranging from the role of Britain’s empire through to intelligence and unconscious bias testing—you name it. All that should be on the table, and we should be interrogating, exploring and examining it. The threats are multi-faceted and are not just coming from one direction. That underlines the need for some action in this area.
Professor Kaufmann: I would add that even though conservative academics are reporting much higher levels of self-censorship—two to three times as high as the left—it is also the case that this is not just about protecting conservatives. Certain types of left-wing research around the middle east, for example, and Islam will also benefit from this protection. It is worth noting that. In our Policy Exchange study, we had a number of left-wing academics making that exact point. They are worried about some off-campus groups such as Turning Point UK. They are worried about Prevent and discussions around Israel-Palestine, so this Bill will benefit not just conservatives.
Of course, it is the case that political minorities are reporting much higher levels of self-censorship. For example, in the King’s study—you will be hearing from one of the authors later—they asked about the statement:
“Students with conservative views are reluctant to express them at my university”.
Conservative students agreed by a 59:26 ratio. There is a much higher level of censorship and chilling going on for Conservatives, but it is not only Conservatives—certain kinds of left-wing speech are also being chilled. The Bill will benefit both kinds of speech.
The Chair
More than half of the time allocated has already been used up. I hope that colleagues will make their questions very brief, in the hope of encouraging succinct answers.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Q Professor Kaufmann, you used the words “chilling effect” and “tip of the iceberg”. We heard this the other day from other witnesses. Getting your head around the idea of self-censorship is like having blancmange in your hands. Frankly, there is no firm evidence for it. My problem with the Bill is that it is a very un-Conservative piece of legislation. It is about involving the state directly in the running of universities. You mentioned the director for freedom of speech, and that may be fine, under the present Conservative Government, but, as I said last week—
The Chair
I am going to interrupt, because we are not taking evidence from you. We are trying to invite the witnesses to express their views.
Mr Jones
As you cannot challenge the director, if you had an authoritarian Government, that could potentially be very difficult. The other point, to Professor Goodwin, is on employment: the Bill will not stop academics being sacked. Surely there should be something in the Bill, or some change in terms of employment law, to give protection to those individuals you talked about? Finally, Professor Kaufmann, on the tort issue: does the Bill not open universities up to a huge amount of litigation? For example, the United Front—a front for the Chinese Communist party—operates widely on our campuses today; will it not use the Bill as a mechanism to ensure that it gets across its ideas and arguments, while being possibly well-funded by the Chinese Communist party and Chinese Government? Is there not a danger of giving weapons to our opponents, and doing the opposite of what we are trying to achieve?
Professor Kaufmann: There are some really good questions there; the one about the state is interesting. It can seem paradoxical that the state is needed to protect individual liberty, but actually it has happened many times in the past. Think of society as three layers, Government, institutions and individuals, instead of two, Government and individuals. The institutions can become illiberal, in which case the Government need to step in to protect the liberty of the individuals. In the United States, in the early 1960s, there were universities that segregated black and white students—essentially barring black students from entering the university, such as at the University of Mississippi. The US federal Government had to more or less step in and desegregate those universities, and they essentially violated the universities’ autonomy to do so. That is an example of where the Government were needed to protect the freedoms of students.
Mr Jones
Q Also McCarthyism, which was the reverse of that.
Professor Kaufmann: Sure, McCarthyism. All I am saying is: it is not unusual. If you have a corrupt police department or a school that is taken into special measures, government action is needed to protect liberties. This is clearly one of those situations.
I do not think that universities can reform themselves. The pressures on them are simply too powerful. I have seen this up close, as a head of department: in committee meetings, no one will speak up against what is an illiberal policy but will make them look like a racist or transphobe, and so the policy gets through. In the US, they have had speech codes in universities since the late 1980s. There have been complaints about them—they are a violation of the first amendment right to free speech—but they persist because the institutional forces are too strong. You need an outside force to come in to reform the system. Government action is absolutely central to this, and that is why the Bill is so important.
Professor Goodwin: To keep it brief, I think the Cambridge vote was very revealing. Publicly, you have an academic who struggles to get two dozen signatures, but the moment you ask academics to express their view in an anonymous situation under secret ballot you find that most academics are willing to speak up and challenge the consensus. That is, to me, direct evidence of the chilling effect, and the way in which once you remove the threat of being exposed people are more than willing to challenge that orthodoxy.
If the current system with regard to sacking and dismissal were working, we would not be having this conversation. We would not have had dozens of academics appearing in the newspapers. There was another one this weekend from the University of Bristol who was accused of being Islamophobic. The university had ruled that he was not Islamophobic, but had none the less removed his course in response to student satisfaction.
That is another example of how, to be frank, the broader system needs a good overhaul. We have generated a market-based system that is overwhelmingly skewed around student satisfaction rather than the pursuit of truth and intellectual exploration. If the current system were working, we would not be having this conversation. It is why, on the director of academic freedom, people who are dismissed for, they feel, political reasons need to have somebody to whom they can turn to explore their case and interrogate it.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Q Thank you, gentlemen, for coming today. The Bill speaks of freedom of speech in relation to students as well as staff; however, academic freedom in the Bill is defined in relation only to academic staff. Should that definition also include students? I am thinking not only that academic freedom is important generally for anyone at a university, but that some students, such as doctoral students, may also be tutoring.
Professor Goodwin: My view would be that the protection of academic freedom should apply not just to established academics but, in particular in some cases, to academics who are at the beginning of their career and perhaps on fixed-term contracts, or who perhaps are doctoral students. They are the most likely to self-censor, for obvious reasons. They do not want to irritate their colleagues. They do not want to suffer reputational consequences.
My view would be that it should also apply to students, given that we have around a quarter, if we look at the King’s study, for example—I would add lots of emails from students in my 20-year career of teaching in universities—of students feeling that they cannot speak out about particular issues. I think you heard from Tom Simpson who made that point regarding his experience at Oxford, so I think that students definitely need to be included.
Professor Kaufmann: I agree with that absolutely.
Fiona Bruce
Thank you. That gives me time for a second question, if I may, Sir Christopher.
Fiona Bruce
Q You reflected on the implications of exercising academic freedom. I think Professor Goodwin hinted on the loss of posts by some colleagues. I would be interested if you could reflect a little more on that, because it is a very important issue. Should a right to apply to the employment tribunal be included in the Bill? You said that going to an external entity is important.
Professor Goodwin: This is how it typically works: a group of students will make a complaint about an academic. They may take that academic’s words out of context. They may imply that something was said that may not have been said—who knows? That academic is typically investigated and, as we saw in the case at Edinburgh recently, they are suspended and asked to leave campus for six weeks or so while the case is investigated. There is a reason why academics says that the punishment is the process. The reputation of that academic is now in tatters. Nobody will hire that academic. His or her chances of getting a research grant are probably minimal, and those of getting published have been severely damaged.
That individual is tainted. We are tainted simply for making some of the arguments that we have made today. The protections and the right to recourse that we give to academics who find themselves in that situation should be as strong as possible. Our entire world is dependent on reputation. Everything we do is under our name. If allegations are made that may even be free of evidence, the onus is very much on the academic to defend themselves against something that often has detrimental consequences.
I personally know many professors, for example, who are on medication to sleep because of the stress and strain that comes with this new culture that we have had. In America, Jonathan Haidt’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” has documented this in detail. From 2010 onwards we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of student protests, and much more robust, assertive activities to try to constrain what can and cannot be said on campus. I will allow Eric to come in.
Professor Kaufmann: I want to add one thing. The nature of the academic employment market is such that any permanent academic job in a lot of universities will get 100 or 200 applications for each position. To get a position in your field of specialty in a place you want to be is not impossible, but it is extremely difficult. If you lose at it, it is not enough to pay somebody a year’s salary. This is why we need recourse to an employment tribunal that can recommend reinstatement. You need reinstatement, not just a year of salary. A year of salary is not going to cut it when you are unemployable, so it is vital that this amendment goes through.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
Q I am going to ask the witnesses to be as brief as possible, because there are hundreds of things that I would like to ask, but I will try to limit them to just a couple. Professor Kaufmann, in your written evidence, you stated:
“Only in this manner can academics have the confidence that they are protected from ideological opponents who wish to punish them for their views.”
I support you in wanting to protect academics from ideological opponents. How can we ensure the independence of the director of freedom of speech? Interestingly, further on in your written evidence, you refer to an ombudsman system in other countries. How can we ensure the independence of the director of freedom of speech to prevent “ideological opponents” who wish to punish academics?
Professor Kaufmann: All that the director of academic freedom has to do is enforce the letter of the law.
Emma Hardy
Q Sorry, I am going to quickly interrupt. To enforce the letter of the law, should the director be legally trained? Should they be a legal expert if their duty is to enforce the letter of the law?
Professor Kaufmann: No, I do not think you need to have a lawyer in there. You just need somebody who understands the spirit of the legislation—it is not too difficult—but who is proactive.
Emma Hardy
Q But they would have to make decisions on where freedom of speech falls between the Equality Act 2010, this piece of legislation and of course the Counter-terrorism and Security Act 2015. Would you not therefore presume that they should have at least some knowledge of the law if they make rulings?
Professor Kaufmann: I think their office and the legal advice that they take can guide them. Those kinds of details—
Emma Hardy
Q So you would expect them to be surrounded by lawyers who could give them legal advice in their role?
Professor Kaufmann: They could take legal advice, certainly.
Emma Hardy
Q Provided by the Office for Students to accompany the director?
Professor Kaufmann: I am probably not enough of a policy wonk to know where such an individual would sit. Would you contract it out or have it in-house? That is a decision for somebody else to make, but I think that you need to make a legally informed decision that is in alignment with what a court would decide and what the intent of the legislation is.
Emma Hardy
Q You foresee the director making decisions in alignment with what a court would decide, not within a court, so they make legal decisions, but not within a court. Is that correct?
Professor Kaufmann: No, I think they proactively apply the law so that it does not go to a court. Another system could be to allow everybody to sue, but that is reactive. It is very difficult and expensive to go through these court cases. We have seen that in the US in first amendment court cases.
Emma Hardy
It is hugely expensive.
Professor Kaufmann: I would much rather be proactive. Also, you need it to be proactive in order to give academics assurance. If they have to sue—[Interruption.]
The Chair
Emma, would you please allow some academic freedom to this witness? You may disagree with what he says, but you must allow him to answer your question.
Emma Hardy
Q I will. I would just ask you to be as precise as possible.
Professor Kaufmann: Of course.
Emma Hardy
You are talking about how this director of freedom will have some knowledge of the law but will not be a lawyer, and will make law-based decisions but not in a court. How should they obtain this position, then, to ensure this academic freedom and prevent ideological opponents from being punished?
Professor Kaufmann: The criteria would involve somebody who is knowledgeable about the sector, who would also be on board with the mission of protecting academic freedom and would care about it. I think those are the two most important qualities for an individual.
Emma Hardy
Q I agree, but how would you foresee them obtaining this? Who is going to appoint them? How are they going to reach this position? As we know, this position is the first time that a higher education regulator will have the power to intervene in student unions. This is a massive expansion of the state’s powers over universities. Who gets to choose who this person is?
Professor Kaufmann: I wish I were an expert. There has to be some sort of precedent in terms of these bodies. I guess they would be advertised; you would have the criteria. The Office for Students would presumably be involved, and the Government would be involved. That is the best I can give you.
Emma Hardy
Q Would you expect the Government of the day to be involved in appointing the director of free speech?
Professor Kaufmann: Yes, I would. I think it is important that they are accountable to the voters. They need to be sure that the person is upholding the values that are important for this role, because I think there is a problem that sometimes, bodies can be captured by a particular stream of opinion. As we know, this can happen in academia, so you have to have a check on that.
The Chair
I am going to stop this now and ask Gareth Bacon to ask a question, because we have only three minutes left.
Gareth Bacon
Q Thank you very much, Sir Christopher. This is to Professor Goodwin. I graduated from the University of Kent 25 years ago, and my experiences in Canterbury are very different from what you have described. Do you agree that in a free and democratic society, the best way to deal with views you disagree with or, indeed, find repugnant is to be able to openly challenge them, debate them, and expose their weaknesses in an open debate?
Professor Goodwin: I do agree. I would just add on the record that most of the problems I have encountered personally have not come from within the University of Kent, but from within the broader higher education sector.
Gareth Bacon
Q My final question—I am conscious of time—is to both witnesses, if I may. Both of you, in common with academics who gave evidence last week, have talked about the chilling effect that is going through academia. If the Government were to drop this Bill and take no action, what do you foresee being the long to medium-term, five to 10-year consequences?
Professor Goodwin: Again, just to revert to personal experience, I would certainly leave academia, and I know that many other of my colleagues would probably come to the same conclusion. I think there are a large number of researchers, junior and senior, who now feel that viewpoint diversity is no longer really in existence or being protected adequately within Britain’s institutions, and that is a very depressing thing for somebody who has spent 20 years building up their academic career to say.
I know for a fact that many of my colleagues no longer feel particularly welcome, safe, secure, or ultimately able to say what they really think, and for every one of me, there are 20 or 30 people behind me who do not feel able to come and speak and voice their concerns as we are doing today. For every Kathleen Stock, there are 50 other gender-critical academics. I had a message from one this morning who is going through a very similar case and is being chased out of a department for reasons similar to those Kathleen raised. The most frustrating thing, just to put this on the record, is for people like me to hear people who are not in higher education say that this is all a myth and that it does not exist. They clearly do not have an understanding of what is happening in higher education.
Professor Kaufmann: To reiterate, I think that what will happen is that the truth-seeking mission of the university will be warped, because many questions that we need to ask will not be asked and many answers that we need are not going to be given, for career reasons.
On Matt’s point about the idea that this is somehow a moral panic or a new thing, a recent paper by a leading Harvard political scientist, Pippa Norris, called “Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?”, was published in Political Studies a few months ago. She asked three questions: “Have the following got better or worse in the last five years: academic freedom to teach and research; respect for open debate from diverse perspectives; pressures to be politically correct?” The modal answer, even from left-wing academics, was that those things had got worse in the last five years. For those on the right, the percentage was in the 80s. We have a problem, in that people are saying that it has got worse in the last five years, and the King’s surveys of students found similar. If we do not address this, the truth-seeking mission of the university if going to be severely impacted.
The Chair
Thank you very much indeed, both of you. We now have to move on to the next session. If any colleagues have complaints about the length of time allocated, I am told that they must be referred to the Whips, as they were the people who dictated that there should be such limited time to hear your expert evidence.
Examination of Witness
Sunder Katwala gave evidence.
The Chair
Mr Katwala, please could you introduce yourself for the record?
Sunder Katwala: I am Sunder Katwala and am director of British Future, which is an independent, non-partisan think-tank and charity that engages the public on identity and related issues.
Matt Western
Q Thank you, Mr Katwala, for joining us today. I want to ask you a few questions. You have put on record your concern about this Bill opening up universities and student unions to being sued an unlimited number of times by people such as David Irving. Could you expand on those concerns?
Sunder Katwala: The underlying thought is that the legitimate concern of the Bill is to protect academic freedom expansively, to symbolically reinforce that that is the case, and to provide new mechanisms to deal with disputes. Everybody who is interested in academic freedom would say that it is in law and we should be protecting it, and that is being driven by the fear that there is overcreep from the side that wants to take away academic freedom. In terms of how you implement that, if you say, “Let’s defend lawful speech because lawful speech is free speech, and lawful speech is academic freedom,” that sounds very good, as long as you can answer the question: is all lawful speech something we want to defend as academic freedom, or are there categories of lawful speech that we do not want to defend?
Most racist and antisemitic speech does not meet the legal threshold of being unlawful. Intimidation and violence are unlawful, and other forms of stirring up are unlawful, but holocaust denial is not unlawful. We may wish to stigmatise it—we would not want it on our charity board or in our political parties, but different institutions have different rules. In this case, what are the principles and categories by which we might say that there is a form of lawful speech that we should not be protecting under academic freedom because it is inimical to academic freedom? That is the tension.
For example, if the Government say to universities that they should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, that is an important thing to do for antisemitism. There are two reasons to do that: one is symbolism—antisemitism is bad—and the other is to prohibit on campus speech that is currently lawful but also antisemitic. Comparing the Israeli Government to Nazi Germany, for example, is a lawful position that we wish to stigmatise. If you have this measure and the IHRA definition, you have potential tension at the boundary between the lawful speech that you are trying to exclude and the lawful speech that you are trying to protect.
Matt Western
Q Briefly, what sort of impact do you think this is going to have on student unions?
Sunder Katwala: With student unions, it is there to push back against not inviting, disinviting or protesting against someone whose political views you do not share. Wide boundaries are good, but are the boundaries of lawful speech exactly the boundaries you want to protect as academic freedom, or are there some hard cases? I will come on to this, but I think there are probably three different sets of hard cases where the boundary gets complicated.
Matt Western
Q You said you can imagine cases of hypothetically cancelled speakers claiming or pursuing hypothetically lost fees. Will you explain that further, and what amendments would you like to be made to the legislation in order to combat it?
Sunder Katwala: What I am not clear about at this stage concerning the legislation, the principles, the operationalisation and so on is how far these things are going to be broadly symbolic—so that they are just there—or how far it goes. What are the damages? If I am disinvited because I am David Irving—I have published a book and then I was disinvited because people read the High Court judgment—what is the material loss to David Irving? I suspect that it is quite small, but we do not know. That is the level of detail that the legislation does not take us to.
Matt Western
Q Could that include reputational damage?
Sunder Katwala: Yes. Mr Irving has a very low reputation, because the High Court has said what it said about him, so him not being allowed to proceed with his event at the University of Cambridge and so on would add to the reprehensible reputation of a man with an already low reputation. There might be other cases in which somebody loses significant amounts of reputation by being cancelled for the first time. This is a level of operational detail that, obviously, I do not think that the legislation is designed to get to. What are the scales of these kinds of interventions?
Matt Western
Q I am interested in your view of how this will interface with the proposed online harms Bill. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Sunder Katwala: The online harms Bill has the opposite principle—again, it is a good principle—which is that there is some lawful speech that is reprehensible and we wish to stigmatise it, even though it is lawful. The example that I put to one of the social media platforms was, “No blacks in the England team—keep our team white.” It is lawful, reprehensible racist speech. It is also within the rules of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at the moment, and they are embarrassed about that and looking into it. I feel that an event at a student union, “No blacks in the England team—keep our team white,” does not seem to be the kind of event that we want to protect, and yet that is lawful but reprehensible speech, which we want to stigmatise, even though it is free speech within the law.
If I sit in my living room or go to the pub and say, “Marcus Rashford isn’t English—keep our team white,” I am not breaking the law. I might be if I put it on the internet in particular ways, but I am not in that case—I have not hit the threshold for racist abuse. If I sent it to him with the wrong kind of epithets, maybe I would. This is a question of wide boundaries for sure, but are there hard cases for how far those boundaries go?
Matt Western
Q You heard the previous session. There was a lot of talk from the previous two witnesses about self-censoring and so on. Do you share those concerns, or do you think, as I was perhaps suggesting, that we all self-censor to a certain extent? As we heard from a witness last week, that is just the way of the world—you get on with it and you make your case.
Sunder Katwala: The harder question about self-censorship is: what will these mechanisms do about self-censorship? They might change the culture in a very positive way, because everyone feels reinforced and is not worried about stigmatisation, but they might change the culture in a rather negative way, where everyone is bringing cases and counter-cases against each other, and the processes, the punishment, could get worse if we have a lot of tit-for-tat things. There might be something in the culture of a regulator about the treatment of, say, vexatious cases as opposed to substantive cases, which might be quite important if the stress actually comes from the possibility of the cases. Because self-censorship and chilling effects are cultural points, it is not obvious to me that we know how these mechanisms affect that broader cultural plane.
Michelle Donelan
Q Your recent research suggests that more divisive voices and controversial issues are often amplified online. Do you agree that that influences how freely the majority of people feel able to express themselves?
Sunder Katwala: On the whole, in terms of the British public and the general population, these current issues of free speech and academic freedom are important issues in our political and media culture and so on; they are not gripping the broad public. It is a much less heated and polarised debate about these issues in Britain than in the United States of America. It might be the case that in five, 10 or 15 years, we have a much more heightened culture, but there is a very broad balance, a middle, in British society. When we have engaged in conversations about the worry about people being called racist before they have been racist, but also about wanting decent debates about race and integration that do not cross boundaries, a great many people are trying to strike those balances in a way that is good for freedom of speech but has boundaries.
A lot of people think political correctness can go too far if you take it too far, but they will then say, “But it had a point in the first place.” To give an example, research by More in Common found that seven out of 10 people in this county think that political correctness can be a problem if you overapply it, overreach with it and go for trivia. Seven out of 10 people think that hate speech can be a problem, because we are letting too much go. The median person in Britain thinks that both those things are true. At the same time, they are probably frustrated that we are removing episodes of “Fawlty Towers” from archives. It is entirely trivial, while we are letting neo-Nazi content run riot on Facebook. There is awareness of this tension, and frustration that you could overreach in different directions.
What is much more the case in America is that people have picked a side. Therefore, they are always on one side of every question. We definitely have the possibility of having that culture among the most politically engaged—the people who spend most of their time on the internet, and perhaps the people who write the most newspaper columns—but most people are quite frustrated with that, because they would see that there are good public goals here that might be complicated to get right.
Michelle Donelan
Q I will ask just one more question, because I know that a number of Members want to come in. Do you agree that it is important to create an atmosphere on our campuses whereby difficult issues can be openly discussed, to create the critical thinkers of tomorrow?
Sunder Katwala: Completely, yes. It is the question of whether there are any boundaries where you would be allowing reprehensible content that undermined academic freedom, liberal democracy or the role of the university, if you did not get those difficult cases right.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
Q Thank you very much for your evidence. I should declare my interests, as I have done in previous sessions—Sussex University, the University of Bradford and the University and College Union.
Is there a problem that expanding this to student unions might have detrimental effects? Student unions traditionally allow students to self-organise ginger groups, different political groups and so forth. If you require the Conservative club to enforce academic freedom, does not that make a mockery of having a club of Conservatives in which they can talk and debate issues among themselves?
Sunder Katwala: In principle, I do not see why it should do so—unless you have organisation of it wrong. As I see it, the principle is that the Bill should protect the difficult conversations that different people want to have. In theory, it should be blocking people saying, “I don’t like you saying that about Winston Churchill or the British empire—that’s too tough,” as well as stopping other things. But the devil is in the detail.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Our last witness, Matthew Goodwin, said that he wants the Bill to stop people making a mockery of academics. Last week, Dr Ahmed said that he wanted the Bill to allow him and his colleagues to be able mock religion and different people’s ideas, and Trevor Phillips said that he wants the Bill to stop people calling him racist on campus. Is this a Bill in which everyone has put their desires but which does not actually fulfil any of them?
Sunder Katwala: Mocking academics is part of free speech, so I do not think the Bill will stop people mocking academics.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Exactly.
Finally, I want to talk about self-censorship. According to Facebook, 71% of its users self-censor. The UCU study says that only 35% of academics self-censor, and the King’s study says that, among right-wing academics, the figure is only 32%. Would that be evidence that, actually, right-wing academics are the least likely to self-censor and there is no problem?
Sunder Katwala: We are looking for cultural change whereby we have more confidence in having difficult conversations. The way to do that—I have tried doing this, and it is quite an interesting thing to do—is to say to people, “Give me a list of things that you think we can’t talk about any more. Let’s stay in the room and see whether we can have a conversation about them.” I have a concern: do we have that conversation with the right boundaries and the right culture? This is where I think people are balancers on these issues.
For example, people think there is a view about language that we do not want to use and there are labels not to use about people. Political correctness has civility and kindness, and it has a value for people, but when it is a code and you did not get the memo last week and now you are on the wrong side of it, people get a bit worried about how fast it moves.
I am not an expert on this, but, for example, people find this with debates about gender and sexuality. They know that we have changed our minds about the way we treat gay people in our society, but they find that very confusing and they do not know where to go to have that conversation and ask people about that. It is that navigation. Maybe we should be putting more emphasis into seeing how we have these sites of constructive engagement with difference, rather than having a regulatory process about who do you want to fine.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Finally, what you have just explained seems laudable and admirable, and what I want every university to be doing. Just so we are clear: are you saying that providing a legal tort process could actually undermine the ability to get people around to have a decent conversation, because they will be running to the courts?
Sunder Katwala: We do not know what the cultural impact of that will be, and whether that will be weaponised or used sensibly. I think the culture of the regulator in dealing with vexatious cases will be quite important. We see it in the sector of charities now and other things; we probably see it in politics, as well. If you create a regulatory thing, then people want to use up the time of people they do not like by reporting them to things. Pushing back against that, while doing the job it is trying to do, is important.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
Q You do not work at a university and you are a journalist by background, are you not?
Sunder Katwala: I have worked in think-tanks, journalism and so on.
Sir John Hayes
Q The previous witness said that no one who had not worked in a university could quite understand both the climate of fear and the culture of silence that prevails in many universities. Do you think you are better placed to make a judgment about that than someone who works in a university or not?
Sunder Katwala: No, I am not. I am not trying to bring you evidence on that. At the level of public policy, we are trying to decide on the principles we should be legislating for in our country, about where is the expanse of free speech we want to protect and where are there dangerous misuses by people who are claiming to use free speech to do something to undermine liberal democracy. That is my work. I am not telling you what is going on in universities.
Sir John Hayes
Q In common with my colleagues, I have to declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am an academic at Bolton University.
The point you are making is that some speech should be prohibited that is legally lawful. Who would arbitrate that? Would it be university authorities, Governments or the mass of students? Once you get into the territory that you are describing, which could lead to a liberal tyranny, as I am sure you appreciate, who is going to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable, if it is not the law?
Sunder Katwala: All sorts of institutions make these decisions. The Labour party, the Conservative party and the Democratic Unionist party make these decisions. They prohibit people from saying things that are lawful and reprehensible. Newspapers make these decisions about lawful speech. As I say, social media companies are coming under more pressure. What should happen in the universities? Let me give you the three case versions that I think you should examine.
One is where the content is directly discriminatory: this would be the clash with the Equality Act. If somebody said, “Let’s have a lecture on how women are not fit to study maths and sciences,” and they brought the Taliban over to advocate their view on that, you could say, “Let’s just stand up and tell them that’s wrong.” Fine, we could do that, but, as with the Government’s position on antisemitism, there might be some kinds of versions of that—like no gays, Jews or blacks on campus, or whatever—where the responsibilities to treat students equally might be undermined.
My second category would be where people are advocating against academic freedom. If I held a campus event called “The burning books party” on 5 November, I might be burning the books that Hitler burned or burning “Mein Kampf,” but burning books or advocating the burning of books is against academic freedom. Should we have that debate? Clearly, burning a book is, in a sense, freedom of expression of a particular kind, but I don’t think we would invite people to have bonfires of books on campus. Would that be a public order offence or not? There might be an argument saying, “There are some books we should ban,” or “Women should not be allowed to write books. My vision of society is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.” That is a stupid view, but it is a lawful view. Are we protecting that as academic freedom?
My third case would be very extreme conspiracy theories. Here we have a real dilemma. We know about Galileo, Darwin and so on, but when it comes to 9/11 “Truthers” and people who have David Icke’s view of covid—that it does not exist anywhere; it is just a plot by Bill Gates—where is the balance between the sunlight on that being right and the expression of that view? These things blend into each other. Why is there a conspiracy theory?
Those are the categories where I think that you need to think about whether there are versions of reprehensible but lawful speech that are inimical to academic freedom rather than needing to be protected as academic freedom. The Government have taken that position on holocaust denial, as I understand it, but they have not outlined a set of principles on what is wrong with holocaust denial. How does that relate to the denial of other genocides? How does that relate to the identical position of other minority groups who are not Jewish?
Sir John Hayes
Q I just want a straightforward answer, really. You are right, of course, that many things are offensive, rude or unsavoury. Indeed, some things are alarming, shocking and disturbing, but some things that are alarming, shocking and disturbing should be said because innovators have done that through the ages. Copernicus was alarming. Darwin was certainly alarming and shocking to many people—pretty shocking to me, actually. Having said all that, you have not really been clear about who determines what is lawful but prohibited. Is it the university?
Sunder Katwala: Is it the vice-chancellor? National Action has now been proscribed, but a very violent, aggressive group such as Britain First has not been, and the Islamist equivalent of such groups. Most people have different views about these different groups, but do you give Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group whose sole existence is to undermine liberal democracy and academic freedom, the floor and argue against it, or are there some versions of the content where you draw the line, either because of—
Sir John Hayes
Q Sorry to interrupt you, but I want to get to the bottom of this. The vice-chancellor in a particular university, or the university management, would determine what was unacceptable but lawful.
Sunder Katwala: Or it might be a national policy. In the case of holocaust denial, it will be a national policy that the lawful speech of holocaust denial will not be welcome on our campuses. The Government have taken that view. Do the Government want to protect 9/11 conspiracies as academic freedom or not? Do the Government want to take a view, or does the vice-chancellor take a view? It is up to the Government first—
Sir John Hayes
Q So it is the Government who determine it, not the vice-chancellor.
Sunder Katwala: It would depend. The Government will decide in the case of holocaust denial that it needs to be very clear that it is not welcome on campus. I am saying that there are analogous cases to holocaust denial for other reasons, for other minority groups.
Mr Jones
Q On that point, it is quite clear in the legislation who will decide: it will be the director of free speech, whose decisions are not even legally challengeable. To me, that is very clear.
I know that in the modern-day Conservative party there is a lot of political cross-dressing going on, but what I find quite frightening about the legislation is that one individual, or a future Government of any persuasion, will have a very Orwellian view of deciding what is and is not acceptable. That is a great departure from my usual understanding of what traditional Conservatives have argued for in this place over the years. Would you say that that one of the problems of this is that the final arbiter will be a political appointee?
Sunder Katwala: I think that there are risks if it is the whims of an individual. We will have to have a clear framework. Say we create an event titled “Are there any limits to free speech?”—I remember people used to create that event when I was an undergraduate student—and we say, “We’ll be joined by the Taliban, David Irving, Anjem Choudary and Zhirinovsky of Russia for that debate about whether there are any limits.”
The question then for the Government, the regulator or the vice-chancellor is to say, “Is that a jolly good way to establish the debate? There are some risks of Anjem Choudary because we know that he radicalises a lot of people towards terrorism, but he dances within the law,” and so on, or is that a kind of lawful speech? I would not have that in my charity. I would have a very robust debate, but I would not have it with Anjem Choudary and Britain First. Are we going to say to universities, “You can’t make any of those choices about the boundaries within your expansive protection of free speech”? That is the key practical question.
Mr Jones
Q I agree, but the danger in the legislation as it is written is about those individuals. My concern is more that foreign states that want to change the direction that we argued for on freedom of speech in this country will use this to challenge academic institutions, and will be allowed to.
I mentioned earlier the issue of the operation in our universities of the United Front of China. They will be able to take cases and argue them and no doubt they will be well financed. There is a danger that they will use it to get their own way through their very deep pockets.
Sunder Katwala: You are going to have to have a transparent policy on which cases are decided. That is where my principles are about “What can you say about gays, women or Jews?” and “What can you or can’t you say about the lurid conspiracies that don’t seem to have any value to academic freedom?” How do you deal with those tensions?
Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)
Q You have raised three interesting points at the margins. The entire point of the legislation is that there are things that are not in these extreme examples that are currently being challenged at universities. That is basically the evidence that we have received from the academics who have appeared before us in these evidence sessions.
In light of that, do you not think that any Government in a liberal democracy such as ours would find that those three specific issues––clashes with the Equality Act, those advocating against academic freedom and those with very extreme views that they try to cover with academic freedom––could easily be contained within that direction of free speech, thereby ensuring what we all want: the extension of free speech by the academics who tell us that they are mass self-censoring now, so that the professors who just appeared before us can be allowed their academic freedom? We are actually protecting the freedom of perfectly reasonable people, not people who are doing the things that you suggested. Do you see where I am coming from?
Sunder Katwala: In principle, I think the approach you have is very good. We have been having this debate about free speech on campus in society more broadly for several years and we never really get to the difficult issues.
What I would like is for people on both sides of the debate––there should not be sides––to look through the other end of the telescope. If you are someone who is very worried about racism and hate crime, you have got to be clear about the robust, tough stuff that you are going to allow so that you can be clear about where you draw the line.
The liberal or left side of the debate has a reputational point. The people worried about the incursion of free speech have not yet gone to these hard cases and said, “That is what we would do on this boundary, this boundary and this boundary.” If, instead of always just using their overall slogan, the two sides engaged with the value of the point on the other side, we would actually get to the hard cases.
Mr Holden
Q I get where you are coming from. Where do you come down? Do you think this legislation is unnecessary and that we should just trust the academic institutions as they are now or do you think there is a place for the Government to do something in this space?
Sunder Katwala: I do not have a very strong view on that. I think the Government want to symbolically commit to things that are already the case. It is creating new mechanisms and I do not know whether the new mechanisms will create a worse or a better culture.
The mechanisms are clearly the new thing: the responsibility is already there. Amplifying the responsibility is good, but we will do it by creating spaces in which we show that you have robust, difficult, democratic conversations but with boundaries.
Mr Holden
Q Finally, one of the things that Mr Jones and I tend to agree on is the concern around foreign states and foreign state actors. Although you are not an academic yourself, do you accept that there is a danger of academics in UK academic institutions not saying things because of the enormous financial impact that some of these foreign states, particularly the People’s Republic of China, have in the UK?
Sunder Katwala: I am not an expert on that question, but I can see why you would ask it. The thing to worry about with campus culture is that, having made the very positive decision to welcome Hong Kongers to the UK, many of whom will be students, and having a very large number of Chinese students in the UK, which is a positive thing I am sure for universities, there will be more of a challenge to be proactive on the culture of student debate and so on, so that we do not have tensions on campus between those groups.
Mr Holden
Q Perhaps that is a reason, given the extra pressure facing the universities at the moment, to allow the legislation to come forward and for a Government body to help them in that very difficult potential situation.
Sunder Katwala: I think that is about the culture of campus, the safety on campus, as well as the principles. It is the chilling effects. There will be more of an issue there about the potential Hong Kong-China political views that different people have for different reasons.
The Chair
I am sorry, but we have now reached the end of the time allocated for this session. Thank you very much, Mr Katwala, for your evidence and for the help you have given the Committee. We now move on to the next panel, please.
Examination of Witness
Nicola Dandridge gave evidence.
The Chair
Q We now welcome Nicola Dandridge, who is the chief executive of the Office for Students. Will you tell us a bit about what that is? What is the Office for Students?
Nicola Dandridge: We are the independent regulator for higher education in England. We have been up and running since 2018.
Matt Western
Q Thank you for joining us today, Ms Dandridge. Just looking through the legislation, I have a few points to make. It does not seem to be particularly clear about the future relationship between the Office for Students and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. Is that clear to you from the Bill? Perhaps you will explain how it could work.
Nicola Dandridge: We work collaboratively with a whole range of organisations, including the OIA and other regulators. The way to make that work is to have discussions with them, to make sure that there is clarity about responsibilities and who does what, and that that is clear between ourselves and to universities, colleges and students. I am a stakeholder, so I anticipate that exactly the same will happen here. The new director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will speak with the OIA to resolve who does what and how we can make sure that that is as clear as possible to staff, students and everyone who is interested in this area of activity.
Matt Western
Q Can you imagine situations in which one body might go to the OIA and another to the OfS, and how that might be reconciled?
Nicola Dandridge: That is exactly the sort of thing that we need to make clear. I do not see that that is an insuperable problem. We just need to make sure that we have sorted it out and that there is clarity for everyone involved.
Matt Western
Q You mentioned the director for freedom of speech and academic freedom and the appointment process. I guess I have certain concerns about how the chair of the OfS was appointed. How do you imagine—it is not clear from the Bill—the director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will be appointed? Should how that will come about be included in the Bill? As we have heard in previous sessions, there are concerns—across the House, depending on which Government are in place—so who should be involved in that appointment? I assume that you would want to be involved, for example. Maybe you should have the ultimate say. Do you have any thoughts about that, and should it be included in the Bill?
Nicola Dandridge: I anticipate that the process will follow the usual public appointments process and be conducted by the DFE. That is probably a question you need to put to the DFE. It is unlikely to be a decision taken in-house by the Office for Students.
Matt Western
Q Do you have any thoughts on the skills that that person might need?
Nicola Dandridge: They will need to believe in the importance of freedom of speech and academic freedom, as the OfS and all of us do. That goes without saying. In this debate, I have been interested to hear that they should be a lawyer. Undoubtedly, I think a legal background would be helpful, but I really do not think that being a lawyer is essential. It is not as if we are going to lock the director up in a room somewhere with no access to any of our existing resource. We have a very talented legal team already, who will provide considerable advice and support to the director. So I do not think that being a lawyer is essential, but I do think that having a legal background might help, but absolutely not determinative of who is appointed.
Matt Western
Q Have you had any conversations with the current chair or the DFE about what the scale of the department—it will not be just one individual; it will be the director of freedom of speech plus X people working within the department—will be, what the cost will be and how that will be funded? Would the OfS need an additional budget?
Secondly, do you have concerns about what will happen for universities and student unions? One of the points that came out from the BEIS report, which you may have seen, is what significant costs there will be for universities and student unions, which clearly, after the past 18 months, are really struggling financially anyway.
Nicola Dandridge: It is very difficult at this stage to predict what the pressures on the Office for Students will be as a consequence of the proposals, but certainly the complaints system is likely to generate quite a lot of work. It is really important that we have the capacity to deal with that properly without compromising our important work on quality and standards, and access and participation. This is an area that we will be keen to discuss with Government to ensure that we are properly resourced to do this work well in all its complexity, without compromising our other work.
Michelle Donelan
Q Thank you for attending, Ms Dandridge. When considering the impact that the new director could have, we can look at the impact that the director for fair access and participation has had. Could you outline the positive impact that you think having somebody solely responsible for that area has had?
Nicola Dandridge: In my view, and I think the view of many others, the role of the director for fair access and participation has been really significant in setting expectations, driving through the importance of what is also a very complex agenda, engaging in discussions with universities, students and student unions, and speaking publicly about the importance of access and participation. I think the impact that the director has had has been really significant, and it is a good analogy for the impact that we hope the director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will have similarly.
Michelle Donelan
Q What routes could students, staff and visiting speakers currently take if they wished to raise with the OfS a concern about a provider with regard to free speech?
Nicola Dandridge: We have to approach free speech in a rather oblique way, because of the way our powers are structured and set up. We have a number of public interest principles, of which one is a duty to protect academic freedom. The other is to secure free speech. What we say is that, under one of our registration conditions, all universities and colleges have to have governing documents that uphold those public interest principles, and they have to have governance and management arrangements to adequately implement those public interest principles.
The way into this is not exactly straightforward. We have a number of ongoing cases where we are looking at issues of free speech, but because of the ways our powers are framed, we are primarily looking at whether universities and colleges have the systems in place to address issues of free speech themselves, rather than our adjudicating on them. That is rather a complex explanation, because of the way our powers are structured. They are slightly, as I say, oblique, whereas what the Bill proposes is entirely different. It foregrounds the importance of free speech and, for all the reasons of which you will be aware, gives us significant additional powers in that respect.
Michelle Donelan
Q So as the body dedicated to students, in essence, would you say that you are constrained at the moment in assisting students with issues of free speech?
Nicola Dandridge: The way our powers are structured means that we approach it by looking at the systems that the university has in place. That is a very limited way of engaging with issues of free speech, so yes, it is constrained.
Emma Hardy
Q Welcome—it is great to see you here. Coming back to the point that you made about the regulatory overlap between the OfS and the OIA, you said that we would need to have some sort of clarity and talk about that. Would you say that that clarity should be in the Bill—that it should explain who does what—or are you thinking more about guidance produced by the Department for Education? How can that work out so that everybody knows where to go and whom to go to?
Nicola Dandridge: I was thinking that it would be the latter. It is one of the first responsibilities that the director for free speech and academic freedom will have to undertake. Although it would be their choice, not mine, I would anticipate that they would want to produce guidance in order to provide clarity in some of these very complex areas, one of which is who does what and how it is done. I was anticipating that it would be guidance and not on the face of the Bill.
Emma Hardy
Q I know that the Office for Students has received two letters recently from the Secretary of State, directing you to reduce the regulatory burden on higher education providers. How does the Bill align with the Secretary of State’s stated aim to reduce the regulatory burden?
Nicola Dandridge: Well, it is challenging. We take reducing the regulatory burden very seriously. It is one of our own priorities, as well as a priority for the Secretary of State, but it is like all these things. Regulatory burden is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is if it is disproportionate. It depends on what the regulator does, and there is a very serious issue here about academic freedom, for the reasons that you have been hearing this week and last. The way through this is to ensure that our response is proportionate and risk-based, and that will be one of our priorities as we go into this. Clearly it is challenging, because this is a very significant number of additional responsibilities—serious and complex responsibilities—so it needs to be done properly. That is what we will do, and we will look forward to doing it in that way.
Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)
Q May I ask a simple question? Do you welcome the Bill?
Nicola Dandridge: Yes. We think that there is a serious and significant issue in relation to academic freedom and free speech in higher education, and the proposals in the Bill seek to address that and create mechanisms for tackling such issues.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q The Bill would allow a complainant to bypass the Office for Students and go straight to the courts. Is that something you welcome—that there is an ability to run rings around each process—or should they be interrelated?
Nicola Dandridge: The Bill does acknowledge that the different mechanisms might need to be interrelated, so that a student or an academic member of staff can take recourse through only one mechanism before they engage with another. That is in the Bill. I do not think it is a question of running rings around the Office for Students. It will be a question of making clear what the advantages and disadvantages are for each route, so that the student, member of staff or any third party affected can pursue the most appropriate recourse for them.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Currently, there is no requirement in the Bill to go through any internal or external process before you go to the courts.
Nicola Dandridge: But the Bill allows for that.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Is that something that you think should be more explicit in the Bill—to require someone to have sought other dispute mechanisms first, like you do with other requirements, such as before you go to court for a judicial review?
Nicola Dandridge: The Bill does acknowledge that that may be something that needs to happen. I do not know whether it needs to be on the face of the Bill, but the Bill does acknowledge that that sort of thing needs to happen, and I think it is quite important. The main thing is about making sure that there are clear and proportionate paths for claimants to follow. Of course, the advantage of the complaints system—for example, with the Office for Students—is that it would be free to the claimant, whereas going to the courts can be very expensive. Things such as that need to be made clear, so that people can make the appropriate choice.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Do you think it is right that the outcome and annual report made by the Office for Students would be privileged and, therefore, not open for judicial review or oversight?
Nicola Dandridge: We would normally publish our reports. It depends on the circumstances, but I cannot imagine why we would not want to publish a report of this sort.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q But my understanding is that the report being privileged means that a complainant who might feel that it has not fairly reflected their views would not have recourse to judicial review. Do you think it right that a public body has that unusual level of privilege?
Nicola Dandridge: My understanding is that the Bill protects against defamation—that is very common with other regulators, too—but that does not mean that the decisions of the director for free speech and academic freedom cannot be judicially challenged. All our regulatory decisions—or most, as far as I am aware—can be judicially challenged, and I do not see that the decision of the director would be any different.
Sir John Hayes
Q The witness immediately before you suggested that lawful speech on campus might be mitigated, restrained or even prohibited, and said that that job would perhaps fall to the Government or vice-chancellors. What is your view on that?
Nicola Dandridge: These sorts of decisions about what is lawful and what is not are both hugely complex and very facts-specific, so I think it would be very hard for the Government to anticipate those sorts of decisions. I think it is appropriate for that to fall to someone like the director and the Office for Students, who could take all the facts into account to make the appropriate decision.
Sir John Hayes
Q Presumably, with lawful free speech on campus assumed to be a given, it is important that its defence is not in the hands of particular vice-chancellors or university management but carried out by an independent third party on the grounds of consistency.
Nicola Dandridge: I think the whole point behind setting up a director is that those will be independent decisions, whether for the university or for anyone else. That is fundamental to the way the role is cast, and I think it is fundamentally important.
Fiona Bruce
Q One students union has submitted to us:
“This bill addresses a non-problem”
—certainly at their student union and university. Do you agree?
Nicola Dandridge: The evidence suggests that there is an issue.
Fiona Bruce
Q Thank you. Would you also reflect on another statement made in that submission?
“Speakers”
—presumably at events—
“should be of the highest quality and have expertise in their field. Therefore, if speakers are known to have contradictory, erroneous or conspiratorial ideas on subjects for which they are speaking”,
our student union
“is obliged to discourage the spread of disinformation on its premises and within its societies.”
What are your reflections on that statement?
Nicola Dandridge: I do not know the context in which it was made—in all these things, context is rather important—but it does seem to fly in the face of the principles of free speech and academic freedom.
Fiona Bruce
Q The context is a response to the Bill, under the heading “Thought leaders”.
Nicola Dandridge: It is worth adding that we at the Office for Students work very closely, collaboratively and constructively with the NUS and student unions across the country. I have yet to have a discussion with a student union that does not think that free speech and academic freedom are really important.
The Chair
There are no further questions, so I thank our witness very much for her contribution.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned—(Michael Tomlinson.)
Adjourned till this day at half-past Five o'clock.
Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Fourth sitting)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Committee consisted of the following Members:
Chairs: Sir Christopher Chope, † Judith Cummins
† Bacon, Gareth (Orpington) (Con)
† Britcliffe, Sara (Hyndburn) (Con)
† Bruce, Fiona (Congleton) (Con)
† Donelan, Michelle (Minister for Universities)
† Glindon, Mary (North Tyneside) (Lab)
† Hardy, Emma (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
† Hayes, Sir John (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
† Holden, Mr Richard (North West Durham) (Con)
† Johnston, David (Wantage) (Con)
† Jones, Mr Kevan (North Durham) (Lab)
† McDonnell, John (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
† Nichols, Charlotte (Warrington North) (Lab)
† Russell-Moyle, Lloyd (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
† Simmonds, David (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
† Tomlinson, Michael (Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury)
Webb, Suzanne (Stourbridge) (Con)
† Western, Matt (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Kevin Maddison, Seb Newman, Committee Clerks
† attended the Committee
Witnesses:
Professor Paul Layzell, Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London and Chair of Universities UK Advisory Group on Free Speech and Academic Freedom
Professor Jonathan Grant, Professor of Public Policy, King's College London
Danny Stone MBE, Director, Antisemitism Policy Trust
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, Vice-President for Higher Education, National Union of Students
Public Bill Committee
Monday 13 September 2021
(Evening)
[Judith Cummins in the Chair]
Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill
The Committee deliberated in private.
Examination of Witnesses
Professor Paul Layzell and Professor Jonathan Grant gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear evidence from Professor Paul Layzell, principal of Royal Holloway, University of London, and chair of the Universities UK advisory group on free speech and academic freedom, and from Professor Jonathan Grant, professor of public policy at King’s College London, who is joining us remotely via Zoom. We have until 6 o’clock for this session.
I ask the witnesses to please introduce yourselves for the record. Professor Layzell, will you start?
Professor Layzell: I am Professor Paul Layzell. I am principal of Royal Holloway, University of London, but I am here in my capacity as a board member of Universities UK and chair of the working group on freedom of speech.
Professor Grant: Good afternoon. I am Professor Jonathan Grant, professor of public policy at King’s College, London. I used to be vice-principal for service, where I had some responsibility for the operationalisation around freedom of speech, although I should stress that today I am speaking in a personal capacity.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Q257 Thank you, and welcome to the Committee. We really appreciate you joining us today, Professor Layzell and Professor Grant.
Given all the pressures and issues that universities are facing, is this Bill a priority for the higher education- sector? I put that question to Professor Layzell first.
Professor Layzell: Freedom of speech is a priority for the sector. It is an absolutely integral and fundamental part of what we are about. I cannot imagine that there is a vice-chancellor or board in the country that would not want to promote freedom of speech. As your previous witness said, there have been issues, and I think we recognise the commitment to bring forward legislation. For the universities sector, it must be proportionate and help to deal with complex situations. Vice-chancellors and their senior teams are concerned about the interplay of this legislation and other legislation. I think we have made some recommendations in our submission about ministerial statements that make clear the position of this legislation with respect to other duties. In addition, if the Office for Students was encouraged to work with us, we could work with it to develop a code of practice based on case studies and examples of dealing not with the straightforward freedom of speech issues that are often cited, but with situations where a number of issues come together. If that helps decision making and brings transparency and clarity, it is welcome.
Matt Western
Q Do you think a tighter code of practice and guidelines from the OfS, maybe along the lines of the Chicago principles, could have achieved what you have just described, or do you think it needed something like a tort and this legislation?
Professor Layzell: I think that that would have gone a long way towards achieving the situation I have just described, but there are other things in the Bill on complaints systems and the requirement to positively promote freedom of speech that I do not think anybody in the sector would have a problem with.
Professor Grant: To answer your first question, I think it is somewhat overkill. That would be my overall assessment, but I think it conflates a number of issues, so it is a slightly more nuanced response. On the elements around cancel culture, when you look at the data it is very rare that events are cancelled or people get no-platformed. I have concerns around the chilling effect, which I heard previous witnesses talk about, but I wonder whether regulation is the way to address those concerns. There are elements that could do damage, but overall I am reasonably neutral about the Bill, albeit slightly cynical about whether it will achieve its objectives.
Matt Western
Q There is a lot of colourful language used such as “icebergs” and “extreme crisis”. How do you think the views of students compare with those of wider society when it comes to freedom of speech?
Professor Grant: We know from the survey that we did a couple of years ago, where we went out and asked students exactly those questions, that 81% of students support free speech, 81% of students support a version of the Chicago principles, and the vast majority of students think that free speech is more likely to be challenged in broader society than in their universities, so the idea that students do not buy into the concept of free speech is an absolute red herring, in my view. As I said, that survey also demonstrated some quite worrying statistics around the concept of a chilling effect where people are self-censoring themselves in classrooms.
That for me is where the issue is. It is not about the process of inviting people on to campus and worrying about no-platforming and cancel culture. The data there says that it is a non-issue. If we could move our conversation from that issue on to the chilling effect and how we have a more open culture on campus where people of different views feel confident in expressing them, I think that would be a much more useful conversation.
Matt Western
Q Professor Layzell, many people have voiced concerns regarding the legislation as drafted. We heard from a witness last week, a lawyer, who really feared where it would take us in terms of litigation, and what will happen on university campuses, in student unions and so on. In your experience, given your position, can universities really afford the scale of the burden of bureaucracy, and the potential financial cost, of some of the claims that might get dragged into from certain speakers?
Professor Layzell: The first point to make is that it is important that the legal options that are being presented in the Bill do not cut across the existing mechanisms. There are plenty of mechanisms within universities to deal with complaints internally. There is other apparatus around employment tribunals and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. Of course, we have the proposed OfS complaints scheme, so there is a lot of apparatus there.
What we want is something that ends up being proportionate and manageable. In our written submission, we suggested that there be a mechanism to prevent frivolous and vexatious claims. Completing internal processes, which we would be quite happy to operate, should be a condition before going to law. We would also recommend that the scope was limited to those who were directly affected by alleged breaches of freedom of speech. Our worry is that the apparatus gets used for other purposes. If it is framed carefully, we could avoid that. That is the thing that we would not want to waste our time on.
Matt Western
Q Do you think that academic freedom needs stronger definition?
Professor Layzell: I think the definition is fine. We have the concept of academic freedom of speech within the law already. This puts a nuance on it, but I think we are quite happy with the definition as it is.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Q The problem with the Bill as it is written is that there is no stipulation that, per your very sensible suggestion, people would have to go through the internal complaints process first, which is the usual thing for ombudsmen and anything else. If we are not careful, we could end up with people resorting straight to law if they want to make a political point. That is going to cost the universities a lot. In some cases, they will settle just to get rid of them.
Professor Layzell: That is why you would want the full internal and existing apparatus to be fully utilised before we go into that final stage.
Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)
Q Professor Grant, I agree with your analysis that the bigger concern seems to be self-censorship, but we are a little unclear on the levels of evidence around this. Could you outline some of the evidence of self-censorship that you have seen? Is this something that affects you in your department at King’s?
Professor Grant: This is one of those things that is really hard to get good evidence on. In the survey we did of 2,000 students, about a quarter said that they felt unable to express views in their university because they were nervous about disagreeing with their peers. That is a big number; if a quarter of the students in a class are nervous about expressing their views, that worries me. We then followed up that survey data through focus groups. In those groups, this was the issue that the students landed on. Focus groups are by definition small numbers so we need to treat some of this evidence carefully, but they were saying that they felt that reading lists in certain topics were biased to one view or another and were not balanced, and that lecturers quite often had some political view that they would express in the classroom, and if the students disagreed with that, they were nervous about expressing contrarian views in that context.
We followed that up with a focus group with a mix of vice-chancellors from the UK, Australia and the US. What was interesting for me was that when we put that evidence on the table, the response from the vice-chancellors was “We cannot tell our lecturers what to put on their reading list because that would breach academic freedom.” What I find interesting in the Bill is that tension between the desire to promote free speech––and cool the chilling effect––and the concept of academic freedom, and how it is actually the academic who decides what to teach in the classroom. That is why I am not convinced that regulation or legislation is going to solve this. I think it is deeper: it is cultural, it is values-driven.
Mr Holden
Q But you do accept that legislation can help to lead that values change? Many academics have told us already today that the fact that this is being talked about in an open session in Parliament is helping lead to some of those conversations on campus.
Professor Grant: I entirely accept that. I am glad we are having the conversation and maybe the legislation has sparked us to have that conversation. What I wait to see—I cannot answer this; I am speculating––is whether the legislation will have an impact on that 25% of people who feel that they cannot say what they want to and whether it will change the behaviours of lecturers in the classroom to get more balanced reading lists. I hope that is the case, but we do not know at this stage. If this legislation leads to that, then it has been successful.
Mr Holden
Q So at the moment your view on the legislation is a wait-and-see approach—perhaps slightly moved from being opposed to it?
Professor Grant: Yes. As I said at the outset, I would distinguish two elements. The legislation around the so-called cancel culture piece is, to me, redundant. It is broadly a non-issue. I am much more interested in the issue I have just been talking about. It is a wait-and-see approach. I will be delighted if it works. I look forward to seeing that.
Mr Holden
Q Your emphasis has been on the student and their feeling of academic freedom, which is something that we have not discussed in as much depth as we have for the academics themselves. Do you get the feeling that some of the academics you work with also feel that they have to self-censor in what they are doing, or is that more on the student side in your experience?
Professor Grant: I am going to be very dull and say that we do not know, because I like to look at the research and evidence. I have looked to see how you would survey academics to ask the same questions that we ask the students, and from a purely methodological point of view, it is really difficult to do that, so I will sit on the fence for that question.
The Minister for Universities (Michelle Donelan)
Q The Committee has heard evidence from a number of people who have said that their individual academic freedom, or that of their colleagues and, potentially, their students, has been restricted. Do you both acknowledge that that demonstrates that restrictions on freedom of speech in our universities are actually happening and are not a rare phenomenon?
Professor Layzell: Universities have a range of processes and procedures in place that protect and provide some protection against that. In my own institution, for example, promotions and reward procedures are anonymised—we focus on the CVs and the evidence in front of us—so existing mechanisms provide a degree of protection. I cannot comment on individual cases. I can guess some of the individuals you are referring to, and they may well have had some experiences where they felt disadvantaged or adversely affected; we recognise that.
In addition, the wording in the Bill varies in different places. In some places it talks about “likelihood” and in others it talks about being “adversely affected”. In our submission, we have suggested that “adversely affected” is a better term and should be used consistently throughout the Bill.
Professor Grant: I am going to be boringly analytical again. There is no issue when it comes to the cancelling events. The numbers are small, as the OfS demonstrates. There is potentially an issue when it comes to this idea of self-censorship in the classroom, and I think that is a legitimate concern. As I just said, when it comes to academics, we do not know. It is inevitable that people who feel that they have had their freedom of speech inhibited will talk about that, but we do not know about all the other people who are not talking about it. We need to get the data. At this stage, I will say that you cannot answer that question on academics.
Michelle Donelan
Q I have just one more question. What more do you think universities could do to promote free speech?
Professor Grant: What we did at King’s was work with our student union in developing a joint statement modelled on the Chicago principles and signed by both the president of the student union and the president of King’s College London. On the back of that, we developed a committee that reviewed all so-called high-risk events. That committee was made up of equal numbers of university staff, academics and professional staff, and students. It made recommendations to the senior vice-principal for operations and, potentially, to the principal. In my mind, creating a sort of co-production and co-creation process around managing those events was deeply beneficial because, as the previous witness said, both sides started having conversations about the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. Both groups then owned the process and the mitigations thereafter.
Professor Layzell: I think Universities UK would support what Professor Grant said. Many universities will have similar sorts of processes. I think one other step that could be taken—this comes under the promotion of free speech duty in the Bill—is to help students to better understand the role of university education. It is quite different from school and college. I think the concern that some students have about expressing a view is not necessarily about freedom of speech; it is about having the confidence to speak out and express an opinion.
I think we could do more to help students to understand how the university education process works and the role of freedom of speech and freedom of expression within that, in order to encourage them to have the confidence to express views that might be contrary to those of others in the room and to feel comfortable with that, and to help them understand that that is a normal part of how we do our business; that that is the lifeblood of academic research and teaching. I think we could do more in that respect.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
Q Jonathan Grant, I am interested in this chilling effect. Did you do any baseline studies on what the chilling effect was in other areas? I ask that because I have done some cursory searching. It is difficult to find, but Facebook has done some internal research and says that 71% of its users, even online, will censor what they say in order to meet the desires of friends and colleagues. Therefore, if that figure of 71% is about accurate—we do not know, because this could be a ballpark figure—a quarter of students is much lower than wider society, so is that an example of how universities are actually much better?
Professor Grant: That is an excellent question, and the short answer is no. When we did the survey, we went out to the general public and asked them a range of questions on their attitudes to free speech, and they were broadly the same as students, but we did not ask them that question about self-censorship, so I think it is an entirely legitimate question.
If I may, I just want to pick up on the previous comment, because I visited the University of Chicago a number of years ago, which had set up a programme to teach high school students about free speech, how to debate effectively and take contrarian views, and about the resilience needed to hear something challenging. I absolutely agree with Paul that in universities we could do more to help our students understand what debate is about, how at times it might be painful and the resilience needed to engage in some of that debate.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Thank you, and I totally agree with your point. I went to a comprehensive school, but we had a compulsory debating society every lunchtime, and we were required to take points that we disagreed with, which built resilience. Maybe we need to look at that at secondary school level in our comprehensive system.
Paul, I want to ask you about who takes responsibility for these duties. The Bill is quite unusual in putting the duty on both the institution and the student union, whereas the Education Act 1994 puts the responsibility only on the institution to require the student union. Does that duality of responsibility clarify the issue or, given that most student unions are probably using university premises and university money, does it muddy the question of who will then be responsible for reporting on these issues?
Professor Layzell: I think the existing position is ambiguous and difficult for the very reasons you mention. There is often a joint process going on. Universities are often responsible for health and safety, security and just managing a significant gathering, yet the event might be organised by the student union. I think that we get around that by having codes of practice and clear sets of responsibilities within institutions on who should be doing what, but it is a good point.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Jonathan Grant mentioned the joint committee that has been set up at King’s. Would something in the Act requiring institutions and student unions to create joint committees to look at this and assess freedom of speech be a better way forward than just having an external regulator?
Professor Layzell: I think we would be reluctant to over-specify the mechanics. Good relationships between universities and student unions are absolutely essential to make this work. Encouraging that would be good, but as to specifying particular mechanisms or ways of doing it, we all work in slightly different ways and have slightly different student unions, so I think we would need some flexibility.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q I have worked at both Sussex and Bradford in the past, so I understand that. Sometimes it seems that universities can be over-cautious, and act as small “c” conservatives about putting on events that might have risk attached. Will the Bill give universities more confidence about putting on events, or will it give them less confidence, because of the tort part, about initiating events?
The Chair
May I ask you to keep your answer brief, Professor Layzell, because two more members of the Committee have indicated that they want to speak?
Professor Layzell: There is a concern around the litigation and making both student unions and universities more risk averse, without the sort of protections that we put in our written submission.
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
Q I want to push you on this point about the effectiveness of non-legislative measures and how we compare the norms in different environments. I am not entirely convinced that Facebook, which is essentially an unregulated environment, would have the same norms as you would find in a university and the world of academia. I am not entirely convinced by that analogy, although I understand the point. Both of you have mentioned training and things like anonymisation of promotion processes as a way of addressing the issue, but presumably if those things were entirely effective and consistent, we wouldn’t be hearing the evidence about people suffering this chilling effect. Would you like to reflect on the effectiveness of those existing measures and any lessons that we as a Committee might need to take on board from what appears to be inconsistency in the way they operate?
Professor Layzell: As I said earlier, I think Universities UK would recognise that there have been cases where this approach has not worked as well as one would have wished. If the legislation is proportionate and does not create undesired side-effects such as more risk aversion, it may help to achieve a greater degree of consistency, but it is about keeping proportionality.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
Q Thank you for your evidence, which has been extremely interesting. I am going to ask similar questions to those I asked earlier about the director of freedom of speech. In the past few evidence sessions, we have heard varying opinions on who the director should be, how they should be appointed and what skills or knowledge they should have. In your evidence, you referred to
“the desirability of the preferred candidate having experience of either the higher education or legal sector.”
Why do you think that is desirable?
Professor Layzell: I think because the challenges that vice-chancellors feel they face arise when situations are complex. A simple black and white issue of saying yes or no is not where the problem is. It is the confluence of a number of legal requirements that you need to get your head around. You have got to have that legal experience and/or experience of dealing with these sorts of situations in higher education. It would be wrong to think that these issues are very simple yes/no decisions; they are generally more complex.
Emma Hardy
Q I agree on complexity. In your evidence, you highlight where legislation must be taken into account: the public sector equality duty, the Equality Act 2010, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and so on. The University of Cambridge has argued for a gradated system of sanctions. Is that something that Universities UK would support?
Professor Layzell: Sanctions against offences?
Emma Hardy
So if the director of free speech was making a judgment on something, they would have a range of sanctions available to them, rather than just going straight for a tort.
Professor Layzell: Again, we would want the sanctions to be proportionate. I think I would look at it in the context of us all wanting to do better in this space. I think we have heard a number of times that there have been issues, so sanctions that encourage greater consideration, greater thought and learning from one another would be appropriate.
Emma Hardy
Q In the Bill as it stands, there is no right to appeal the decision made by the director for freedom of speech. We have already heard that it could be a political appointment, as the chair of the Office for Students is right now. The director for freedom of speech is judge and jury over decisions over universities, and as it stands there is no right to appeal. Do you think that is right?
Professor Layzell: I think we would have a concern.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Danny Stone MBE and Hillary Gyebi-Ababio gave evidence.
The Chair
Q We will now hear oral evidence from Danny Stone MBE, director of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, and Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, vice-president for higher education at the National Union of Students. We have until 6.45 pm for this session. I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves for the record.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Thank you again for having me. I am Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, the vice-president for higher education at the National Union of Students, representing students here today.
Danny Stone: I am Danny Stone, the chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust.
Matt Western
Q Thank you both for coming along this evening, and for the evidence that you submitted in advance. May I ask a couple of questions of you, Hillary, first? Perhaps then I can turn to you, Danny. Just out of interest, Hillary, what are the current issues on campus among student unions? What are the priorities that you are facing?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: There is a plethora of issues that student unions are facing and that students are talking about right now, from mental health, which is a really serious issue that continues to pervade higher education, to funding and students not having enough money for accommodation and to live at university. Sexual violence is still prevalent on our campuses, and students are really going through it without enough support orenough measures for justice. Those are just a few, to not take up too much time. Students are going through a lot on campus right now, and seriously need solutions to problems that they are experiencing on the ground.
Matt Western
Q Student unions are feeding back to me that they are struggling financially. The past year and a half has been pretty tough. Incomes are right down, wherever they may be getting them from—some may be directly on campus, through facilities and so on. You may have seen that it is estimated that it will cost almost £800,000 a year for all SUs to sign off and distribute the codes of practice. How do you think that will go down with student unions? What impact will it have?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I think that will have a massive hit on student unions. For information, student unions are often funded through negotiations with parent institutions. That is how they get the bulk of their funding. Especially over the pandemic, student unions have been subject to so much lost from not being able to run their commercial services. Often student unions have bars, shops or discounted outlets for students to shop at and experience student life. Student unions, as a collective, spending almost £1 million every single year trying to abide by the Bill will reduce what they can do, at the root of it, which will stop them doing the already fantastic work that they do, facilitating events and a student life that is worth having, and representing students on all the issues that I spoke about earlier.
Matt Western
Q We just heard from Professor Grant of King’s College London, who said that we have a very good system in place to address speech issues at events on campus. Do you find that currently it is working generally pretty well? Other than KCL, do you have any other examples where you know the process has been working?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I think it is commonplace that student unions and universities work together when it comes to events, to approving external speakers, and to ensuring that freedom of speech is facilitated on campus. You only have to look at the NSU calendar to see the wide range of events that are constantly going on, often led by students. A lot of that is facilitated by close relationships with universities. If there is an area on which universities and students work closely, it is that. There are measures in place; there are quite detailed ways that free speech is facilitated on campus through the partnership between student unions and universities. I think they are doing a good job in making that work. Where they need to improve, they are constantly eager to work together to do that.
Matt Western
Q Do you have concerns about some of our smaller higher education institutes? It is very easy to think about the big names, because they are the ones that always come up in the media, but in my few months in this role, I have begun to realise the scale of HE institutions that are covered. How do you think this will affect the hundreds of smaller institutions?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I think that is a really important question. If I am being completely honest, a lot of stuff in the Bill is really, really concerning, such as measures under which people could get monetary sanctions for breaches of freedom of speech. Not only will that involve lots of bureaucracy for universities and student unions to make sure they are complying with the Bill, but it will take away from their ability to freely and fairly facilitate freedom of speech on campus.
Those smaller institutions are often places where students try to share their views, beliefs and experiences in a really tight-knit way in quite close communities. The Bill runs the risk of making those specific institutions—alongside the whole sector—much more risk averse in running events and facilitating freedom of speech, simply because they cannot bear the amount that the Bill would put on them, in addition to the fact that they already have internal processes on which they have worked hard for years and years. We are really concerned about that and about the impact the Bill will have on such institutions, as well as on larger institutions and student unions.
Matt Western
Q Thank you. Danny, can you give us an overview of the current landscape of our universities and campuses? I am interested to hear specifically about the situation with regard to antisemitism. Can you give a flavour on that?
Danny Stone: Sure, and thank you for having me today. We have data: the Community Security Trust, which records antisemitic incident figures, reported that there were 58 university incidents in 2018-19, including four assaults; 65 incidents in 2019-20, including two assaults; and 109 incidents in 2020-21. We know that in May, issues occurred in universities where there had not previously been issues. Certainly, some of the abuse has moved online, and the Union of Jewish Students in particular has reported online abuse.
On the issue of speakers, which I suppose is of particular interest to the Committee, the CST reported that from 2018 to 2020, 15 speakers who had some association with antisemitism or had made antisemitic remarks in the past came on to campus. As a former officer of the Union of Jewish Students, I dealt with some of those cases. In 2005, at SOAS—the School of Oriental and African Studies—a speaker said:
“I’m not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act”.
Somebody who came to Oxford had actually been barred from entering the UK and was broadcast in. They had been barred because of their views on terrorism. In 2017, after the passing of the Equalities Act 2010, a speaker said:
“Zionists should be treated like Nazis”.
The point is that people are coming on to campus and expressing antisemitic views. The concern is that those impacts are being properly considered and that they do not get additional protections. As the trust, we have a couple of recommendations for the Bill, including that the codes of practice that are drawn up and the complaints scheme appropriately address the complexities around legal harms and freedom of speech, which Sunder Katwala pointed out to you.
Matt Western
Q Finally, other legislation is quite clear in how it addresses and balances competing freedoms, but there is seemingly no such balance in this legislation. Can you expand on the importance of balancing competing freedoms on campus, particularly in a higher education setting?
Danny Stone: I learnt a lot about the balancing of freedoms from a guy called Ray Hill. He was a far-right mole who talked to me about the importance of not always shutting down debate. His experience of working with young people, particularly on the far right, was that opportunities to ask difficult questions and raise difficult issues should not be shut down. Equally, he acknowledged the harms caused by some people who express particular views in harmful ways.
This has been addressed in the higher education sector. Malcolm Grant did a report in 2010 in which he talked about trying to promote freedom of speech while understanding its limits. He said that universities need to balance the competing interests and might reach
“different but equally legitimate conclusions about the same matters.”
The Prevent guidance that followed talked about freedom of speech and moral obligations to address harms. We have seen it in Government guidance from 2008 about free speech, which said that everyone can be safe and not intimidated at university.
In fact, the human rights memorandum for this Bill says that there will be competing freedoms, but it suggests leaving it to the end point: the universities. You have heard from people today who say, “Well, the universities aren’t getting it right.” My view is that it should be on the face of the Bill, per the Online Safety Bill, the Joint Committee on which I appeared before the other day. Recognition of the complexities and the competing freedoms would be welcome.
Michelle Donelan
Q Danny, you have previously raised concerns about a lack of consistency in the duties on higher education providers, in that they do not apply to student unions—something that this Bill would correct. Do you think that it is important that we do that?
Danny Stone: In terms of student unions? Absolutely. Again, if we are talking about complexities, there was a move to essentially prohibit the Jewish society at the University of Essex from becoming a society. That was unacceptable, and I believe it was reversed in the end. Similarly, there have been moves in the past to ban Jewish societies, and I was involved in campaigning against a motion at the University of Manchester that essentially would have done that.
On the flip side, there are front groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is not a proscribed organisation, that will seek to set up on campus, and there are far-right organisations that will seek to set up student societies on campus. That presents me with real concern. Could they potentially appeal and try to get money and find a route through? Yes, they might. There is a complexity in this which I would like to see recognised in the Bill. I would like to see something about the competing freedoms that exist.
Michelle Donelan
Q Do you think Jewish students feel comfortable reporting incidents where they may have had their freedom of speech inhibited?
Danny Stone: I think it depends on the institution and on how confident they might be. For example—I am sure we will come back to this—at the moment at Bristol, and potentially at Warwick, there have been concerns raised by the Union of Jewish Students about the operation of their procedures. In fact, I think the OfS may have taken at look at Warwick. It will depend, but I can well imagine there will be instances in which Jewish students would be nervous about reporting their concerns.
Michelle Donelan
Q Thank you. Hillary, in the past you have said that there is a freedom of speech problem on our campuses. Can you explain why you said that? Was it from personal experience?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Could you clarify where and when I said that, please?
Michelle Donelan
It is from one of the documents we have from a while ago.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Sure. I cannot recall exactly when I said that—apologies—but to speak to the background of the Bill, I think there are concerns around the evidence upon which this Bill has been brought about. If there is anything that we need to be worried about on campus, it is facilitating what would look like equitable free speech for everyone. Some students on campus do not feel that they have the same level of rights to free speech as others because, for example, existing legislation makes them nervous about speaking about their views or what they believe. In 2018, 43% of Muslim students, if I recall correctly, talked about the Prevent duty having an impact on their ability to feel—[Interruption.]
The Chair
Order. There is a Division. The sitting will be suspended, and I shall resume the Chair in 15 minutes’ time, just before half-past six o’clock.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
Q I will direct my questions to Mr Stone. Earlier, Professor Goodwin said in evidence that he would happily have invited someone from the BNP or the National Front to speak to students, if they were available. He also spoke about the need for academics to feel welcome, safe and secure, but that does not seem to apply to students, in particular those from minority groups, including Jewish students. Under the proposals in the Bill, the OfS will have a specific condition of registration relating to the promotion of freedom of speech. Should it also have a condition in relation to discrimination?
Danny Stone: This is something that I wrote about when the OfS was first established. My view was, “Wouldn’t it be helpful if the OfS had a condition relating to discrimination?”, so that students could look to a regulator and see whether there were particular things that their proposed institution was doing—or not doing. In the end, that was not included. The first ministerial guidance to the OfS suggested that it looked at discrimination. Since that point, it has been consulting on a sexual abuse and harassment procedure. It has put out a statement, which has gone to institutions, and institutions have had to respond on whether they comply—I assume that they have all said that they can comply. It strikes me, talking again about complexity, that the OfS, which already has certain principles that it must abide by in respect of freedom of speech, as Nicola Dandridge was saying, will now have a specific condition of registration, so this is the time to include a condition of registration in respect of discrimination. That then enables the OfS to look at the whole picture, ensuring that the complexity is properly reflected. Rather than it waiting for a non-legislative fix on discrimination, we have the balance brought all the way up. This is where I would do it, if I were putting the Bill together.
Charlotte Nichols
Q You referred to this earlier, so I am interested to know what you think that the Bill, if enacted, would mean for cases such as that of Professor David Miller at the University of Bristol? He has been widely condemned by the Union of Jewish Students, the Board of Deputies and more than 100 parliamentarians across both Houses of Parliament and all political parties regarding allegations of antisemitism. Would the Bill protect him?
Danny Stone: Before coming here, I had a look at the expertise that David Miller’s professes on the Bristol website, which is the Zionist movement, the Israel lobby and racism. One can see, using the Miller case as an example, why that might present an issue in the future. If an academic has the right to protest that they have not got a promotion or have been passed over for a job because of free speech they have used in their area of expertise—well, hold on, the area of expertise here is Israel, Zionism and racism.
David Miller, however, has talked about Jewish students
“being used as political pawns”
by
“a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.”
Everyone, I think, recognises that that is an antisemitic statement. Certainly, as you say, across Parliament it has been recognised as such. There will be other examples of academics who have a particular area of expertise and that area of expertise will potentially give cover for them saying particular things. If you remove that, the problem is not fixed, because in the past other academics have spoken in an antisemitic way when those particulars are not their area of expertise.
Yes, that needs looking at, and those complexities need bringing out in the Bill. I do not necessarily have a particular suggestion, but I worry about it.
Charlotte Nichols
Q Hillary, is there anything you would like to add?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: It is important, especially in reference to your first question and whether we think about discrimination and what the Bill could allow for. First and foremost, the Bill needs to give stronger reassurances that will not allow for free rein on discrimination, especially of vulnerable groups. However, it is also really important that we recognise that there are students who are made much more vulnerable by different types of speech than others, and unless the Bill recognises that they need protections and unless it can work alongside existing Acts and duties, it is going to make a lot of those students feel unsafe on campus—even more so than they do now with just their general experiences. I think that many elements of the Bill need to be looked at closely to ensure that that is embedded in there.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
Q Further to the last point, speaking from a personal point of view and a NUS point of view, presumably you believe in freedom of speech in the sense that you believe in the freedom to disturb, to alarm, or even to shock or outrage.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Yes. As the NUS, we believe in freedom of speech.
Sir John Hayes
Q Even if that makes people feel very uncomfortable?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: What I would say is that to focus on freedom of speech as just being about making people uncomfortable is quite restrictive. If we are going to speak about freedom of speech in that regard, we also have to speak about the freedom of people to have opposing views and the right of people to protest when they do have opposing views. Even more so, I think it is important that when we think about freedom of speech, we acknowledge the fact that freedom of speech is important to have, to champion and to promote, but we also have to be mindful of where it might encroach into places where people feel harmed, and are harmed, especially if they come from a vulnerable or marginalised group with protected characteristics under the Equality Act.
Sir John Hayes
Q Of course, you are right that freedom of speech is unqualified in the sense that both views need to be put and many opinions need to be shared. There should be no prohibition on that within the law, and the law does prohibit incitement to hatred, incitement to terrorism and various other things, as you know. However, within those lawful constraints, is the freedom to offend important to you?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I would say to that that we could speak about the freedom to offend, but I think it is important that if we are so focused on offending rather than promoting an environment of debate in which people are able to voice opposing views, rather than just allow people to have the freedom to offend, I think we are not speaking about freedom of speech in the way that it should look like—in a balanced way, you know. If people should have the freedom to offend, people should also have the freedom to express opposing views, and to express that as freely as people would offend. Again, going back to the Bill, we cannot talk about this until there are proper reassurances that the Bill will not allow that freedom of offence to flirt with where it might encroach on hate speech or harmful speech, especially when people are from marginalised communities.
Sir John Hayes
Q Hang on, I want to be clear about this. I totally agree with you that there need to be plural opportunities for people to express their views. I may find those views entirely unacceptable, possibly shocking and maybe offensive, but I would defend people’s right to be able to express them. We have laws that protect against hatred, incitement to violence, incitement to terrorism and so on, so are we clear that what the Bill does is to allow pretty pervasive freedom of speech within the law, allowing all kinds of views to be articulated on campus? That is a good thing, surely.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Again, I would just reiterate that we believe in and champion freedom of speech on campus. It is not a secret that the NUS and the student movement have been facilitating this happening for years and years, so that is what I would say to that.
I think, though, that what the Bill proposes, and some of its elements, come across as finding ways to promote free speech by introducing a body to bring in punitive measures where that is inhibited. I think that does not give enough acknowledgement to the fact that there are already existing processes to ensure that, when free speech is inhibited, that is dealt with. There is already promotion of free speech by student unions, by universities and by the NUS, even, and we need to think about whether the Bill will have the effect of promoting free speech, or whether it will have an opposite effect that causes people to be very risk-averse.
Sir John Hayes
Q Very briefly, Chair—I know others want to speak—let me be clear. I am relieved and delighted by what you said about the NUS’s position. So, the NUS is against no-platforming, it is against a list of proscribed speakers who can lawfully make their views known elsewhere, and it is basically in favour of a pretty permissive free speech policy across universities.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: If I may, that is not what I said exactly, especially in reference to the no-platforming policy. We have a no-platforming policy that includes six organisations, most of which the Government would also see as racist and fascist organisations. To say that we do not agree with no-platforming is simply not true.
Sir John Hayes
Q Are these lawful organisations? Are you saying that you are in favour, then, of prohibiting lawful free speech in certain circumstances?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: No. I am not saying that I am not in favour of lawful free speech. I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the NUS supports, champions and cares deeply that free speech is championed, enabled and supported. To say that we do not agree with no-platforming where there are organisation like those I referenced with NUS’s no-platform policy that share and promote hate speech that hurts people from marginalised groups––to say that we do not support that is not true.
Emma Hardy
Q This is not just about free speech within the law. Conservative Members may not recall that the Minister wrote to universities asking them to adopt the definition of antisemitism. The Chair of the Education Committee has promoted, and asked universities to adopt, the definition of antisemitism. That definition is not law, so there are times when we want to restrict what people say that are not necessarily within the law. Do you want to comment on why adopting that definition is important, despite it not being law?
Danny Stone: There are two different issues here. Sir John, I found the your exchange earlier with Sunder Katwala really interesting because there are points in society where we turn round and say, “Sorry, this isn’t acceptable. There are societal standards here.” We do that with Ofcom. We do it with the British Board of Film Classification in our film regulation. We do it in other areas of public life where we say there are some kind of limits. That does not mean that the speech cannot happen, but Parliament sets a standard and it allows regulators, for example, to have a say on those standards. That is why I think that the complexities I spoke to should be on the face of the Bill.
I am pleased to have the chance to talk about International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, so thank you. The IHRA definition is excellent and it was created––people may not know this––to try to bring uniformity for practitioners who were trying to understand why Jews were fleeing antisemitism and antisemitic terrorism in Europe. It helps to bring a standard of understanding to people. What it does not do––I disagree with Sunder’s evidence earlier––is to block people from saying anything. It is an advisory tool. It helps people to understand what antisemitism may be in a particular context. That is a very useful thing for universities, and the Secretary of State and the Minister have been very good in supporting the IHRA definition. But, as you say, it does help to guide what our expectations are around antisemitism, and presumably, if something is found to be antisemitic, we do not really want that. There is a societal standard that we aspire to. Sorry for a long answer but, yes, I do think that these complexities need to be addressed in the Bill.
The Chair
I realise that these are very complex issues, but I ask Members and the panel to try to be succinct because we still have an awful lot of people who want to ask questions. I will try my level best to let everybody in.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Q Thank you both for coming today. Danny, you have given us some carefully collated data on antisemitism which has been very helpful, not just in relation to the Bill but more widely. What are your thoughts about faith-based views being expressed and how there may have been an impact on those in the university arena, including in terms of the chilling effect? The kind of views that I am talking about have perhaps not been mentioned in the witness sessions we have had so far, in which we have talked about the political spectrum of restrictions on freedom of speech. What about things like a biblical view of creation, pro-life views or a faith perspective on the meaning of marriage—or indeed having a faith at all? Could you comment on how those areas have been affected by the issues that we have been discussing?
Danny Stone: In truth, I do not have specific data on that.
Fiona Bruce
I would not expect you to.
Danny Stone: I would want to speak to, for example, the University Jewish Chaplaincy about that to understand what has happened. From my limited knowledge, I know that there are issues around exams on Jewish festivals, but I do not have much more. My general principle, as before, is that there has to be a right to offend. There has to be a right of freedom to express difficult, controversial opinions, but I am afraid that I do not have enough on the specifics for you.
Fiona Bruce
Q That is all right. Hillary, do you have any comments on students being freely able to express that kind of view within the university environment?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I do not necessarily know that it is for me to comment. I would reassert that freedom of speech is important, especially when there are views that offend or might alarm, but that has to be balanced by the ability of people who disagree to oppose and challenge those views. It is important that whenever we speak about freedom of speech there is balance. It is not just about allowing alarming views; it is about also allowing people who challenge and oppose those views to have the right to freedom of speech in an equal and equitable way.
Fiona Bruce
Q Thank you. A further short question, if I may. We have asked witnesses about the impact that they think not having the Bill would have on the university environment in 10 years’ time. One witness said that there could be a monoculture or a lack of development of critical thinkers. I am really interested in what your impression is of the effect on wider society of not having the Bill, in 10 years’ time when all the students who have experienced that environment are in positions of responsibility.
Danny Stone: It depends whether the Bill has the amendments in it that I have proposed or not—[Laughter.] The truth is that I do not know, but I can tell you that the Union of Jewish Students asked me to raise specifically that there has been disruption of where Jewish students who have a particular Zionist identity are looking to host Israeli speakers. Those talks, in numerous cases—I have 20 different examples in front of me—have been interrupted and the students have not been able, in their opinion, to host people with views that they want to be shared.
These are not controversial things; it is Israeli students and a group of Israeli minorities cancelled at short notice. There is a concern in that regard about being able to have a well thought through, rational and calm discussion about what is happening in the middle east, and whether that might be impacted. The UK Lawyers for Israel have raised that in front of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I thought that concern might fit in answer to your question.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q To follow up on that, I remember that when I was a student at the University of Bradford, I hosted a speaking tour of Zionist refuseniks—people who were proud Israelis and Zionists, but at the time were refusing to fight in the Israel Defence Forces. I remember the paperwork and bureaucracy required to host those young people from Israel at university, and to get them to speak about their experiences and how they, very importantly, were not anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist, but had disagreements on certain policies. It almost meant that some of the objectives did not happen. Is there a danger with some of this, particularly around tort, that universities will require even more paperwork and more thresholds that might mean that people such as myself in Bradford, who had a countervailing view at the time, might end up saying, “I can’t be bothered to host that speaking tour”?
Danny Stone: I will give you another answer about complexities. In some instances, that bureaucracy can be helpful. We worked on the Manchester guidelines, which meant that when a speaker was coming to campus it was advertised in a bar so that students could raise concerns if somebody was coming and they thought that there would be a problem. Then the university could put in place various measures to ensure that that talk went off without any problem. Perhaps the event was recorded; perhaps the speaker was asked to undertake to uphold the various principles that the university has or its requirements in respect of the public sector equality duty. Those things are helpful, so I do not think all bureaucracy is unhelpful, but I do not know yet; I suppose a lot will depend on how this is enacted and whether that may cause bureaucracy. Certainly as a student, the less paperwork I could fill in, the better.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q I was on a panel at one event where there was—I do not think he is even a professor—the Miller chap from Bristol, and I remember that at the end of the event I said I think what has been said here is a load of rubbish—I think I was more fruity in my language. I told my office at the time to write a letter to him to say that I would not sit on any more panels and would not host any events with him. Is there a danger that if I were an institution and then wrote to Mr Miller with that, I would open myself up for tort liability, because I would be effectively saying, “I don’t want to host your views anymore”? I can do that as an MP, but as a university I would be potentially liable to be sued.
Danny Stone: The truth is I do not know how this will play out. I do think there is a difference between people in public life being on panels and deciding their engagement with particular speakers—and institutions. I do think there is a qualitative difference. I do not know—it may very well. That is why, in all these cases, whether it be in relation to the director of freedom of speech for the OfS, the code of practice or anything else, that balance and the reference to complexity and competing freedoms will be hugely important in trying to get the balance right.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q Hillary, you always get—and it is fantastic—some contrary students in student unions, who want to rock the boat. That is basically the point of a student union, under the Education Act 1994 and case law—v. Brady and others, for example. But is there a difficulty with this, particularly, that there might be a reverse chilling effect, and that rather than allowing students to invite whomever they want and then doing as Danny says and seeing whether there can be a process to ensure that things are followed, some student unions just go down the course of saying, “You can’t invite in anyone, because we don’t want to breach”—
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: That is an important concern to raise: the inadvertent or indirect—well, I do not even know whether it is indirect. I think a direct unintended consequence of this Bill could be that student unions would become more risk averse to inviting speakers, because they just cannot handle the bureaucracy; they just cannot handle the prospect of having to pay lots of money in the case of litigation. They are having to worry about doing what they already do well and facilitate very well, in a way that is much more complicated and adds so many more layers of process to what they already do very well, in order not to face the consequences of this Bill. If we are going to think about bringing student unions into this duty, we have to think about the fact that they already have regulators, regulations and provisions to make sure that freedom of speech is facilitated well and strongly on campus. I think that is a legitimate direct consequence that this Bill could create for student unions—not least the £800,000 a year in printing and signing off the code of practice.
Mr Holden
Q My first question is to Mr Stone. I just wanted to pick up on something that we got evidence on earlier, which was that about 20% of students are apparently feeling unable to express their views in the classroom. I just wondered whether there were any specifics around Jewish students, given what you had said about the UJS having difficulty with people coming on campus.
Danny Stone: As I say, there have been various Israeli speakers that they have sought to have on campus, including a professor of international law at City University in 2015—cancelled. In 2018 it was the Israeli ambassador; the event was initially cancelled and then held after a legal threat. There is a suggestion by a law lecturer at City University that they had been refused a sabbatical for attending a law conference in Israel. For Israeli minorities that I spoke to, events were cancelled at short notice and held off campus, because the SU imposed charges. This is actually something fairly important; it has happened a number of times—student societies being asked to pay a fee to cover the security costs of an event going ahead.
Mr Holden
Q He raised a particular concern around academic freedom and the lack of voices from certain points of the political establishment. Do you find that that is also an issue that Jewish academics face?
Danny Stone: There are anecdotal examples of Jewish academics who have felt that they have been passed over for a promotion, or that they have not necessarily had the support that they thought they should have for speaking about antisemitism. On the flip side, as I pointed to before, I know that there are academics who have expressed antisemitic views, and we have significant concerns about that. One that I spotted today—this points to the earlier discussion about conspiracy theories—had a conspiracy theory on their personal website, which is linked to the university website. It is complex. There are issues there. The Jewish community is like the rest of the world, and will experience the same issues that others face.
Mr Holden
Q Miss Gyebi-Ababio, we had evidence from Kathleen Stock, from the University of Sussex, about her concerns around academic freedom. One of the things that you mentioned earlier was that you want to believe in and champion freedom of speech, and that is what the NUS does. Would that extend as far as people like Kathleen Stock, who push gender-critical thinking?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I do not think it is necessarily my place to say who is and is not okay to speak on campus. I would say that there are frameworks in place to facilitate people with views that might be viewed as controversial or unpopular to be able to speak on campus. Those are already in place and already happening. I think it is important that, where freedom of speech is championed, we are trusting in the existing processes that are facilitating that already.
I think that this Bill puts in place undue measures, in an excessive way, to solve something that just has not been proven to be widespread. The data released by the OfS last week shows it. When 0.002% of events were cancelled—that is under 100 of the 43,000 events that were reported for them to look at—free speech is already being facilitated on campus, and universities and student unions are doing it well. Again, as I said at the start, they are learning as they go. They are continuing to learn and continuing to improve their procedures, and doing that really well.
Mr Holden
Q One of the issues that has been raised, rather than this direct cancelling of events, which Mr Stone has spoken to, is also the self-censorship: people not inviting people, and that sort of thing. I believe you are here on behalf of the NUS, at least in some part. I just wanted to raise something—a term called TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I am just looking at the NUS website now, from June this year, and it says, basically, that “the gender-critical perspective” is essentially “trying to rebrand” people who are “just…hateful bigots”. Do you agree with that?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: It is important that NUS is able to express its views and opinions, just as we champion the right for people to be able to express their own. That is us exercising our freedom of speech in challenging a view that we do not agree with. I do not know how that necessarily speaks to the Bill, but again, I want to reiterate that this Bill does some really important stuff in promoting free speech, but it does not offer enough—
The Chair
I am sorry to interrupt, but I am afraid we are running out of time, and we have one more question to take. It will have to be the last question of the day.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I was just finishing the sentence.
David Simmonds
Q I thank Danny for his comments about the usefulness of the IHRA definition. A brief question for Hillary: you said in a number of your responses that there are a lot of things in the Bill that need to be closely scrutinised; luckily, the purpose of this Committee is to ensure that scrutiny. Can you say specifically which points in the Bill the NUS wishes to express a view about, and how you feel the Bill should change in the light of the NUS’s point of view?
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Hopefully you will have seen our amendments, so to save time I will not repeat them. All our amendments cover the fact that there are confusing regulatory positions in the Bill, which add regulation to a sector and a space that are already regulated quite well. It is concerning, in that the Bill will cause chaos and confusion for students and academics alike, I imagine. There is not a lot of clarity around the measures. I have spoken a lot about the disproportionate financial impact that they will have on student unions. They do not show a preparedness to be transparent and accountable in relation to the Director for Freedom of Speech, and more generally in how the regulatory framework will work. Again, as I said—and this speaks to the last question I was answering—there is not enough reassurance—
The Chair
Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allocated for the Committee to ask questions of this panel. I thank the witnesses on behalf of the Committee for their evidence. I invite any member of the Committee who wishes to register an interest to do so now.
Sir John Hayes
As I did previously, I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests relating to my role at the University of Bolton.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
As I mentioned in the previous sitting, I am a trustee at the University of Bradford union, I receive money from the University of Sussex to provide educational opportunities to its students, and I have received support from the University and College Union.
Matt Western
My wife works at a higher education provider.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Michael Tomlinson.)
Adjourned till Wednesday 15 September at twenty-five minutes past Nine o’clock.
Written evidence reported to the House
HEFSB10 Free Churches Group of England and Wales
HEFSB11 Professor Kathleen Stock OBE, Philosophy, University of Sussex
HEFSB12 Dr David Renton, barrister, and Prof Alison Scott-Baumann, SOAS, SOAS ICOP project
HEFSB13 The Russell Group
HEFSB14 Executive Committee of Beds SU, University of Bedfordshire
HEFSB15 George Sullivan, Union Development Officer, The University of Nottingham Students’ Union
HEFSB16 Sheffield Hallam University
HEFSB17 Professor Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
HEFSB18 National Union of Students UK and the National Union of Students Charity
HEFSB19 Smita Jamdar, Partner & Head of Education, Shakespeare Martineau (supplementary)
Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Third sitting)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
Good afternoon. We will now hear oral evidence from Professor Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Professor Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Q
Professor Kaufmann: The right to question received wisdom, the right of academics to question—
The Chair
I am afraid the acoustics in this room are very poor. Do you think that you could speak up as though you were addressing a hall of 500 students?
Professor Kaufmann: I have not done that in a while. The freedom of academics to test and question received wisdom, including public commentary and extramural speech, is how I would define academic freedom. It needs to be protected to a greater extent, perhaps, than in other professions to allow academics really to challenge convention without risking a detriment. The special thing about universities is that you can do that.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Kaufmann: No, it is something that you have as an academic. It needs to be protected. If it is something that you have to earn, that would suggest that there are two tiers. I think that even a temporary, adjunct academic should have it.
Professor Goodwin: I would agree. I would define academic freedom as the ability to challenge conventional wisdom, to voice unpopular opinions and to go against the grain without suffering adverse consequences from within your institution.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Kaufmann: I do not think anyone can predict. That is a public order question and the determination of the risk would have to be made by the police, for example. I think this is quite far from the situation that has given rise to the need for the Bill. It is not really a public order Bill; it is much more about protecting the everyday rights of academics to speak out, speak their beliefs and research without detriment. Yes, if there is likely to be some kind of public order incident, the police will have to give advice on that.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Kaufmann: The Bill will have a very important effect. Sometimes the point is missed when we focus in on a few incidents of no-platforming. Really, the big, big issue here is the monumental chilling effect that academics feel: in a UCU-sponsored study, 35% of academics—UCU members—said that they felt restricted in saying what they believe. That is 35,000 academics. In a King’s study, 25% of students claim that they will not say what they believe—that is 500,000 people. We are talking about an absolutely massive problem here, and I think it is very important to get that point across. Issues around no-platforming are the tip of a vast iceberg of chilling effects and self-censorship that I believe is distorting the truth-seeking mission of the university. The university has to be a place where we can pursue truths, even if they go against conventions and mores of the time. The no-platforming incidence is really the crux of the issue, which the Bill will address.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Goodwin: I will speak from personal experience to give you an idea. I publicly accepted the vote for Brexit in an environment where only around 10% of academics either supported Brexit or tend to support conservative or right-wing political parties, and that really makes me an outlier. The only reason why I, and colleagues who might hold gender critical views or a more nuanced interpretation of British history, have been able to speak up about some of those issues is because we have often been professors with job security and tenure, and are very difficult to sack.
If you are a junior academic or are on a fixed-term contract, speaking out about issues that go against the monoculture in many of our universities comes with very real consequences, and I know that from the many emails that I have received from junior academics and members of staff at universities who simply feel unable to voice their true views on those issues because they are fearful of what will happen to their careers. Indeed, in some cases—including friends of mine—they have been sacked or disinvited from workshops. As Professor Kaufmann points out, the temptation in this debate is to say, “There are only a few cases. Isn’t this about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut?” When you are looking at rigorous and robust surveys that suggest that one in three academics are self-censoring, that is a very big problem in a country that has long prided itself on having some of the best universities in the world, which are based on viewpoint diversity—being able to challenge, critique and voice unpopular opinions. However, many of my colleagues do not feel able to do that, as you heard last week and as I am sure you will hear this week, as well.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Goodwin: When you look at institutions that lean very heavily in one particular direction— 75%, 80% leaning toward the left of the political spectrum— we know from research that those kinds of monocultures also encourage people to become more radical over time; Cass Sunstein, for example, has written a book about that.
However, we are also dealing with institutions that are responsible for the next generation. I would want my students to disagree with me on a whole range of issues, but I would also want them to be exposed to very different viewpoints throughout their university experience: viewpoints on the left, on the right, from above and from below. Ultimately, that is what gives us the ability to think critically and it strengthens our democracy. At the moment, however, we know clearly from the King’s study—I think you are speaking to the author later— that a quarter of all university students in the UK are self-censoring, which is a very depressing statistic.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Goodwin: I can speak from personal experience; I have invited people from across the political spectrum to speak to my students over the years. I have had Conservative, Labour and UK Independence party candidates come to speak to students. I would have invited somebody from the British National party or the National Front, were they available.
Those experiences taught me and demonstrated very clearly that students are more than capable of being exposed to a range of different views and of challenging those views, because ultimately we are here to develop critical thinkers; we are not here to put students in ideological monocultures that only give them one view of the world.
One thing I would say, which I think is a very important point for this Committee, is this: if you look at the United States and at levels of trust in universities in America over the last 10 years, you will see that they have declined significantly, as this debate has become very polarised. The last thing that I think we would want in the UK is to repeat that experience, because people are increasingly looking at higher education institutions as being very political institutions—being very lopsided. It would be a great shame if that were to happen in this country.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Kaufmann: That is a really good point: very few academics—only about one in 10—are willing to support a given cancel campaign, which is good news.
The problem, in a way, is that all it really takes is only a very small minority of radical activists to get, let us say, an attack on a gender critical feminist. I mean, these are small, tightly organised networks, but they are able to move mountains because nobody necessarily wants to stand up to them.
Most academics are not in favour of this stuff, but they are also scared to stand up to it, because if you stand up to people who are attacking gender critical feminists, you might be labelled as a transphobe. You are not a transphobe, but by critiquing people who claim to be acting for the benefit of the trans community, you fear that that aura will stick to you. What happened at Cambridge, with Arif Ahmed, is instructive. You have heard from him, and essentially he struggled to get 25 signatures of people who were willing to put something to a vote on whether to change the wording of the university’s policy. Once it was put to the vote, it passed by 80%.
There is a lot of reluctance; people do not want to stick their heads above the parapet. That is the issue that we face. I have looked at survey data on this: an academic individual is actually more pro-free speech than a non-academic individual, when you account for their ideology; a far leftist who is not an academic is less supportive of free speech than a far leftist academic.
The issue, however, is that in the university we have such a skew, because most of these claims of coming from the far left. Because they make up 25% to 30% of academic staff in the social sciences and humanities and because they make up a significant share of students, we are going to see a lot more of these challenges to free speech. It is not because academics are any more anti-free speech than non-academics—in fact, it is the reverse. It is just that it is a function of the ideological distribution of academics. That is why we see more of these events in universities.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Kaufmann: On critical race theory?
Matt Western
Yes.
Professor Kaufmann: I never endorsed any Government action on critical race theory in universities—only in schools where the teaching is compulsory and you have to pass the element. In a university, it absolutely should be taught; people are free to take it and to teach it. It is a different thing: you are dealing with adults. In a school where every pupil has to be taught critical race theory, we have a compelled speech issue, a freedom of conscience issue.
I think critical race theory is a conspiracy theory. I am quite open about that. However, there is high critical race theory, which is interesting, is worth teaching and has some insights. The vulgar critical race theory that is appearing in schools and some diversity training, where they separate pupils by race and say that some are oppressors and some are oppressed, is nonsense. However, in a university classroom, people are free to take what they want and teach what they want. In schools, where we are not dealing with adults and it is compulsory, there is a freedom of conscience issue. I make that distinction very clearly.
The Minister for Universities (Michelle Donelan)
Q
Professor Kaufmann: It is important for academics who might find themselves in a situation in which they are disciplined for speech to have recourse against their institution if that institution is not upholding their rights to freedom of speech. The point of the statutory tort is simply to allow an avenue for those with grievances that cannot be met within their institutions. Very often, I am sad to say, many institutions are not doing a successful job of upholding this right for many academics —hence the need for recourse to the court system.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Professor Goodwin: From my experience, this debate is already actually beginning to bring about some important culture change. The shift from protecting to promoting is incredibly important. Universities are, by their nature, very bureaucratic organisations, and, once this change gives a signal about the renewed importance of protecting academic freedom, it will have a profound impact on universities. I can speak from experience of my university, the University of Kent, which is already having a vigorous debate about academic freedom and I am sure will emerge as a sector leader in promoting academic freedom. It is reassuring to see the way in which this national discussion is already bringing about change.
For many of my colleagues, who have in some cases been sacked, disinvited, intimated, harassed, undermined and mocked, this piece of legislation is very important, for obvious reasons. We are not talking about small numbers, as Professor Kaufmann points out. I know from personal experience that having the ability to go to an external entity to ensure that cases are explored and examined will play a critical role in ensuring viewpoint diversity within the sector. I think it is already having an impact, and I suspect that, much like the legislation around equalities, we will probably find that within a few years universities will suddenly be arranging league tables of academic freedom and all the kinds of things that tend to come with changes that are brought about by law.
There is a massive opportunity to emerge globally as a leader in the promotion of academic freedom in a debate that is global. The Canadians, the French and the Americans are talking about it, and nobody has really got a hold of it and demonstrated what it means in practice, so I think there is an opportunity for the UK to be that model.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Professor Kaufmann: I am Canadian, and it is interesting to look at what has happened in the province of Ontario. Ontario and Alberta have both adopted elements of this kind of legislation, and it has been very ineffective because it has not gone the same distance that this legislation has. In the province of Ontario, all universities have to adopt a sort of Chicago principles-style free speech document and issue an annual free speech report, and there is an ombudsman for complaints. However, there is not anything like a director of academic freedom to spearhead the process, so even though there is an ombudsman, that individual is in fact not on board with this agenda. Therefore, when people have made complaints, they have gone nowhere.
It is incredibly important, therefore, to have a director of academic freedom who believes in promoting academic freedom, can see this through and can proactively make sure the legislation is applied. That is an absolutely critical part of this legislation. That is one of the reasons that this is so path-breaking. William McNally, who is a professor in a Canadian university called Wilfrid Laurier, looks at the UK and says, “I wish we could have something like the UK’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.” I think this could very well be world-leading.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Professor Goodwin: I think there are multiple threats relating to debates we are having around the role of China; indeed, that was in the newspapers again over the weekend, relating to the University of Cambridge. We also have parallel issues around the ability of gender-critical academics, some of whom you heard from last week, to be able just to conduct themselves on campus without requiring security, which is an incredible state of affairs for anyone to be in. There is also the ability of some of our colleagues in history and psychology to challenge conventional wisdom on issues ranging from the role of Britain’s empire through to intelligence and unconscious bias testing—you name it. All that should be on the table, and we should be interrogating, exploring and examining it. The threats are multi-faceted and are not just coming from one direction. That underlines the need for some action in this area.
Professor Kaufmann: I would add that even though conservative academics are reporting much higher levels of self-censorship—two to three times as high as the left—it is also the case that this is not just about protecting conservatives. Certain types of left-wing research around the middle east, for example, and Islam will also benefit from this protection. It is worth noting that. In our Policy Exchange study, we had a number of left-wing academics making that exact point. They are worried about some off-campus groups such as Turning Point UK. They are worried about Prevent and discussions around Israel-Palestine, so this Bill will benefit not just conservatives.
Of course, it is the case that political minorities are reporting much higher levels of self-censorship. For example, in the King’s study—you will be hearing from one of the authors later—they asked about the statement:
“Students with conservative views are reluctant to express them at my university”.
Conservative students agreed by a 59:26 ratio. There is a much higher level of censorship and chilling going on for Conservatives, but it is not only Conservatives—certain kinds of left-wing speech are also being chilled. The Bill will benefit both kinds of speech.
The Chair
More than half of the time allocated has already been used up. I hope that colleagues will make their questions very brief, in the hope of encouraging succinct answers.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Q
The Chair
I am going to interrupt, because we are not taking evidence from you. We are trying to invite the witnesses to express their views.
Mr Jones
As you cannot challenge the director, if you had an authoritarian Government, that could potentially be very difficult. The other point, to Professor Goodwin, is on employment: the Bill will not stop academics being sacked. Surely there should be something in the Bill, or some change in terms of employment law, to give protection to those individuals you talked about? Finally, Professor Kaufmann, on the tort issue: does the Bill not open universities up to a huge amount of litigation? For example, the United Front—a front for the Chinese Communist party—operates widely on our campuses today; will it not use the Bill as a mechanism to ensure that it gets across its ideas and arguments, while being possibly well-funded by the Chinese Communist party and Chinese Government? Is there not a danger of giving weapons to our opponents, and doing the opposite of what we are trying to achieve?
Professor Kaufmann: There are some really good questions there; the one about the state is interesting. It can seem paradoxical that the state is needed to protect individual liberty, but actually it has happened many times in the past. Think of society as three layers, Government, institutions and individuals, instead of two, Government and individuals. The institutions can become illiberal, in which case the Government need to step in to protect the liberty of the individuals. In the United States, in the early 1960s, there were universities that segregated black and white students—essentially barring black students from entering the university, such as at the University of Mississippi. The US federal Government had to more or less step in and desegregate those universities, and they essentially violated the universities’ autonomy to do so. That is an example of where the Government were needed to protect the freedoms of students.
Mr Jones
Q
Professor Kaufmann: Sure, McCarthyism. All I am saying is: it is not unusual. If you have a corrupt police department or a school that is taken into special measures, government action is needed to protect liberties. This is clearly one of those situations.
I do not think that universities can reform themselves. The pressures on them are simply too powerful. I have seen this up close, as a head of department: in committee meetings, no one will speak up against what is an illiberal policy but will make them look like a racist or transphobe, and so the policy gets through. In the US, they have had speech codes in universities since the late 1980s. There have been complaints about them—they are a violation of the first amendment right to free speech—but they persist because the institutional forces are too strong. You need an outside force to come in to reform the system. Government action is absolutely central to this, and that is why the Bill is so important.
Professor Goodwin: To keep it brief, I think the Cambridge vote was very revealing. Publicly, you have an academic who struggles to get two dozen signatures, but the moment you ask academics to express their view in an anonymous situation under secret ballot you find that most academics are willing to speak up and challenge the consensus. That is, to me, direct evidence of the chilling effect, and the way in which once you remove the threat of being exposed people are more than willing to challenge that orthodoxy.
If the current system with regard to sacking and dismissal were working, we would not be having this conversation. We would not have had dozens of academics appearing in the newspapers. There was another one this weekend from the University of Bristol who was accused of being Islamophobic. The university had ruled that he was not Islamophobic, but had none the less removed his course in response to student satisfaction.
That is another example of how, to be frank, the broader system needs a good overhaul. We have generated a market-based system that is overwhelmingly skewed around student satisfaction rather than the pursuit of truth and intellectual exploration. If the current system were working, we would not be having this conversation. It is why, on the director of academic freedom, people who are dismissed for, they feel, political reasons need to have somebody to whom they can turn to explore their case and interrogate it.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Q
Professor Goodwin: My view would be that the protection of academic freedom should apply not just to established academics but, in particular in some cases, to academics who are at the beginning of their career and perhaps on fixed-term contracts, or who perhaps are doctoral students. They are the most likely to self-censor, for obvious reasons. They do not want to irritate their colleagues. They do not want to suffer reputational consequences.
My view would be that it should also apply to students, given that we have around a quarter, if we look at the King’s study, for example—I would add lots of emails from students in my 20-year career of teaching in universities—of students feeling that they cannot speak out about particular issues. I think you heard from Tom Simpson who made that point regarding his experience at Oxford, so I think that students definitely need to be included.
Professor Kaufmann: I agree with that absolutely.
Fiona Bruce
Thank you. That gives me time for a second question, if I may, Sir Christopher.
Fiona Bruce
Q
Professor Goodwin: This is how it typically works: a group of students will make a complaint about an academic. They may take that academic’s words out of context. They may imply that something was said that may not have been said—who knows? That academic is typically investigated and, as we saw in the case at Edinburgh recently, they are suspended and asked to leave campus for six weeks or so while the case is investigated. There is a reason why academics says that the punishment is the process. The reputation of that academic is now in tatters. Nobody will hire that academic. His or her chances of getting a research grant are probably minimal, and those of getting published have been severely damaged.
That individual is tainted. We are tainted simply for making some of the arguments that we have made today. The protections and the right to recourse that we give to academics who find themselves in that situation should be as strong as possible. Our entire world is dependent on reputation. Everything we do is under our name. If allegations are made that may even be free of evidence, the onus is very much on the academic to defend themselves against something that often has detrimental consequences.
I personally know many professors, for example, who are on medication to sleep because of the stress and strain that comes with this new culture that we have had. In America, Jonathan Haidt’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” has documented this in detail. From 2010 onwards we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of student protests, and much more robust, assertive activities to try to constrain what can and cannot be said on campus. I will allow Eric to come in.
Professor Kaufmann: I want to add one thing. The nature of the academic employment market is such that any permanent academic job in a lot of universities will get 100 or 200 applications for each position. To get a position in your field of specialty in a place you want to be is not impossible, but it is extremely difficult. If you lose at it, it is not enough to pay somebody a year’s salary. This is why we need recourse to an employment tribunal that can recommend reinstatement. You need reinstatement, not just a year of salary. A year of salary is not going to cut it when you are unemployable, so it is vital that this amendment goes through.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
Q
“Only in this manner can academics have the confidence that they are protected from ideological opponents who wish to punish them for their views.”
I support you in wanting to protect academics from ideological opponents. How can we ensure the independence of the director of freedom of speech? Interestingly, further on in your written evidence, you refer to an ombudsman system in other countries. How can we ensure the independence of the director of freedom of speech to prevent “ideological opponents” who wish to punish academics?
Professor Kaufmann: All that the director of academic freedom has to do is enforce the letter of the law.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: No, I do not think you need to have a lawyer in there. You just need somebody who understands the spirit of the legislation—it is not too difficult—but who is proactive.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: I think their office and the legal advice that they take can guide them. Those kinds of details—
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: They could take legal advice, certainly.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: I am probably not enough of a policy wonk to know where such an individual would sit. Would you contract it out or have it in-house? That is a decision for somebody else to make, but I think that you need to make a legally informed decision that is in alignment with what a court would decide and what the intent of the legislation is.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: No, I think they proactively apply the law so that it does not go to a court. Another system could be to allow everybody to sue, but that is reactive. It is very difficult and expensive to go through these court cases. We have seen that in the US in first amendment court cases.
Emma Hardy
It is hugely expensive.
Professor Kaufmann: I would much rather be proactive. Also, you need it to be proactive in order to give academics assurance. If they have to sue—[Interruption.]
The Chair
Emma, would you please allow some academic freedom to this witness? You may disagree with what he says, but you must allow him to answer your question.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: Of course.
Emma Hardy
You are talking about how this director of freedom will have some knowledge of the law but will not be a lawyer, and will make law-based decisions but not in a court. How should they obtain this position, then, to ensure this academic freedom and prevent ideological opponents from being punished?
Professor Kaufmann: The criteria would involve somebody who is knowledgeable about the sector, who would also be on board with the mission of protecting academic freedom and would care about it. I think those are the two most important qualities for an individual.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: I wish I were an expert. There has to be some sort of precedent in terms of these bodies. I guess they would be advertised; you would have the criteria. The Office for Students would presumably be involved, and the Government would be involved. That is the best I can give you.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Kaufmann: Yes, I would. I think it is important that they are accountable to the voters. They need to be sure that the person is upholding the values that are important for this role, because I think there is a problem that sometimes, bodies can be captured by a particular stream of opinion. As we know, this can happen in academia, so you have to have a check on that.
The Chair
I am going to stop this now and ask Gareth Bacon to ask a question, because we have only three minutes left.
Gareth Bacon
Q
Professor Goodwin: I do agree. I would just add on the record that most of the problems I have encountered personally have not come from within the University of Kent, but from within the broader higher education sector.
Gareth Bacon
Q
Professor Goodwin: Again, just to revert to personal experience, I would certainly leave academia, and I know that many other of my colleagues would probably come to the same conclusion. I think there are a large number of researchers, junior and senior, who now feel that viewpoint diversity is no longer really in existence or being protected adequately within Britain’s institutions, and that is a very depressing thing for somebody who has spent 20 years building up their academic career to say.
I know for a fact that many of my colleagues no longer feel particularly welcome, safe, secure, or ultimately able to say what they really think, and for every one of me, there are 20 or 30 people behind me who do not feel able to come and speak and voice their concerns as we are doing today. For every Kathleen Stock, there are 50 other gender-critical academics. I had a message from one this morning who is going through a very similar case and is being chased out of a department for reasons similar to those Kathleen raised. The most frustrating thing, just to put this on the record, is for people like me to hear people who are not in higher education say that this is all a myth and that it does not exist. They clearly do not have an understanding of what is happening in higher education.
Professor Kaufmann: To reiterate, I think that what will happen is that the truth-seeking mission of the university will be warped, because many questions that we need to ask will not be asked and many answers that we need are not going to be given, for career reasons.
On Matt’s point about the idea that this is somehow a moral panic or a new thing, a recent paper by a leading Harvard political scientist, Pippa Norris, called “Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?”, was published in Political Studies a few months ago. She asked three questions: “Have the following got better or worse in the last five years: academic freedom to teach and research; respect for open debate from diverse perspectives; pressures to be politically correct?” The modal answer, even from left-wing academics, was that those things had got worse in the last five years. For those on the right, the percentage was in the 80s. We have a problem, in that people are saying that it has got worse in the last five years, and the King’s surveys of students found similar. If we do not address this, the truth-seeking mission of the university if going to be severely impacted.
The Chair
Thank you very much indeed, both of you. We now have to move on to the next session. If any colleagues have complaints about the length of time allocated, I am told that they must be referred to the Whips, as they were the people who dictated that there should be such limited time to hear your expert evidence.
Examination of Witness
Sunder Katwala gave evidence.
The Chair
Mr Katwala, please could you introduce yourself for the record?
Sunder Katwala: I am Sunder Katwala and am director of British Future, which is an independent, non-partisan think-tank and charity that engages the public on identity and related issues.
Matt Western
Q
Sunder Katwala: The underlying thought is that the legitimate concern of the Bill is to protect academic freedom expansively, to symbolically reinforce that that is the case, and to provide new mechanisms to deal with disputes. Everybody who is interested in academic freedom would say that it is in law and we should be protecting it, and that is being driven by the fear that there is overcreep from the side that wants to take away academic freedom. In terms of how you implement that, if you say, “Let’s defend lawful speech because lawful speech is free speech, and lawful speech is academic freedom,” that sounds very good, as long as you can answer the question: is all lawful speech something we want to defend as academic freedom, or are there categories of lawful speech that we do not want to defend?
Most racist and antisemitic speech does not meet the legal threshold of being unlawful. Intimidation and violence are unlawful, and other forms of stirring up are unlawful, but holocaust denial is not unlawful. We may wish to stigmatise it—we would not want it on our charity board or in our political parties, but different institutions have different rules. In this case, what are the principles and categories by which we might say that there is a form of lawful speech that we should not be protecting under academic freedom because it is inimical to academic freedom? That is the tension.
For example, if the Government say to universities that they should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, that is an important thing to do for antisemitism. There are two reasons to do that: one is symbolism—antisemitism is bad—and the other is to prohibit on campus speech that is currently lawful but also antisemitic. Comparing the Israeli Government to Nazi Germany, for example, is a lawful position that we wish to stigmatise. If you have this measure and the IHRA definition, you have potential tension at the boundary between the lawful speech that you are trying to exclude and the lawful speech that you are trying to protect.
Matt Western
Q
Sunder Katwala: With student unions, it is there to push back against not inviting, disinviting or protesting against someone whose political views you do not share. Wide boundaries are good, but are the boundaries of lawful speech exactly the boundaries you want to protect as academic freedom, or are there some hard cases? I will come on to this, but I think there are probably three different sets of hard cases where the boundary gets complicated.
Matt Western
Q
Sunder Katwala: What I am not clear about at this stage concerning the legislation, the principles, the operationalisation and so on is how far these things are going to be broadly symbolic—so that they are just there—or how far it goes. What are the damages? If I am disinvited because I am David Irving—I have published a book and then I was disinvited because people read the High Court judgment—what is the material loss to David Irving? I suspect that it is quite small, but we do not know. That is the level of detail that the legislation does not take us to.
Matt Western
Q
Sunder Katwala: Yes. Mr Irving has a very low reputation, because the High Court has said what it said about him, so him not being allowed to proceed with his event at the University of Cambridge and so on would add to the reprehensible reputation of a man with an already low reputation. There might be other cases in which somebody loses significant amounts of reputation by being cancelled for the first time. This is a level of operational detail that, obviously, I do not think that the legislation is designed to get to. What are the scales of these kinds of interventions?
Matt Western
Q
Sunder Katwala: The online harms Bill has the opposite principle—again, it is a good principle—which is that there is some lawful speech that is reprehensible and we wish to stigmatise it, even though it is lawful. The example that I put to one of the social media platforms was, “No blacks in the England team—keep our team white.” It is lawful, reprehensible racist speech. It is also within the rules of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at the moment, and they are embarrassed about that and looking into it. I feel that an event at a student union, “No blacks in the England team—keep our team white,” does not seem to be the kind of event that we want to protect, and yet that is lawful but reprehensible speech, which we want to stigmatise, even though it is free speech within the law.
If I sit in my living room or go to the pub and say, “Marcus Rashford isn’t English—keep our team white,” I am not breaking the law. I might be if I put it on the internet in particular ways, but I am not in that case—I have not hit the threshold for racist abuse. If I sent it to him with the wrong kind of epithets, maybe I would. This is a question of wide boundaries for sure, but are there hard cases for how far those boundaries go?
Matt Western
Q
Sunder Katwala: The harder question about self-censorship is: what will these mechanisms do about self-censorship? They might change the culture in a very positive way, because everyone feels reinforced and is not worried about stigmatisation, but they might change the culture in a rather negative way, where everyone is bringing cases and counter-cases against each other, and the processes, the punishment, could get worse if we have a lot of tit-for-tat things. There might be something in the culture of a regulator about the treatment of, say, vexatious cases as opposed to substantive cases, which might be quite important if the stress actually comes from the possibility of the cases. Because self-censorship and chilling effects are cultural points, it is not obvious to me that we know how these mechanisms affect that broader cultural plane.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Sunder Katwala: On the whole, in terms of the British public and the general population, these current issues of free speech and academic freedom are important issues in our political and media culture and so on; they are not gripping the broad public. It is a much less heated and polarised debate about these issues in Britain than in the United States of America. It might be the case that in five, 10 or 15 years, we have a much more heightened culture, but there is a very broad balance, a middle, in British society. When we have engaged in conversations about the worry about people being called racist before they have been racist, but also about wanting decent debates about race and integration that do not cross boundaries, a great many people are trying to strike those balances in a way that is good for freedom of speech but has boundaries.
A lot of people think political correctness can go too far if you take it too far, but they will then say, “But it had a point in the first place.” To give an example, research by More in Common found that seven out of 10 people in this county think that political correctness can be a problem if you overapply it, overreach with it and go for trivia. Seven out of 10 people think that hate speech can be a problem, because we are letting too much go. The median person in Britain thinks that both those things are true. At the same time, they are probably frustrated that we are removing episodes of “Fawlty Towers” from archives. It is entirely trivial, while we are letting neo-Nazi content run riot on Facebook. There is awareness of this tension, and frustration that you could overreach in different directions.
What is much more the case in America is that people have picked a side. Therefore, they are always on one side of every question. We definitely have the possibility of having that culture among the most politically engaged—the people who spend most of their time on the internet, and perhaps the people who write the most newspaper columns—but most people are quite frustrated with that, because they would see that there are good public goals here that might be complicated to get right.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Sunder Katwala: Completely, yes. It is the question of whether there are any boundaries where you would be allowing reprehensible content that undermined academic freedom, liberal democracy or the role of the university, if you did not get those difficult cases right.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
Is there a problem that expanding this to student unions might have detrimental effects? Student unions traditionally allow students to self-organise ginger groups, different political groups and so forth. If you require the Conservative club to enforce academic freedom, does not that make a mockery of having a club of Conservatives in which they can talk and debate issues among themselves?
Sunder Katwala: In principle, I do not see why it should do so—unless you have organisation of it wrong. As I see it, the principle is that the Bill should protect the difficult conversations that different people want to have. In theory, it should be blocking people saying, “I don’t like you saying that about Winston Churchill or the British empire—that’s too tough,” as well as stopping other things. But the devil is in the detail.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Sunder Katwala: Mocking academics is part of free speech, so I do not think the Bill will stop people mocking academics.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Finally, I want to talk about self-censorship. According to Facebook, 71% of its users self-censor. The UCU study says that only 35% of academics self-censor, and the King’s study says that, among right-wing academics, the figure is only 32%. Would that be evidence that, actually, right-wing academics are the least likely to self-censor and there is no problem?
Sunder Katwala: We are looking for cultural change whereby we have more confidence in having difficult conversations. The way to do that—I have tried doing this, and it is quite an interesting thing to do—is to say to people, “Give me a list of things that you think we can’t talk about any more. Let’s stay in the room and see whether we can have a conversation about them.” I have a concern: do we have that conversation with the right boundaries and the right culture? This is where I think people are balancers on these issues.
For example, people think there is a view about language that we do not want to use and there are labels not to use about people. Political correctness has civility and kindness, and it has a value for people, but when it is a code and you did not get the memo last week and now you are on the wrong side of it, people get a bit worried about how fast it moves.
I am not an expert on this, but, for example, people find this with debates about gender and sexuality. They know that we have changed our minds about the way we treat gay people in our society, but they find that very confusing and they do not know where to go to have that conversation and ask people about that. It is that navigation. Maybe we should be putting more emphasis into seeing how we have these sites of constructive engagement with difference, rather than having a regulatory process about who do you want to fine.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Sunder Katwala: We do not know what the cultural impact of that will be, and whether that will be weaponised or used sensibly. I think the culture of the regulator in dealing with vexatious cases will be quite important. We see it in the sector of charities now and other things; we probably see it in politics, as well. If you create a regulatory thing, then people want to use up the time of people they do not like by reporting them to things. Pushing back against that, while doing the job it is trying to do, is important.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
Q
Sunder Katwala: I have worked in think-tanks, journalism and so on.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Sunder Katwala: No, I am not. I am not trying to bring you evidence on that. At the level of public policy, we are trying to decide on the principles we should be legislating for in our country, about where is the expanse of free speech we want to protect and where are there dangerous misuses by people who are claiming to use free speech to do something to undermine liberal democracy. That is my work. I am not telling you what is going on in universities.
Sir John Hayes
Q
The point you are making is that some speech should be prohibited that is legally lawful. Who would arbitrate that? Would it be university authorities, Governments or the mass of students? Once you get into the territory that you are describing, which could lead to a liberal tyranny, as I am sure you appreciate, who is going to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable, if it is not the law?
Sunder Katwala: All sorts of institutions make these decisions. The Labour party, the Conservative party and the Democratic Unionist party make these decisions. They prohibit people from saying things that are lawful and reprehensible. Newspapers make these decisions about lawful speech. As I say, social media companies are coming under more pressure. What should happen in the universities? Let me give you the three case versions that I think you should examine.
One is where the content is directly discriminatory: this would be the clash with the Equality Act. If somebody said, “Let’s have a lecture on how women are not fit to study maths and sciences,” and they brought the Taliban over to advocate their view on that, you could say, “Let’s just stand up and tell them that’s wrong.” Fine, we could do that, but, as with the Government’s position on antisemitism, there might be some kinds of versions of that—like no gays, Jews or blacks on campus, or whatever—where the responsibilities to treat students equally might be undermined.
My second category would be where people are advocating against academic freedom. If I held a campus event called “The burning books party” on 5 November, I might be burning the books that Hitler burned or burning “Mein Kampf,” but burning books or advocating the burning of books is against academic freedom. Should we have that debate? Clearly, burning a book is, in a sense, freedom of expression of a particular kind, but I don’t think we would invite people to have bonfires of books on campus. Would that be a public order offence or not? There might be an argument saying, “There are some books we should ban,” or “Women should not be allowed to write books. My vision of society is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.” That is a stupid view, but it is a lawful view. Are we protecting that as academic freedom?
My third case would be very extreme conspiracy theories. Here we have a real dilemma. We know about Galileo, Darwin and so on, but when it comes to 9/11 “Truthers” and people who have David Icke’s view of covid—that it does not exist anywhere; it is just a plot by Bill Gates—where is the balance between the sunlight on that being right and the expression of that view? These things blend into each other. Why is there a conspiracy theory?
Those are the categories where I think that you need to think about whether there are versions of reprehensible but lawful speech that are inimical to academic freedom rather than needing to be protected as academic freedom. The Government have taken that position on holocaust denial, as I understand it, but they have not outlined a set of principles on what is wrong with holocaust denial. How does that relate to the denial of other genocides? How does that relate to the identical position of other minority groups who are not Jewish?
Sir John Hayes
Q
Sunder Katwala: Is it the vice-chancellor? National Action has now been proscribed, but a very violent, aggressive group such as Britain First has not been, and the Islamist equivalent of such groups. Most people have different views about these different groups, but do you give Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group whose sole existence is to undermine liberal democracy and academic freedom, the floor and argue against it, or are there some versions of the content where you draw the line, either because of—
Sir John Hayes
Q
Sunder Katwala: Or it might be a national policy. In the case of holocaust denial, it will be a national policy that the lawful speech of holocaust denial will not be welcome on our campuses. The Government have taken that view. Do the Government want to protect 9/11 conspiracies as academic freedom or not? Do the Government want to take a view, or does the vice-chancellor take a view? It is up to the Government first—
Sir John Hayes
Q
Sunder Katwala: It would depend. The Government will decide in the case of holocaust denial that it needs to be very clear that it is not welcome on campus. I am saying that there are analogous cases to holocaust denial for other reasons, for other minority groups.
Mr Jones
Q
I know that in the modern-day Conservative party there is a lot of political cross-dressing going on, but what I find quite frightening about the legislation is that one individual, or a future Government of any persuasion, will have a very Orwellian view of deciding what is and is not acceptable. That is a great departure from my usual understanding of what traditional Conservatives have argued for in this place over the years. Would you say that that one of the problems of this is that the final arbiter will be a political appointee?
Sunder Katwala: I think that there are risks if it is the whims of an individual. We will have to have a clear framework. Say we create an event titled “Are there any limits to free speech?”—I remember people used to create that event when I was an undergraduate student—and we say, “We’ll be joined by the Taliban, David Irving, Anjem Choudary and Zhirinovsky of Russia for that debate about whether there are any limits.”
The question then for the Government, the regulator or the vice-chancellor is to say, “Is that a jolly good way to establish the debate? There are some risks of Anjem Choudary because we know that he radicalises a lot of people towards terrorism, but he dances within the law,” and so on, or is that a kind of lawful speech? I would not have that in my charity. I would have a very robust debate, but I would not have it with Anjem Choudary and Britain First. Are we going to say to universities, “You can’t make any of those choices about the boundaries within your expansive protection of free speech”? That is the key practical question.
Mr Jones
Q
I mentioned earlier the issue of the operation in our universities of the United Front of China. They will be able to take cases and argue them and no doubt they will be well financed. There is a danger that they will use it to get their own way through their very deep pockets.
Sunder Katwala: You are going to have to have a transparent policy on which cases are decided. That is where my principles are about “What can you say about gays, women or Jews?” and “What can you or can’t you say about the lurid conspiracies that don’t seem to have any value to academic freedom?” How do you deal with those tensions?
Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)
Q
In light of that, do you not think that any Government in a liberal democracy such as ours would find that those three specific issues––clashes with the Equality Act, those advocating against academic freedom and those with very extreme views that they try to cover with academic freedom––could easily be contained within that direction of free speech, thereby ensuring what we all want: the extension of free speech by the academics who tell us that they are mass self-censoring now, so that the professors who just appeared before us can be allowed their academic freedom? We are actually protecting the freedom of perfectly reasonable people, not people who are doing the things that you suggested. Do you see where I am coming from?
Sunder Katwala: In principle, I think the approach you have is very good. We have been having this debate about free speech on campus in society more broadly for several years and we never really get to the difficult issues.
What I would like is for people on both sides of the debate––there should not be sides––to look through the other end of the telescope. If you are someone who is very worried about racism and hate crime, you have got to be clear about the robust, tough stuff that you are going to allow so that you can be clear about where you draw the line.
The liberal or left side of the debate has a reputational point. The people worried about the incursion of free speech have not yet gone to these hard cases and said, “That is what we would do on this boundary, this boundary and this boundary.” If, instead of always just using their overall slogan, the two sides engaged with the value of the point on the other side, we would actually get to the hard cases.
Mr Holden
Q
Sunder Katwala: I do not have a very strong view on that. I think the Government want to symbolically commit to things that are already the case. It is creating new mechanisms and I do not know whether the new mechanisms will create a worse or a better culture.
The mechanisms are clearly the new thing: the responsibility is already there. Amplifying the responsibility is good, but we will do it by creating spaces in which we show that you have robust, difficult, democratic conversations but with boundaries.
Mr Holden
Q
Sunder Katwala: I am not an expert on that question, but I can see why you would ask it. The thing to worry about with campus culture is that, having made the very positive decision to welcome Hong Kongers to the UK, many of whom will be students, and having a very large number of Chinese students in the UK, which is a positive thing I am sure for universities, there will be more of a challenge to be proactive on the culture of student debate and so on, so that we do not have tensions on campus between those groups.
Mr Holden
Q
Sunder Katwala: I think that is about the culture of campus, the safety on campus, as well as the principles. It is the chilling effects. There will be more of an issue there about the potential Hong Kong-China political views that different people have for different reasons.
The Chair
I am sorry, but we have now reached the end of the time allocated for this session. Thank you very much, Mr Katwala, for your evidence and for the help you have given the Committee. We now move on to the next panel, please.
Examination of Witness
Nicola Dandridge gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Nicola Dandridge: We are the independent regulator for higher education in England. We have been up and running since 2018.
Matt Western
Q
Nicola Dandridge: We work collaboratively with a whole range of organisations, including the OIA and other regulators. The way to make that work is to have discussions with them, to make sure that there is clarity about responsibilities and who does what, and that that is clear between ourselves and to universities, colleges and students. I am a stakeholder, so I anticipate that exactly the same will happen here. The new director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will speak with the OIA to resolve who does what and how we can make sure that that is as clear as possible to staff, students and everyone who is interested in this area of activity.
Matt Western
Q
Nicola Dandridge: That is exactly the sort of thing that we need to make clear. I do not see that that is an insuperable problem. We just need to make sure that we have sorted it out and that there is clarity for everyone involved.
Matt Western
Q
Nicola Dandridge: I anticipate that the process will follow the usual public appointments process and be conducted by the DFE. That is probably a question you need to put to the DFE. It is unlikely to be a decision taken in-house by the Office for Students.
Matt Western
Q
Nicola Dandridge: They will need to believe in the importance of freedom of speech and academic freedom, as the OfS and all of us do. That goes without saying. In this debate, I have been interested to hear that they should be a lawyer. Undoubtedly, I think a legal background would be helpful, but I really do not think that being a lawyer is essential. It is not as if we are going to lock the director up in a room somewhere with no access to any of our existing resource. We have a very talented legal team already, who will provide considerable advice and support to the director. So I do not think that being a lawyer is essential, but I do think that having a legal background might help, but absolutely not determinative of who is appointed.
Matt Western
Q
Secondly, do you have concerns about what will happen for universities and student unions? One of the points that came out from the BEIS report, which you may have seen, is what significant costs there will be for universities and student unions, which clearly, after the past 18 months, are really struggling financially anyway.
Nicola Dandridge: It is very difficult at this stage to predict what the pressures on the Office for Students will be as a consequence of the proposals, but certainly the complaints system is likely to generate quite a lot of work. It is really important that we have the capacity to deal with that properly without compromising our important work on quality and standards, and access and participation. This is an area that we will be keen to discuss with Government to ensure that we are properly resourced to do this work well in all its complexity, without compromising our other work.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Nicola Dandridge: In my view, and I think the view of many others, the role of the director for fair access and participation has been really significant in setting expectations, driving through the importance of what is also a very complex agenda, engaging in discussions with universities, students and student unions, and speaking publicly about the importance of access and participation. I think the impact that the director has had has been really significant, and it is a good analogy for the impact that we hope the director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will have similarly.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Nicola Dandridge: We have to approach free speech in a rather oblique way, because of the way our powers are structured and set up. We have a number of public interest principles, of which one is a duty to protect academic freedom. The other is to secure free speech. What we say is that, under one of our registration conditions, all universities and colleges have to have governing documents that uphold those public interest principles, and they have to have governance and management arrangements to adequately implement those public interest principles.
The way into this is not exactly straightforward. We have a number of ongoing cases where we are looking at issues of free speech, but because of the ways our powers are framed, we are primarily looking at whether universities and colleges have the systems in place to address issues of free speech themselves, rather than our adjudicating on them. That is rather a complex explanation, because of the way our powers are structured. They are slightly, as I say, oblique, whereas what the Bill proposes is entirely different. It foregrounds the importance of free speech and, for all the reasons of which you will be aware, gives us significant additional powers in that respect.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Nicola Dandridge: The way our powers are structured means that we approach it by looking at the systems that the university has in place. That is a very limited way of engaging with issues of free speech, so yes, it is constrained.
Emma Hardy
Q
Nicola Dandridge: I was thinking that it would be the latter. It is one of the first responsibilities that the director for free speech and academic freedom will have to undertake. Although it would be their choice, not mine, I would anticipate that they would want to produce guidance in order to provide clarity in some of these very complex areas, one of which is who does what and how it is done. I was anticipating that it would be guidance and not on the face of the Bill.
Emma Hardy
Q
Nicola Dandridge: Well, it is challenging. We take reducing the regulatory burden very seriously. It is one of our own priorities, as well as a priority for the Secretary of State, but it is like all these things. Regulatory burden is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is if it is disproportionate. It depends on what the regulator does, and there is a very serious issue here about academic freedom, for the reasons that you have been hearing this week and last. The way through this is to ensure that our response is proportionate and risk-based, and that will be one of our priorities as we go into this. Clearly it is challenging, because this is a very significant number of additional responsibilities—serious and complex responsibilities—so it needs to be done properly. That is what we will do, and we will look forward to doing it in that way.
Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)
Q
Nicola Dandridge: Yes. We think that there is a serious and significant issue in relation to academic freedom and free speech in higher education, and the proposals in the Bill seek to address that and create mechanisms for tackling such issues.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Nicola Dandridge: The Bill does acknowledge that the different mechanisms might need to be interrelated, so that a student or an academic member of staff can take recourse through only one mechanism before they engage with another. That is in the Bill. I do not think it is a question of running rings around the Office for Students. It will be a question of making clear what the advantages and disadvantages are for each route, so that the student, member of staff or any third party affected can pursue the most appropriate recourse for them.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Nicola Dandridge: But the Bill allows for that.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Nicola Dandridge: The Bill does acknowledge that that may be something that needs to happen. I do not know whether it needs to be on the face of the Bill, but the Bill does acknowledge that that sort of thing needs to happen, and I think it is quite important. The main thing is about making sure that there are clear and proportionate paths for claimants to follow. Of course, the advantage of the complaints system—for example, with the Office for Students—is that it would be free to the claimant, whereas going to the courts can be very expensive. Things such as that need to be made clear, so that people can make the appropriate choice.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Nicola Dandridge: We would normally publish our reports. It depends on the circumstances, but I cannot imagine why we would not want to publish a report of this sort.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Nicola Dandridge: My understanding is that the Bill protects against defamation—that is very common with other regulators, too—but that does not mean that the decisions of the director for free speech and academic freedom cannot be judicially challenged. All our regulatory decisions—or most, as far as I am aware—can be judicially challenged, and I do not see that the decision of the director would be any different.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Nicola Dandridge: These sorts of decisions about what is lawful and what is not are both hugely complex and very facts-specific, so I think it would be very hard for the Government to anticipate those sorts of decisions. I think it is appropriate for that to fall to someone like the director and the Office for Students, who could take all the facts into account to make the appropriate decision.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Nicola Dandridge: I think the whole point behind setting up a director is that those will be independent decisions, whether for the university or for anyone else. That is fundamental to the way the role is cast, and I think it is fundamentally important.
Fiona Bruce
Q
“This bill addresses a non-problem”
—certainly at their student union and university. Do you agree?
Nicola Dandridge: The evidence suggests that there is an issue.
Fiona Bruce
Q
“Speakers”
—presumably at events—
“should be of the highest quality and have expertise in their field. Therefore, if speakers are known to have contradictory, erroneous or conspiratorial ideas on subjects for which they are speaking”,
our student union
“is obliged to discourage the spread of disinformation on its premises and within its societies.”
What are your reflections on that statement?
Nicola Dandridge: I do not know the context in which it was made—in all these things, context is rather important—but it does seem to fly in the face of the principles of free speech and academic freedom.
Fiona Bruce
Q
Nicola Dandridge: It is worth adding that we at the Office for Students work very closely, collaboratively and constructively with the NUS and student unions across the country. I have yet to have a discussion with a student union that does not think that free speech and academic freedom are really important.
The Chair
There are no further questions, so I thank our witness very much for her contribution.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned—(Michael Tomlinson.)
Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Fourth sitting)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Chair
We will now hear evidence from Professor Paul Layzell, principal of Royal Holloway, University of London, and chair of the Universities UK advisory group on free speech and academic freedom, and from Professor Jonathan Grant, professor of public policy at King’s College London, who is joining us remotely via Zoom. We have until 6 o’clock for this session.
I ask the witnesses to please introduce yourselves for the record. Professor Layzell, will you start?
Professor Layzell: I am Professor Paul Layzell. I am principal of Royal Holloway, University of London, but I am here in my capacity as a board member of Universities UK and chair of the working group on freedom of speech.
Professor Grant: Good afternoon. I am Professor Jonathan Grant, professor of public policy at King’s College, London. I used to be vice-principal for service, where I had some responsibility for the operationalisation around freedom of speech, although I should stress that today I am speaking in a personal capacity.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Q
Given all the pressures and issues that universities are facing, is this Bill a priority for the higher education- sector? I put that question to Professor Layzell first.
Professor Layzell: Freedom of speech is a priority for the sector. It is an absolutely integral and fundamental part of what we are about. I cannot imagine that there is a vice-chancellor or board in the country that would not want to promote freedom of speech. As your previous witness said, there have been issues, and I think we recognise the commitment to bring forward legislation. For the universities sector, it must be proportionate and help to deal with complex situations. Vice-chancellors and their senior teams are concerned about the interplay of this legislation and other legislation. I think we have made some recommendations in our submission about ministerial statements that make clear the position of this legislation with respect to other duties. In addition, if the Office for Students was encouraged to work with us, we could work with it to develop a code of practice based on case studies and examples of dealing not with the straightforward freedom of speech issues that are often cited, but with situations where a number of issues come together. If that helps decision making and brings transparency and clarity, it is welcome.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Layzell: I think that that would have gone a long way towards achieving the situation I have just described, but there are other things in the Bill on complaints systems and the requirement to positively promote freedom of speech that I do not think anybody in the sector would have a problem with.
Professor Grant: To answer your first question, I think it is somewhat overkill. That would be my overall assessment, but I think it conflates a number of issues, so it is a slightly more nuanced response. On the elements around cancel culture, when you look at the data it is very rare that events are cancelled or people get no-platformed. I have concerns around the chilling effect, which I heard previous witnesses talk about, but I wonder whether regulation is the way to address those concerns. There are elements that could do damage, but overall I am reasonably neutral about the Bill, albeit slightly cynical about whether it will achieve its objectives.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Grant: We know from the survey that we did a couple of years ago, where we went out and asked students exactly those questions, that 81% of students support free speech, 81% of students support a version of the Chicago principles, and the vast majority of students think that free speech is more likely to be challenged in broader society than in their universities, so the idea that students do not buy into the concept of free speech is an absolute red herring, in my view. As I said, that survey also demonstrated some quite worrying statistics around the concept of a chilling effect where people are self-censoring themselves in classrooms.
That for me is where the issue is. It is not about the process of inviting people on to campus and worrying about no-platforming and cancel culture. The data there says that it is a non-issue. If we could move our conversation from that issue on to the chilling effect and how we have a more open culture on campus where people of different views feel confident in expressing them, I think that would be a much more useful conversation.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Layzell: The first point to make is that it is important that the legal options that are being presented in the Bill do not cut across the existing mechanisms. There are plenty of mechanisms within universities to deal with complaints internally. There is other apparatus around employment tribunals and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. Of course, we have the proposed OfS complaints scheme, so there is a lot of apparatus there.
What we want is something that ends up being proportionate and manageable. In our written submission, we suggested that there be a mechanism to prevent frivolous and vexatious claims. Completing internal processes, which we would be quite happy to operate, should be a condition before going to law. We would also recommend that the scope was limited to those who were directly affected by alleged breaches of freedom of speech. Our worry is that the apparatus gets used for other purposes. If it is framed carefully, we could avoid that. That is the thing that we would not want to waste our time on.
Matt Western
Q
Professor Layzell: I think the definition is fine. We have the concept of academic freedom of speech within the law already. This puts a nuance on it, but I think we are quite happy with the definition as it is.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Q
Professor Layzell: That is why you would want the full internal and existing apparatus to be fully utilised before we go into that final stage.
Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)
Q
Professor Grant: This is one of those things that is really hard to get good evidence on. In the survey we did of 2,000 students, about a quarter said that they felt unable to express views in their university because they were nervous about disagreeing with their peers. That is a big number; if a quarter of the students in a class are nervous about expressing their views, that worries me. We then followed up that survey data through focus groups. In those groups, this was the issue that the students landed on. Focus groups are by definition small numbers so we need to treat some of this evidence carefully, but they were saying that they felt that reading lists in certain topics were biased to one view or another and were not balanced, and that lecturers quite often had some political view that they would express in the classroom, and if the students disagreed with that, they were nervous about expressing contrarian views in that context.
We followed that up with a focus group with a mix of vice-chancellors from the UK, Australia and the US. What was interesting for me was that when we put that evidence on the table, the response from the vice-chancellors was “We cannot tell our lecturers what to put on their reading list because that would breach academic freedom.” What I find interesting in the Bill is that tension between the desire to promote free speech––and cool the chilling effect––and the concept of academic freedom, and how it is actually the academic who decides what to teach in the classroom. That is why I am not convinced that regulation or legislation is going to solve this. I think it is deeper: it is cultural, it is values-driven.
Mr Holden
Q
Professor Grant: I entirely accept that. I am glad we are having the conversation and maybe the legislation has sparked us to have that conversation. What I wait to see—I cannot answer this; I am speculating––is whether the legislation will have an impact on that 25% of people who feel that they cannot say what they want to and whether it will change the behaviours of lecturers in the classroom to get more balanced reading lists. I hope that is the case, but we do not know at this stage. If this legislation leads to that, then it has been successful.
Mr Holden
Q
Professor Grant: Yes. As I said at the outset, I would distinguish two elements. The legislation around the so-called cancel culture piece is, to me, redundant. It is broadly a non-issue. I am much more interested in the issue I have just been talking about. It is a wait-and-see approach. I will be delighted if it works. I look forward to seeing that.
Mr Holden
Q
Professor Grant: I am going to be very dull and say that we do not know, because I like to look at the research and evidence. I have looked to see how you would survey academics to ask the same questions that we ask the students, and from a purely methodological point of view, it is really difficult to do that, so I will sit on the fence for that question.
The Minister for Universities (Michelle Donelan)
Q
Professor Layzell: Universities have a range of processes and procedures in place that protect and provide some protection against that. In my own institution, for example, promotions and reward procedures are anonymised—we focus on the CVs and the evidence in front of us—so existing mechanisms provide a degree of protection. I cannot comment on individual cases. I can guess some of the individuals you are referring to, and they may well have had some experiences where they felt disadvantaged or adversely affected; we recognise that.
In addition, the wording in the Bill varies in different places. In some places it talks about “likelihood” and in others it talks about being “adversely affected”. In our submission, we have suggested that “adversely affected” is a better term and should be used consistently throughout the Bill.
Professor Grant: I am going to be boringly analytical again. There is no issue when it comes to the cancelling events. The numbers are small, as the OfS demonstrates. There is potentially an issue when it comes to this idea of self-censorship in the classroom, and I think that is a legitimate concern. As I just said, when it comes to academics, we do not know. It is inevitable that people who feel that they have had their freedom of speech inhibited will talk about that, but we do not know about all the other people who are not talking about it. We need to get the data. At this stage, I will say that you cannot answer that question on academics.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Professor Grant: What we did at King’s was work with our student union in developing a joint statement modelled on the Chicago principles and signed by both the president of the student union and the president of King’s College London. On the back of that, we developed a committee that reviewed all so-called high-risk events. That committee was made up of equal numbers of university staff, academics and professional staff, and students. It made recommendations to the senior vice-principal for operations and, potentially, to the principal. In my mind, creating a sort of co-production and co-creation process around managing those events was deeply beneficial because, as the previous witness said, both sides started having conversations about the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. Both groups then owned the process and the mitigations thereafter.
Professor Layzell: I think Universities UK would support what Professor Grant said. Many universities will have similar sorts of processes. I think one other step that could be taken—this comes under the promotion of free speech duty in the Bill—is to help students to better understand the role of university education. It is quite different from school and college. I think the concern that some students have about expressing a view is not necessarily about freedom of speech; it is about having the confidence to speak out and express an opinion.
I think we could do more to help students to understand how the university education process works and the role of freedom of speech and freedom of expression within that, in order to encourage them to have the confidence to express views that might be contrary to those of others in the room and to feel comfortable with that, and to help them understand that that is a normal part of how we do our business; that that is the lifeblood of academic research and teaching. I think we could do more in that respect.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
Professor Grant: That is an excellent question, and the short answer is no. When we did the survey, we went out to the general public and asked them a range of questions on their attitudes to free speech, and they were broadly the same as students, but we did not ask them that question about self-censorship, so I think it is an entirely legitimate question.
If I may, I just want to pick up on the previous comment, because I visited the University of Chicago a number of years ago, which had set up a programme to teach high school students about free speech, how to debate effectively and take contrarian views, and about the resilience needed to hear something challenging. I absolutely agree with Paul that in universities we could do more to help our students understand what debate is about, how at times it might be painful and the resilience needed to engage in some of that debate.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Paul, I want to ask you about who takes responsibility for these duties. The Bill is quite unusual in putting the duty on both the institution and the student union, whereas the Education Act 1994 puts the responsibility only on the institution to require the student union. Does that duality of responsibility clarify the issue or, given that most student unions are probably using university premises and university money, does it muddy the question of who will then be responsible for reporting on these issues?
Professor Layzell: I think the existing position is ambiguous and difficult for the very reasons you mention. There is often a joint process going on. Universities are often responsible for health and safety, security and just managing a significant gathering, yet the event might be organised by the student union. I think that we get around that by having codes of practice and clear sets of responsibilities within institutions on who should be doing what, but it is a good point.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Professor Layzell: I think we would be reluctant to over-specify the mechanics. Good relationships between universities and student unions are absolutely essential to make this work. Encouraging that would be good, but as to specifying particular mechanisms or ways of doing it, we all work in slightly different ways and have slightly different student unions, so I think we would need some flexibility.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
The Chair
May I ask you to keep your answer brief, Professor Layzell, because two more members of the Committee have indicated that they want to speak?
Professor Layzell: There is a concern around the litigation and making both student unions and universities more risk averse, without the sort of protections that we put in our written submission.
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
Q
Professor Layzell: As I said earlier, I think Universities UK would recognise that there have been cases where this approach has not worked as well as one would have wished. If the legislation is proportionate and does not create undesired side-effects such as more risk aversion, it may help to achieve a greater degree of consistency, but it is about keeping proportionality.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
Q
“the desirability of the preferred candidate having experience of either the higher education or legal sector.”
Why do you think that is desirable?
Professor Layzell: I think because the challenges that vice-chancellors feel they face arise when situations are complex. A simple black and white issue of saying yes or no is not where the problem is. It is the confluence of a number of legal requirements that you need to get your head around. You have got to have that legal experience and/or experience of dealing with these sorts of situations in higher education. It would be wrong to think that these issues are very simple yes/no decisions; they are generally more complex.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Layzell: Sanctions against offences?
Emma Hardy
So if the director of free speech was making a judgment on something, they would have a range of sanctions available to them, rather than just going straight for a tort.
Professor Layzell: Again, we would want the sanctions to be proportionate. I think I would look at it in the context of us all wanting to do better in this space. I think we have heard a number of times that there have been issues, so sanctions that encourage greater consideration, greater thought and learning from one another would be appropriate.
Emma Hardy
Q
Professor Layzell: I think we would have a concern.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Danny Stone MBE and Hillary Gyebi-Ababio gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Thank you again for having me. I am Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, the vice-president for higher education at the National Union of Students, representing students here today.
Danny Stone: I am Danny Stone, the chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust.
Matt Western
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: There is a plethora of issues that student unions are facing and that students are talking about right now, from mental health, which is a really serious issue that continues to pervade higher education, to funding and students not having enough money for accommodation and to live at university. Sexual violence is still prevalent on our campuses, and students are really going through it without enough support orenough measures for justice. Those are just a few, to not take up too much time. Students are going through a lot on campus right now, and seriously need solutions to problems that they are experiencing on the ground.
Matt Western
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I think that will have a massive hit on student unions. For information, student unions are often funded through negotiations with parent institutions. That is how they get the bulk of their funding. Especially over the pandemic, student unions have been subject to so much lost from not being able to run their commercial services. Often student unions have bars, shops or discounted outlets for students to shop at and experience student life. Student unions, as a collective, spending almost £1 million every single year trying to abide by the Bill will reduce what they can do, at the root of it, which will stop them doing the already fantastic work that they do, facilitating events and a student life that is worth having, and representing students on all the issues that I spoke about earlier.
Matt Western
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I think it is commonplace that student unions and universities work together when it comes to events, to approving external speakers, and to ensuring that freedom of speech is facilitated on campus. You only have to look at the NSU calendar to see the wide range of events that are constantly going on, often led by students. A lot of that is facilitated by close relationships with universities. If there is an area on which universities and students work closely, it is that. There are measures in place; there are quite detailed ways that free speech is facilitated on campus through the partnership between student unions and universities. I think they are doing a good job in making that work. Where they need to improve, they are constantly eager to work together to do that.
Matt Western
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I think that is a really important question. If I am being completely honest, a lot of stuff in the Bill is really, really concerning, such as measures under which people could get monetary sanctions for breaches of freedom of speech. Not only will that involve lots of bureaucracy for universities and student unions to make sure they are complying with the Bill, but it will take away from their ability to freely and fairly facilitate freedom of speech on campus.
Those smaller institutions are often places where students try to share their views, beliefs and experiences in a really tight-knit way in quite close communities. The Bill runs the risk of making those specific institutions—alongside the whole sector—much more risk averse in running events and facilitating freedom of speech, simply because they cannot bear the amount that the Bill would put on them, in addition to the fact that they already have internal processes on which they have worked hard for years and years. We are really concerned about that and about the impact the Bill will have on such institutions, as well as on larger institutions and student unions.
Matt Western
Q
Danny Stone: Sure, and thank you for having me today. We have data: the Community Security Trust, which records antisemitic incident figures, reported that there were 58 university incidents in 2018-19, including four assaults; 65 incidents in 2019-20, including two assaults; and 109 incidents in 2020-21. We know that in May, issues occurred in universities where there had not previously been issues. Certainly, some of the abuse has moved online, and the Union of Jewish Students in particular has reported online abuse.
On the issue of speakers, which I suppose is of particular interest to the Committee, the CST reported that from 2018 to 2020, 15 speakers who had some association with antisemitism or had made antisemitic remarks in the past came on to campus. As a former officer of the Union of Jewish Students, I dealt with some of those cases. In 2005, at SOAS—the School of Oriental and African Studies—a speaker said:
“I’m not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act”.
Somebody who came to Oxford had actually been barred from entering the UK and was broadcast in. They had been barred because of their views on terrorism. In 2017, after the passing of the Equalities Act 2010, a speaker said:
“Zionists should be treated like Nazis”.
The point is that people are coming on to campus and expressing antisemitic views. The concern is that those impacts are being properly considered and that they do not get additional protections. As the trust, we have a couple of recommendations for the Bill, including that the codes of practice that are drawn up and the complaints scheme appropriately address the complexities around legal harms and freedom of speech, which Sunder Katwala pointed out to you.
Matt Western
Q
Danny Stone: I learnt a lot about the balancing of freedoms from a guy called Ray Hill. He was a far-right mole who talked to me about the importance of not always shutting down debate. His experience of working with young people, particularly on the far right, was that opportunities to ask difficult questions and raise difficult issues should not be shut down. Equally, he acknowledged the harms caused by some people who express particular views in harmful ways.
This has been addressed in the higher education sector. Malcolm Grant did a report in 2010 in which he talked about trying to promote freedom of speech while understanding its limits. He said that universities need to balance the competing interests and might reach
“different but equally legitimate conclusions about the same matters.”
The Prevent guidance that followed talked about freedom of speech and moral obligations to address harms. We have seen it in Government guidance from 2008 about free speech, which said that everyone can be safe and not intimidated at university.
In fact, the human rights memorandum for this Bill says that there will be competing freedoms, but it suggests leaving it to the end point: the universities. You have heard from people today who say, “Well, the universities aren’t getting it right.” My view is that it should be on the face of the Bill, per the Online Safety Bill, the Joint Committee on which I appeared before the other day. Recognition of the complexities and the competing freedoms would be welcome.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Danny Stone: In terms of student unions? Absolutely. Again, if we are talking about complexities, there was a move to essentially prohibit the Jewish society at the University of Essex from becoming a society. That was unacceptable, and I believe it was reversed in the end. Similarly, there have been moves in the past to ban Jewish societies, and I was involved in campaigning against a motion at the University of Manchester that essentially would have done that.
On the flip side, there are front groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is not a proscribed organisation, that will seek to set up on campus, and there are far-right organisations that will seek to set up student societies on campus. That presents me with real concern. Could they potentially appeal and try to get money and find a route through? Yes, they might. There is a complexity in this which I would like to see recognised in the Bill. I would like to see something about the competing freedoms that exist.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Danny Stone: I think it depends on the institution and on how confident they might be. For example—I am sure we will come back to this—at the moment at Bristol, and potentially at Warwick, there have been concerns raised by the Union of Jewish Students about the operation of their procedures. In fact, I think the OfS may have taken at look at Warwick. It will depend, but I can well imagine there will be instances in which Jewish students would be nervous about reporting their concerns.
Michelle Donelan
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Could you clarify where and when I said that, please?
Michelle Donelan
It is from one of the documents we have from a while ago.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Sure. I cannot recall exactly when I said that—apologies—but to speak to the background of the Bill, I think there are concerns around the evidence upon which this Bill has been brought about. If there is anything that we need to be worried about on campus, it is facilitating what would look like equitable free speech for everyone. Some students on campus do not feel that they have the same level of rights to free speech as others because, for example, existing legislation makes them nervous about speaking about their views or what they believe. In 2018, 43% of Muslim students, if I recall correctly, talked about the Prevent duty having an impact on their ability to feel—[Interruption.]
The Chair
Order. There is a Division. The sitting will be suspended, and I shall resume the Chair in 15 minutes’ time, just before half-past six o’clock.
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
Q
Danny Stone: This is something that I wrote about when the OfS was first established. My view was, “Wouldn’t it be helpful if the OfS had a condition relating to discrimination?”, so that students could look to a regulator and see whether there were particular things that their proposed institution was doing—or not doing. In the end, that was not included. The first ministerial guidance to the OfS suggested that it looked at discrimination. Since that point, it has been consulting on a sexual abuse and harassment procedure. It has put out a statement, which has gone to institutions, and institutions have had to respond on whether they comply—I assume that they have all said that they can comply. It strikes me, talking again about complexity, that the OfS, which already has certain principles that it must abide by in respect of freedom of speech, as Nicola Dandridge was saying, will now have a specific condition of registration, so this is the time to include a condition of registration in respect of discrimination. That then enables the OfS to look at the whole picture, ensuring that the complexity is properly reflected. Rather than it waiting for a non-legislative fix on discrimination, we have the balance brought all the way up. This is where I would do it, if I were putting the Bill together.
Charlotte Nichols
Q
Danny Stone: Before coming here, I had a look at the expertise that David Miller’s professes on the Bristol website, which is the Zionist movement, the Israel lobby and racism. One can see, using the Miller case as an example, why that might present an issue in the future. If an academic has the right to protest that they have not got a promotion or have been passed over for a job because of free speech they have used in their area of expertise—well, hold on, the area of expertise here is Israel, Zionism and racism.
David Miller, however, has talked about Jewish students
“being used as political pawns”
by
“a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.”
Everyone, I think, recognises that that is an antisemitic statement. Certainly, as you say, across Parliament it has been recognised as such. There will be other examples of academics who have a particular area of expertise and that area of expertise will potentially give cover for them saying particular things. If you remove that, the problem is not fixed, because in the past other academics have spoken in an antisemitic way when those particulars are not their area of expertise.
Yes, that needs looking at, and those complexities need bringing out in the Bill. I do not necessarily have a particular suggestion, but I worry about it.
Charlotte Nichols
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: It is important, especially in reference to your first question and whether we think about discrimination and what the Bill could allow for. First and foremost, the Bill needs to give stronger reassurances that will not allow for free rein on discrimination, especially of vulnerable groups. However, it is also really important that we recognise that there are students who are made much more vulnerable by different types of speech than others, and unless the Bill recognises that they need protections and unless it can work alongside existing Acts and duties, it is going to make a lot of those students feel unsafe on campus—even more so than they do now with just their general experiences. I think that many elements of the Bill need to be looked at closely to ensure that that is embedded in there.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Yes. As the NUS, we believe in freedom of speech.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: What I would say is that to focus on freedom of speech as just being about making people uncomfortable is quite restrictive. If we are going to speak about freedom of speech in that regard, we also have to speak about the freedom of people to have opposing views and the right of people to protest when they do have opposing views. Even more so, I think it is important that when we think about freedom of speech, we acknowledge the fact that freedom of speech is important to have, to champion and to promote, but we also have to be mindful of where it might encroach into places where people feel harmed, and are harmed, especially if they come from a vulnerable or marginalised group with protected characteristics under the Equality Act.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I would say to that that we could speak about the freedom to offend, but I think it is important that if we are so focused on offending rather than promoting an environment of debate in which people are able to voice opposing views, rather than just allow people to have the freedom to offend, I think we are not speaking about freedom of speech in the way that it should look like—in a balanced way, you know. If people should have the freedom to offend, people should also have the freedom to express opposing views, and to express that as freely as people would offend. Again, going back to the Bill, we cannot talk about this until there are proper reassurances that the Bill will not allow that freedom of offence to flirt with where it might encroach on hate speech or harmful speech, especially when people are from marginalised communities.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Again, I would just reiterate that we believe in and champion freedom of speech on campus. It is not a secret that the NUS and the student movement have been facilitating this happening for years and years, so that is what I would say to that.
I think, though, that what the Bill proposes, and some of its elements, come across as finding ways to promote free speech by introducing a body to bring in punitive measures where that is inhibited. I think that does not give enough acknowledgement to the fact that there are already existing processes to ensure that, when free speech is inhibited, that is dealt with. There is already promotion of free speech by student unions, by universities and by the NUS, even, and we need to think about whether the Bill will have the effect of promoting free speech, or whether it will have an opposite effect that causes people to be very risk-averse.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: If I may, that is not what I said exactly, especially in reference to the no-platforming policy. We have a no-platforming policy that includes six organisations, most of which the Government would also see as racist and fascist organisations. To say that we do not agree with no-platforming is simply not true.
Sir John Hayes
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: No. I am not saying that I am not in favour of lawful free speech. I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the NUS supports, champions and cares deeply that free speech is championed, enabled and supported. To say that we do not agree with no-platforming where there are organisation like those I referenced with NUS’s no-platform policy that share and promote hate speech that hurts people from marginalised groups––to say that we do not support that is not true.
Emma Hardy
Q
Danny Stone: There are two different issues here. Sir John, I found the your exchange earlier with Sunder Katwala really interesting because there are points in society where we turn round and say, “Sorry, this isn’t acceptable. There are societal standards here.” We do that with Ofcom. We do it with the British Board of Film Classification in our film regulation. We do it in other areas of public life where we say there are some kind of limits. That does not mean that the speech cannot happen, but Parliament sets a standard and it allows regulators, for example, to have a say on those standards. That is why I think that the complexities I spoke to should be on the face of the Bill.
I am pleased to have the chance to talk about International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, so thank you. The IHRA definition is excellent and it was created––people may not know this––to try to bring uniformity for practitioners who were trying to understand why Jews were fleeing antisemitism and antisemitic terrorism in Europe. It helps to bring a standard of understanding to people. What it does not do––I disagree with Sunder’s evidence earlier––is to block people from saying anything. It is an advisory tool. It helps people to understand what antisemitism may be in a particular context. That is a very useful thing for universities, and the Secretary of State and the Minister have been very good in supporting the IHRA definition. But, as you say, it does help to guide what our expectations are around antisemitism, and presumably, if something is found to be antisemitic, we do not really want that. There is a societal standard that we aspire to. Sorry for a long answer but, yes, I do think that these complexities need to be addressed in the Bill.
The Chair
I realise that these are very complex issues, but I ask Members and the panel to try to be succinct because we still have an awful lot of people who want to ask questions. I will try my level best to let everybody in.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Q
Danny Stone: In truth, I do not have specific data on that.
Fiona Bruce
I would not expect you to.
Danny Stone: I would want to speak to, for example, the University Jewish Chaplaincy about that to understand what has happened. From my limited knowledge, I know that there are issues around exams on Jewish festivals, but I do not have much more. My general principle, as before, is that there has to be a right to offend. There has to be a right of freedom to express difficult, controversial opinions, but I am afraid that I do not have enough on the specifics for you.
Fiona Bruce
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I do not necessarily know that it is for me to comment. I would reassert that freedom of speech is important, especially when there are views that offend or might alarm, but that has to be balanced by the ability of people who disagree to oppose and challenge those views. It is important that whenever we speak about freedom of speech there is balance. It is not just about allowing alarming views; it is about also allowing people who challenge and oppose those views to have the right to freedom of speech in an equal and equitable way.
Fiona Bruce
Q
Danny Stone: It depends whether the Bill has the amendments in it that I have proposed or not—[Laughter.] The truth is that I do not know, but I can tell you that the Union of Jewish Students asked me to raise specifically that there has been disruption of where Jewish students who have a particular Zionist identity are looking to host Israeli speakers. Those talks, in numerous cases—I have 20 different examples in front of me—have been interrupted and the students have not been able, in their opinion, to host people with views that they want to be shared.
These are not controversial things; it is Israeli students and a group of Israeli minorities cancelled at short notice. There is a concern in that regard about being able to have a well thought through, rational and calm discussion about what is happening in the middle east, and whether that might be impacted. The UK Lawyers for Israel have raised that in front of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I thought that concern might fit in answer to your question.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Danny Stone: I will give you another answer about complexities. In some instances, that bureaucracy can be helpful. We worked on the Manchester guidelines, which meant that when a speaker was coming to campus it was advertised in a bar so that students could raise concerns if somebody was coming and they thought that there would be a problem. Then the university could put in place various measures to ensure that that talk went off without any problem. Perhaps the event was recorded; perhaps the speaker was asked to undertake to uphold the various principles that the university has or its requirements in respect of the public sector equality duty. Those things are helpful, so I do not think all bureaucracy is unhelpful, but I do not know yet; I suppose a lot will depend on how this is enacted and whether that may cause bureaucracy. Certainly as a student, the less paperwork I could fill in, the better.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Danny Stone: The truth is I do not know how this will play out. I do think there is a difference between people in public life being on panels and deciding their engagement with particular speakers—and institutions. I do think there is a qualitative difference. I do not know—it may very well. That is why, in all these cases, whether it be in relation to the director of freedom of speech for the OfS, the code of practice or anything else, that balance and the reference to complexity and competing freedoms will be hugely important in trying to get the balance right.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: That is an important concern to raise: the inadvertent or indirect—well, I do not even know whether it is indirect. I think a direct unintended consequence of this Bill could be that student unions would become more risk averse to inviting speakers, because they just cannot handle the bureaucracy; they just cannot handle the prospect of having to pay lots of money in the case of litigation. They are having to worry about doing what they already do well and facilitate very well, in a way that is much more complicated and adds so many more layers of process to what they already do very well, in order not to face the consequences of this Bill. If we are going to think about bringing student unions into this duty, we have to think about the fact that they already have regulators, regulations and provisions to make sure that freedom of speech is facilitated well and strongly on campus. I think that is a legitimate direct consequence that this Bill could create for student unions—not least the £800,000 a year in printing and signing off the code of practice.
Mr Holden
Q
Danny Stone: As I say, there have been various Israeli speakers that they have sought to have on campus, including a professor of international law at City University in 2015—cancelled. In 2018 it was the Israeli ambassador; the event was initially cancelled and then held after a legal threat. There is a suggestion by a law lecturer at City University that they had been refused a sabbatical for attending a law conference in Israel. For Israeli minorities that I spoke to, events were cancelled at short notice and held off campus, because the SU imposed charges. This is actually something fairly important; it has happened a number of times—student societies being asked to pay a fee to cover the security costs of an event going ahead.
Mr Holden
Q
Danny Stone: There are anecdotal examples of Jewish academics who have felt that they have been passed over for a promotion, or that they have not necessarily had the support that they thought they should have for speaking about antisemitism. On the flip side, as I pointed to before, I know that there are academics who have expressed antisemitic views, and we have significant concerns about that. One that I spotted today—this points to the earlier discussion about conspiracy theories—had a conspiracy theory on their personal website, which is linked to the university website. It is complex. There are issues there. The Jewish community is like the rest of the world, and will experience the same issues that others face.
Mr Holden
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I do not think it is necessarily my place to say who is and is not okay to speak on campus. I would say that there are frameworks in place to facilitate people with views that might be viewed as controversial or unpopular to be able to speak on campus. Those are already in place and already happening. I think it is important that, where freedom of speech is championed, we are trusting in the existing processes that are facilitating that already.
I think that this Bill puts in place undue measures, in an excessive way, to solve something that just has not been proven to be widespread. The data released by the OfS last week shows it. When 0.002% of events were cancelled—that is under 100 of the 43,000 events that were reported for them to look at—free speech is already being facilitated on campus, and universities and student unions are doing it well. Again, as I said at the start, they are learning as they go. They are continuing to learn and continuing to improve their procedures, and doing that really well.
Mr Holden
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: It is important that NUS is able to express its views and opinions, just as we champion the right for people to be able to express their own. That is us exercising our freedom of speech in challenging a view that we do not agree with. I do not know how that necessarily speaks to the Bill, but again, I want to reiterate that this Bill does some really important stuff in promoting free speech, but it does not offer enough—
The Chair
I am sorry to interrupt, but I am afraid we are running out of time, and we have one more question to take. It will have to be the last question of the day.
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: I was just finishing the sentence.
David Simmonds
Q
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio: Hopefully you will have seen our amendments, so to save time I will not repeat them. All our amendments cover the fact that there are confusing regulatory positions in the Bill, which add regulation to a sector and a space that are already regulated quite well. It is concerning, in that the Bill will cause chaos and confusion for students and academics alike, I imagine. There is not a lot of clarity around the measures. I have spoken a lot about the disproportionate financial impact that they will have on student unions. They do not show a preparedness to be transparent and accountable in relation to the Director for Freedom of Speech, and more generally in how the regulatory framework will work. Again, as I said—and this speaks to the last question I was answering—there is not enough reassurance—
The Chair
Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allocated for the Committee to ask questions of this panel. I thank the witnesses on behalf of the Committee for their evidence. I invite any member of the Committee who wishes to register an interest to do so now.
Sir John Hayes
As I did previously, I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests relating to my role at the University of Bolton.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
As I mentioned in the previous sitting, I am a trustee at the University of Bradford union, I receive money from the University of Sussex to provide educational opportunities to its students, and I have received support from the University and College Union.
Matt Western
My wife works at a higher education provider.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Michael Tomlinson.)
Westminster Hall
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Childcare
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen—welcome back. Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when not speaking, if possible, in line with Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. I apologise to Members for the fact that, having given you that advice, I may not be able to adhere to it myself because my glasses steam up and I might not be able to see anybody. Please give each other and members of staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room.
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Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered e-petition 586700, relating to funding and affordability of childcare.
The petition is about the need for an independent review of childcare funding so that we can really think through what we want our childcare and early education sector to be, and what we hope it can do for the families who need it and for us as a society. So many economic and social benefits flow from the sector that it is difficult to summarise in the time we have, but I think most of us would agree on three key reasons why it is so important to support high quality early education.
First, we know from international evidence that so many important life outcomes—from health to wealth and wellbeing—have their origins in the early years. Quality early education can benefit children’s academic and social development, and evidence shows that those benefits are often stronger for children from disadvantaged families, as it starts them off on a more equal footing with their peers when they go to school.
Secondly, access to childcare is crucial for working parents. Closures during the pandemic have served as a real reminder of just how important it is. The pre-school years are a particularly significant time for new mothers: regrettably, decisions around their childcare in that short period can have a huge impact on their lifetime earnings and, consequently, on the gender pay gap.
Finally, helping with the cost of childcare and early education is one of the best ways for the Government to ensure that families with young children—particularly those on low incomes—are not financially crippled by high costs. As the petitioners point out, childcare in the UK is expensive. Statistics from the OECD show that, however we look at it, we are close to the top of the list of developed countries for childcare costs.
I think that most of us would agree on what we want our early years sector to deliver and on those broad criteria, but some may place different emphasis on them. Analysing whether we are meeting those objectives, and how we can improve on them, is a huge task that touches on many complex areas, such as funding, training, accountability and outcomes. I do not think this House has the expertise or the time to cover those in depth, which is why we need an independent review.
During the debate, I want to look specifically at funding, which is the focus of the petition. In that key area, there is strong evidence that we are letting down children, parents and providers, and I will make the case to support the petitioners’ call for an independent review. Determining the right level of funding for the early years is of course the subject of long-running disputes between the Government and sector representatives, but it goes to the heart of what early years really means to us as a country.
Childcare is as necessary for parents to get to work as the roads and the rail network, so why do we not approach and fund it as the vital infrastructure investment that it clearly is? I am sure the Minister will point out that spending on free entitlements—the 15 and 30-hour entitlements for three and four-year-olds, and disadvantaged two-year-olds—has more than doubled to around £3.4 billion since 2010, but it is important to look at what has driven that increase. Most of it has come from successive expansions of eligibility, which are of course hugely welcome. However, what providers are concerned about is a discrepancy between the cost per hour of delivering the free entitlements and the funding per hour that they receive.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ latest annual report on education spending shows that funding per hour of childcare is now only about 13% higher in real terms than in 2004, despite an increase of about 150% in total spending. In recent years, funding per hour has declined from its 2017-18 peak, showing that even the modest increase introduced alongside the 30-hour entitlement in 2017 has not been maintained.
Even more importantly, we know that it is not enough just to provide for the costs of delivering childcare. The Department for Education’s publication in June of a much-delayed freedom of information response to the Early Years Alliance showed that the Government were aware of the consequences of introducing the 30 hours policy with an insufficient level of investment. Ministers knew that the investment would meet only around two thirds of costs—meaning higher costs for parents—and force early years staff to look after the maximum legal ratio of children, with significant impacts on quality. With a lack of proper investment in the free entitlement, providers are forced to cover their costs by charging more for the non-funded hours. That means spiralling costs for parents and carers, whose fees have risen three times faster than earnings since 2008—and that is just the average. For the parents of two-year-olds in some parts of the country, childcare costs have risen seven times faster than their wages.
As a working mother both before and since becoming an MP, I have my own experiences of the heart-wrenching stress and pressure of getting the right childcare and support, and of the enormous costs. Our childcare costs are now the highest of almost any developed country. In a Petitions Committee survey earlier this year, 77% of parents agreed or strongly agreed that cost had prevented them from getting the kind of childcare they really needed. One respondent said:
“I do not have the option to have family or friends look after my child when I return to work and I can’t afford to not be in work, but childcare costs more than my mortgage for full time hours.”
Another commented:
“My wages will just about cover our childcare costs, therefore I am basically working only to ‘hold my place’ until my baby is old enough not to need childcare i.e., once she starts school.”
That has a huge impact on the gender pay gap. Clearly, it is still by and large women who take on most of the responsibility for childcare. Research by Pregnant Then Screwed found that 62% of women who returned to work worked fewer hours, changed jobs or stopped working because of childcare costs. Sadly, we know that the resulting loss of wages has a long-term impact on far too many women.
Properly funded childcare also means ensuring that providers have the money to pay and train their staff appropriately. I want to thank early years staff and management for their efforts over the last 18 months. Most staff have worked through the entire pandemic, and many settings have kept their doors open the entire time, looking after the children of key workers and others and keeping our country moving through this international crisis. Early years staff and management deserve our thanks and appreciation, and our commitment to tackle the serious issues raised by the petitioners.
According to research by Nursery World, one in 10 childcare workers relies on foodbanks, and 45% claim some form of benefit. One in eight earns less than £5 an hour, meaning that staff turnover is high, which can impact on the quality of care, the quality of education and the stability provided for children. We also know that in the past decade, there has been a long-term decrease in the number of people who want to work in the early years sector. One nursery manager told me just how difficult it is to retain staff, particularly in a setting with a disadvantaged intake and a high incidence of special educational needs.
Employees feel that they are sacrificing any semblance of work-life balance for minimum wage, leading to higher absence rates and higher staff turnover. That means that a child’s key worker might change to someone both they and their parents are unfamiliar with multiple times in a year, affecting the quality of education that they receive. It also means that settings are regularly thrown into chaos because they cannot recruit fast enough to fill the gaps. I was told that, at least once a month, staffing issues mean that nurseries hope that not every parent will bring their child to nursery, because if every child attended there would be no way to maintain the required legal ratios. It is shocking that this is what some settings face, and it shows how badly off track we have got.
It cannot be right that while staff are poorly paid and parents pay high costs, the sector’s biggest customer, the Government, get away with paying what they know is insufficient funding. Deciding on the right level of funding and the best way to provide it is, of course, not an easy task, and I think that speaks to the need for a comprehensive, independent expert review to consider the matter in detail. Our answer to the crucial funding question speaks to what we want our early years sector to be.
Is it the state’s role to provide the minimum funding to cover, or just about cover, basic costs so that parents can at least return to work? That would mean maxed-out ratios, stressed-out staff, higher costs for parents, and providers that are unwilling to provide childcare as cheaply as possible being driven out of the market. Or are the benefits of a more generous childcare and early years education system worth it? That is what I would argue, as it means that we can unlock greater productivity, put a big dent in the gender pay gap, narrow the attainment gap at school and, in the long run, reduce other social problems such as poor mental health, unemployment and crime.
Unfortunately, in their written response to the petition, the Government said that there are no plans to commission a review of childcare funding, but I do not think that the Minister should be so quick to dismiss the petitioners’ concerns. We need a childcare system that helps not only to make the lives of families and their children better, but to make our economy work. With both parents and providers struggling and with early years staff undervalued and underpaid, childcare is becoming a big political issue, and it is not going away any time soon. I urge the Government to consider the petitioners’ request for an independent review so that we can get this right for everybody who would benefit from it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)
I am just working out who is here behind their masks. I am afraid that I have to impose a five-minute limit from the very beginning, if we are to get everybody in. I call Theresa Villiers.
Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and I congratulate the Petitions Committee and its Chair on securing today’s debate. I thank everyone who signed the petition.
Investing in early years provision and education is one of the best ways to secure a successful economy and tackle the root cause of many social problems. A stable and supportive environment during the first few years of life has a crucial impact on people’s life chances, so good quality early years education can be an engine of social mobility. I pay the warmest of tributes to people working in early years in my constituency, in settings such as Bright Little Stars Nursery on Leicester Road, Alonim Kindergarten at the North London Reform Synagogue, and the three maintained nursery schools run by the Barnet Early Years Alliance.
As we have heard, the pandemic has highlighted that childcare and nursery providers form a crucial part of our infrastructure. Without these dedicated individuals, our public services and our economy would grind to a halt, because essential workers would be at home minding the kids. I welcome the around £3.6 billion a year that the Government are devoting to childcare and early years, and I believe that that does not include the further support that many parents receive through the universal credit system.
The petitioners, however, have a valid point. At a recent street surgery, a constituent told me that almost the whole of his wife’s salary as a teacher was being spent on childcare. I, too, would welcome the review that the petition asks for, and appeal for a simpler system of Government support that helps parents, family budgets and providers right across the PVI—private, voluntary and independent—and maintained nursery sectors.
The most urgent financial issue that needs to be resolved is funding for maintained nursery schools, such as those run by BEYA in my constituency. They have excellent results, particularly with children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with special educational needs or disabilities. As I have highlighted many times in Parliament, and recently in a meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, time is running out for those great schools. They lost out when the funding formula was changed in 2017, and ever since much of the sector has been just about kept afloat by £60 million in supplementary funding. If those schools are to continue their vital work, they need a stable, long-term financial settlement, which they were promised in 2016-17. That would see them take on a new role as system leaders and centres of excellence for the local area. Most urgently of all, maintained nursery schools in Barnet need a share of the supplementary funding, which they have been denied up to now. Without it, their future looks bleak and uncertain.
I ask the Minister to take action to save maintained nursery schools and to take action in response to the petition. If the Government are to realise their ambition to level up the country, and if they are to make further progress on gender equality and tackle the health inequalities exposed by the pandemic, it is essential to get childcare and early years provision right and to give the sector the support it needs.
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to have this debate. I am grateful that you gave me an opportunity to put my jacket on because, like any parent of an under-two-year-old, I have snot and Weetabix on the back of my clothes. I have accepted that having two children means that I will be permanently sticky for the next 18 years. Because I have two children under the age of two in London, I also accept that I will probably never be able to go out because the cost of childcare is so prohibitive.
We have one of the most expensive systems in the world, but high cost does not necessarily mean high impact. The TUC found that, for parents with a one-year-old child, the cost of their child’s nursery provision has grown four times faster than their wages, and more than seven times faster in London. In communities such as mine, which has the 10th-highest level of child poverty, families are already choosing between eating and keeping a roof above their heads. Affordable childcare, like affordable housing, is an illusion. I thank Pregnant Then Screwed, the Early Years Alliance, the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society, the National Day Nurseries Association and the all-party parliamentary group on childcare and early education for their refusal to let this be the new normal. Childcare is something that everybody needed during the pandemic and nobody got.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) pointed out, during the pandemic the Government found time to make the case for infrastructure investment. They found £27 billion for roads and for 50 million potholes, money for new railways and stations, and even £5 billion for broadband. What did our children get? Well, the Chancellor did say that mums everywhere were owed a debt of thanks for juggling childcare and work. That pat on the back shone a light on how this Government think about working parents. This is an infrastructure issue, and as a result of failing to see it that way, we are losing tax revenue, losing women from our workforce and hampering equality in our society.
We have already talked about the lack of childcare provision prior to the pandemic—30% of local authorities accept that they did not have enough places, and only one in five said they had enough places for children with special educational needs—but it has become a lot worse during the pandemic. The consequences for families are clear: 75% of children in this country living in poverty are in working households, and childcare accounts for 56% of the overall costs of children for working couples.
Nothing about this system makes any sense. I am a parent of two children under two, but why on earth do we think that when children hit two or three, they are special? What am I supposed to do with these children until then, when it comes to childcare? Frankly, the people who will leave the workforce because they cannot afford childcare will already have done so by the time a child is two, and those of us who can afford childcare will be able to afford it after the age of two.
The Minister will no doubt point to the universal credit system, but it does not make sense in the real world either, because it expects parents to pay for childcare up front and then recoup the cost, as if parents on universal credit have spare cash to begin with. The Minister might say that the flexible support system is there, but only a few have used it on childcare. Anyone who has tried to get childcare in London knows that universal credit, which has been frozen since 2016, means that for most parents it is not a runner.
Failing to invest in childcare is baking inequality into our system for parents and children alike. We know that the vast majority of people using the 30 hours of funded childcare are from the top income earners. We know that the parents of 240,000 children aged two to four could potentially access childcare, but do not because of the cost of it.
We know that this issue is hitting gender inequality, too. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North is right to point out that the burden of childcare too often falls on women. Only 2% of new fathers take any parental leave: that is because we ask them to pay for it, rather than recognise it as the investment in the child’s development and in the family that it represents. Almost 870,000 stay-at-home mums who want to work cannot do so because of the cost and availability of childcare, and those problems have got a lot worse during the pandemic. Some 46% of mothers who have been made redundant said that a lack of childcare was a factor in their selection for redundancy. When furloughing ends, many more will not be able to go back to work because the childcare will still not be available: the loss of places during the pandemic means that many more will be out of work. That means that we will not get the tax revenue from those mums’ work, and it means that their families and their careers will suffer.
The crazy thing about this is that investment in universal childcare from the age of six months pays for itself. When we provide that, not only do we get an income from the sector—and, by God, we should be paying these people a lot more to look after our children—but we get the income from the higher number of women who can be in work. There is an army of mums out there who are mad as hell that they are being ignored and expected to take on childcare at short notice, and I tell the Minister that mums can multitask too, and they can vote. We have to get this right, because we owe it to every child and every mum in this country to see them right.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), who is a friend, on the new arrival. The importance of this issue in the eyes of our constituents, mine included, is reflected in the fact that almost 113,000 people signed this e-petition, which—as has already been set out—calls for
“an independent review of childcare funding and affordability”.
The public, I think, feel we could do more to create a sustainable future for the early years sector, which I represent here today as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on childcare and early education, which has been mentioned. We in that group have spoken for some time about what I would describe as a market failure in this sector, and the need for a meaningful review of it, so it is good that we are having this debate.
Prior to the summer, I had the pleasure of speaking in another debate on this issue, in Westminster Hall in its other incarnation—these debates come around often—and in the months since, things have moved on. The Chancellor has now announced his comprehensive spending review alongside his Budget on 27 October, and it was very useful to speak to him last week—I was in that meeting too, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers)—about many of the issues we are debating this afternoon. I must stress from the outset, as I did to the Chancellor, that this is not all about money. For me, it is about getting back to brass tacks to make our early years funding system work for the children of this country, and for the families who rely on it and the economy that relies on those families. It is about ensuring that our hard-working early years educators—I declare my interest: I am married to one—are rewarded. Most importantly, it is about putting our early years sector on a sustainable footing so that this debate will not keep coming around again and again.
I am here as chair of the all-party parliamentary group, but I am also a Government MP, and I am very proud of the landmark commitment that we as a party made through the 30-hours entitlement. However, I have to say that through my work chairing the group, it has become clear to me that systemic reforms are needed to make this flagship policy work better. Data from the National Day Nurseries Association, which is one of the sponsors of our group, show that in 2019-20, three quarters of councils underspent their early years funding by £62 million. Meanwhile, there is a funding shortfall of almost £3,000 per child per year for every 30-hours place. My hope is that Government will agree to use the forthcoming spending review to fund an early years catch-up premium and address this shortfall, including facing down the local authorities on that underspend. Merely by overhauling the system and tackling the existing underspend, we could properly fund many of those 30-hours places for children right across the country.
That is just one example of how reviewing the funding system would ensure that the existing funding follows the child and is best used. For me, the two issues are intrinsically linked: we cannot fund our early years sector without holding a fundamental review of the funding system, and we cannot simply wait for a review of that system to report without some sort of bridging measures and the long-term certainty that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet spoke about. Between April 2020 and March 2021, there was a 35% increase in nursery closures, just at the time when parents who are key workers needed them most. That is a grave concern for us. The nurseries that are struggling and closing tend to have a higher proportion of Government-funded children. Therefore, the poorer families suffer more from the shortfall between the funding and delivery costs. That causes the lag that is causing the closures.
The future of the sector is in peril, and with it the benefits that it brings to children, their families and the economy. It is not just about the bottom line for providers, but rather the future and development of our children, who are then ready to go on to reception and their primary and secondary education.
Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful case, as have others. Does he agree that grandparents often have to step in to the breach and provide the necessary childcare? While that is very welcome and they do it willingly, it results in an uneven pattern of child development.
Steve Brine
The right hon. Gentleman’s point goes to the heart of the issue. I talked about early years educators; these are not well-meaning amateurs at the end of their career who are just providing plasticine. They are educators and they are preparing children for the world of learning when they go into their primary and secondary education. It is a very good point and it is well made.
Nursery settings have remained open and ready to receive children to help their families get back to work. At the same time, their staffing costs have risen on average by 8.6% through the new national living wage and pension contributions. With the reintroduction of business rates looming, the average nursery will face a bill of about £12,500 for those alone. Surely it would be better to see this money going into the pockets of our early years educators and directly invested in the future of children across the UK. That would be a fitting way to recognise the unsung contribution of early years educators over the last year and to help develop our country’s most valuable asset—the next generation.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
Early years staff have worked incredibly hard during the pandemic, sometimes putting their own health at risk to ensure our children are cared for. I thank each and every one of them. However, one of our early years providers in Bath said, “I feel the Government do not value us and do not see our professionalism and dedication to our role.” Too many childcare workers have felt this way throughout the Government’s response to the pandemic. Guidance to them has been ambiguous, and provision of PPE and testing has come far too slow. Recovery funding has focused primarily on school-aged learners.
I secured a debate on early years funding before the summer recess. My message to the Minister is the same now as it was some weeks ago—acknowledge the value of the early years sector and pay what it costs to deliver it. Funding has been a widespread concern long before the pandemic. Research from YMCA suggests that up to 80% of settings cannot deliver childcare at the funding rate provided by their local authority. I take the point that there is underspending in some local authorities, and we need to get to the bottom of that, but the overall funding gap is still too big. Most providers realistically need more than £6 an hour per child just to break even, let alone reinvest in their business. However, the funding rates do not reflect this. In Bath, in north east Somerset, our local council receives £5.59 an hour for two-year-olds, and just £4.48 an hour for children aged three and above. It means providers have to choose between operating at a loss and subsidising the cost of delivery through fee-paying families.
Of the expenses, 70% are staffing costs. If funding continues to increase at a much slower rate than the national living wage, it will become more and more difficult to pay staff properly. In a country where parents pay the second-highest childcare costs in the world, one in 10 childcare workers are officially living in poverty. Affordable childcare is essential to our economic recovery from covid-19, but with childcare costs adding up to about 30% of the average wage, many parents—usually women—will be forced to make difficult decisions about remaining in or returning to work. Should one of the legacies of covid-19 the roll-back of decades of progress on equality for women in the workplace?
This Saturday is International Equal Pay Day. What better time could there be for the Government to commit to a total rethink of childcare funding? And I add my full support to calls for a meaningful review of early years funding, which must include a multi-year funding settlement, simplifying the funding system and making sure that funding follows the child. All allocations of early years funding must consider children with special educational needs and disabilities, across all settings.
Childcare is an investment in our future. It is time that it was treated as such.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I thank the Petitions Committee and everyone who signed the petition to secure this debate today.
The childcare juggle is real. Parental life should come with a military gold command schedule-planner. Instead, it is made up of grandparents—if people are lucky enough to have them about—after-school clubs, childminders, understanding bosses, nurseries and friends doing favours for each other.
This morning, I dictated a weekly article for my local newspaper down the phone to my team, while trying to put my wriggling daughter’s leggings on, in between trying to put my face on, answering messages and making sure that she was fed before I handed her over in order to come here. On top of all that, the cost of childcare is truly painful for many people.
I will make five key points before I move on. No. 1 is that we cannot afford to have the vital talent of the parents of young children being kept out of the workforce; the country and the economy will not thrive without them.
No.2 is that if anyone has ever seen what a working mum fits into an hour of “free” time before legging it back to the school or nursery gates, they will know that mums could singlehandedly fix the economy’s problem with productivity if they were freed up to do so.
No. 3 is that child carers, nursery teams, nannies and early years teachers are all skilled angels who need more career recognition and pathways to higher salaries. This profession deserves respect and everybody found that out when they tried to home-school children over the past year.
No. 4 is that the wellbeing of a child will always come first for parents. We must work harder to ensure that childcare providers improve our system, so that the choice for parents is not one between having a career and having a child.
Finally, No. 5 is that employers are not the enemy and neither are the Government. If there was a single solution, it would have been put in place by now. I am concerned, because if this issue is turned into a political football, as I have read and heard about in some of the coverage today, nothing will get done.
I have long thought that childcare needs a bit of an overhaul, but without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Parents in my constituency tell me that the 30 hours of free childcare for three and four-year-olds has been invaluable, and approximately 60% of disadvantaged two-year-olds benefit from 15 hours of free childcare a week.
We have a £1 billion flexible childcare services fund being established and I am part of the early years taskforce with my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), so I know well that we are thankfully bringing about some really interesting changes for families at the moment. So, to lambast the Government for not doing anything, or claiming that they are not trying to help, is wrong.
I would also like to see cross-party working on this issue. We saw Labour, when it was in Government, struggling to address rising childcare costs; those costs rose by significantly more than inflation in 2003 and faster than earnings in 2009. Labour knows how difficult this issue is; Labour Members know how difficult it is. Let us work together to try to find new solutions.
Personally, I am open to the petition’s call for an independent review. However, such reviews really cost the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds and—frankly —if that money is available, I would prefer it to go to the childcare sector. So I am also quite cautious about the request.
However, putting myself into action, I am an advisory board member of the think-tank Onward and I am already in discussions with it about conducting an investigation into childcare. I am also a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, and after hearing from some fabulous young women parents who came to give evidence last week, I have asked the Committee’s Chair to consider reviewing childcare policies under universal credit. I say to the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) that that would include considering issues surrounding up-front payment.
The early years of a child’s life are absolutely critical; the relationships in their life, which include those with all the people in the childcare sector who they encounter, will set the scene for them for years to come. I ask the Government to work with us. I know the Minister cares deeply about this, as does the Prime Minister, who has a baby and another one on the way and knows this struggle, but we have to look at all aspects of childcare alongside what we are doing with the early years taskforce, which is critical. The Chancellor is very interested in this area, and I am pleased to hear that Members have spoken to him already.
The issues have got much worse during the pandemic. We owe it to every parent and child and the childcare sector to improve the system. We can show we are working hard for working parents to give every child the best start in life.
Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Sir Roger, on a topic very close to my heart. I thank the Petitions Committee and all the petitioners for securing the debate. I want to start by paying tribute to all the early years educators in my constituency: the nurseries, pre-schools and childminders all worked tirelessly during the pandemic to look after some of the youngest in society.
Early years are critical for a child’s development and for determining their life chances, but the childcare sector faces pressures because of Government neglect over the last decade. Chronic underfunding has left nurseries and childminders facing a growing financial crisis. In this year alone, 2,500 providers have closed, and many talented staff have left the profession. Since 2015, 12,000 early education and childcare providers have been lost, with 30,000 more at risk of closure in the next year.
Millions of parents, particularly mothers, rely on childcare in order to work, and analysis by Pregnant Then Screwed shows that 345,000 women will be at risk of losing their jobs if further childcare providers are lost. Despite that, the Government have said that they are not planning a review of the childcare system or early years funding, but it is clear that urgent steps need to be taken to prevent further childcare closures and to rebuild that essential infrastructure. With the greatest respect to the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), I imagine that the experiences of childcare and affordability are very different for the Prime Minister than for the vast majority of my constituents.
The funding model has a huge number of issues. Prior to the pandemic, 11% of childcare providers were running at a significant loss, with the industry as a whole suffering an estimated £662 million shortfall in funding. Meanwhile, public spending on childcare has fallen as a share of GDP since 2010, and remains considerably below the OECD average.
The Sutton Trust and the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently found that some of the poorest children are “locked out” of the 30-hours childcare scheme for three and four-year-olds simply because their parents do not earn enough to qualify, and that contributes to the widening gap between the poorest children and their peers before school even starts. The funds provided for that childcare, even by the Government’s own estimate, are not enough to fund the scheme.
A related issue is affordability. Fees have risen three times faster than wages since 2008, making the UK home to one of the most expensive childcare systems in the world. A survey published today, commissioned by a dozen organisations, found that 97% of respondents thought childcare was too expensive, and one third said that they paid more for their childcare than for their mortgage. We have already heard that in London, where I am an MP, the cost of nursery provision for a one-year-old grew seven times faster than wages between 2008 and 2016. It simply is not good enough for my constituents who rely on affordable childcare to be able to go out to work.
Finally, I want to say something about the conditions for people working in the childcare sector, where the average wage is £7.42 an hour. In 2019, almost half of childcare workers had to claim state benefits and tax credits, with one in 10 workers officially living in poverty. That is awful. How can we expect such an important job educating the youngest in society to be done for such low pay?
More and more evidence has been published on how critical early years are for a child’s development and future attainment. Investing in childcare therefore offers a huge opportunity to give each child a greater and more equal start in life. Investing in the sector should start by giving workers pay that reflects the importance of their work. High quality early education is an investment in the future—not a cost. A decade of neglect has left the sector in crisis. However, despite this, there are now so many opportunities for reform to benefit working families, future generations and our economy. I hope the Government will listen to the more than 100,000 people who signed the petition calling for today’s debate, and will provide good quality, genuinely affordable childcare for all.
Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I thank the Petitions Committee, and the Chair, for the debate today, and everyone who signed the petition. I also say a huge thank you to all the nursery and early years workers who have done such a sterling job over the last 18 months.
I come at the subject as someone who took full advantage of the Government’s 30 hours scheme. When my daughter was nine months old I had to go back to work, but, as we know, MPs are the most flexible of employers and I was lucky enough to work for one. I took full advantage of grandparental childcare until my daughter was old enough to take advantage of the 30 hours scheme—and I was very grateful for it. Having become an MP, I find myself on the other side of the fence, hearing from those early years providers how difficult it has been, and is. I will not repeat what we have already heard this afternoon.
I, too, sit on the early years taskforce with my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), and we hope to make some very exciting new proposals in the coming months and years. We had a meeting with the early years providers and the children and families sector at Cornwall Council, and we were both pleased to hear that Cornwall is already doing a lot of what we want to achieve. I am hopeful, and want to put another call out, that if any pilot schemes or funding schemes are going to be running for early years and early years sectors, then Cornwall with its very clean boundaries and co-operative and fabulous team of MPs, councillors and council workers will put itself forward for them.
When someone has a baby—as many of us will know—they have the mum guilt. Many parents do not actually want to go back to work. That is at the thrust of this debate. The cost of living today, mostly because of housing, means that it is very difficult to pay a mortgage on just one salary. That is different to where we were 30 years ago. It is absolutely important that we get this right, and I would support any review that we can have. I am encouraged by what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has said, and I would support that too.
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for leading this debate, speaking so passionately and making the argument for the review so clearly. That is supported by the more than 130,000 people who have signed the petition, so I would like to thank them for taking the time to sign, ensuring that we have this important debate—it is not a debate that we have often enough. I thank the almost 500 people in my constituency of Putney who signed the petition. I thank all the early years staff in my constituency and across the country, as other Members have, for their amazing commitment to educating children before and during the pandemic, when we saw so many changes and challenges. I thank the all-party parliamentary group on childcare and early education, as well as Pregnant Then Screwed, for leading campaigning in this area.
As has been said before—it is shocking—the UK has one of the most expensive childcare systems in the world. We should aim for that not to be the case. Some 75% of children living in poverty are in working households, with childcare costs accounting for 56% of the overall cost of a child for working couples. Childcare costs are 30% higher than average in inner London—in my constituency—and up to 50% higher than in other regions. It is a postcode lottery as to how affordable childcare is.
I started paying childcare costs in 1998, when I had my first child, and I had to carry on until 2017 when my fourth child left primary school. I have experienced many years of struggling to afford childcare costs. The local Sure Start centre in my area was closed—it had been a lifeline for me. For many years, the childcare costs I was paying were equal to my salary; as has been mentioned before, I was literally just paying childcare costs to keep my place in my career. I stepped out of the workforce for many years, because it was just not affordable. I then went back part time. It was a struggle throughout all of those years to afford childcare. The fact that only 389 maintained nursery schools are left in the UK is adding to the crisis, as they are such an important part of our early years provision.
One fantastic state-maintained nursery is Eastwood Nursery School, in my constituency. The headteacher at Eastwood recently said to me:
“The quality of what we can offer is in real jeopardy if our funding is reduced. We are fearful that the much-needed service we provide to the children of a very deprived community is at great risk if we do not have the secure funding to continue our work.”
Funding is only given year-by-year, which is why she talked about secure funding.
“Nurseries will simply not be able to continue at the current rates. Closures of early-years settings across the country will deepen both financial and educational inequalities, while slowing the recovery from the pandemic.”
We need a review; a review has been called for by the all-party parliamentary group on childcare and early education from before the pandemic, but it is even more important now. It needs to look at the pandemic’s impact on nurseries, childminders, pre-school children and jobs. It would be a landmark opportunity for a radical rethink of how we fund and deliver childcare.
I was disappointed that the Government dismissed the call for the review out of hand when so much research has shown the impact of covid-19; 7% of parents have attended an early years setting that has subsequently closed, and single parents were twice as likely to be forced to change jobs—or leave work entirely—as a result of the high childcare costs. The statistics could go on.
We are failing children if affordable childcare is a postcode lottery. We need a review to see what is going on across the country, where the early years sector is failing families, what we need to support the early years workforce better and what the impact has been for children’s development, and to make recommendations that will be implemented and funded. One parent’s comment particularly shocked me:
“I had to cease being self-employed as I could not find or afford childcare. I have secured a new job but this is a massive pay cut and a big demotion…It leaves me with not enough for after school club for my eldest child.”
That is the experience of parents across the country.
I fully support and echo the call of these petitioners. It is time to start treating childcare as the essential infrastructure investment that it is—in our economy, in our families, and in our country. I urge the Minister to go back and look again at this and to urgently launch a comprehensive, expert and independent early years review.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson). I followed her in a debate in Westminster Hall, last week, and today I do the same, again on a subject that we agree on. I thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for setting the scene, and for giving us a chance to participate.
Childcare and its affordability are of great interest to every Member in this House. I am sure that not one of us has not sat with a young family to tell them that they are above the threshold and cannot get help. That is, unfortunately, something that I have had to address in my own office recently as the extra £50 per month that they get prevents them from accessing four times that in childcare help—and I want to put on record my thanks to all who provide childcare in my constituency of Strangford, who have helped so many people through the pandemic with what they do. These are everyday problems in my constituency. The options for those families are to live with it, or go to their bosses, cap in hand, and ask for a reduction in hours that will be just enough to put them under that threshold. Many will not do this, as it is not as easy a fix for their boss as it may seem at first glance.
A couple contacted me last week; the lady, in particular, is very unwell. She is on employment and support allowance and personal independence payment. Unfortunately, if she was to transfer to universal credit to access working tax credits and child tax credits, she would automatically find that the childcare that she would qualify for would make her financially worse off. There are many complex issues.
For many, grandparents, whether they are fit or not, are left to fill the breach. There are approximately 14 million grandparents in the UK; one in every three people over the age of 50 is a grandparent. In the past two generations, the number of children being cared for by their grandparents has increased substantially— from 33% to 82%. That is massive. Grandparents are the childminders of today. Almost two thirds of all grandparents regularly look after their grandchildren, saving working parents approximately £6.8 billion nationally in childcare costs, but what is the cost to their quality of life?
We have upped the pension age—we all know about the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, and how those women are unable to leave work at 60. Many women drop their hours at that time of their life to take care of their grandchildren, so they are not able to answer the call of their body and simply slow down. There must be something better for grandparents—more than just a national insurance stamp for minding their grandchildren. Many parents in the middle income bracket simply cannot afford to pay for childcare themselves.
My parliamentary aide is the youngest of five siblings. Her sister was 20 when she had her first child, in the middle of her nursing degree, and my aide was 32 when she had her first. Their mother, Roberta Armstrong, has been providing childcare for almost 50 years: initially caring for her own children and, for the last 27 years, constantly caring for her working children’s children. She has grandchildren in the workforce, grandchildren in medical college, and grandchildren at the start of their education in P2. Roberta Armstrong had her first child at 18. She is not the same as she was at 39, when her first grandchild was born, and yet the demands are the same. Caring for her children and grandchildren has been her way of life, but she has to do what a childminder could never do, and which the parents cannot afford to pay for.
What respite is available for the grandparent, and for my parliamentary aide? She works flexitime to allow her more time off in the holidays; this works well for me, and ultimately it means she can take time off during recess, but jobs like that are not readily available. My wife, Sandra, and I are grandparents as well. She looks after the grandchildren—there are five at different ages. She says the wee boys are the hardest—I would not know, because we only ever had boys—and the wee girls are not too bad. How do we breach the gap for families like those, who are asking too much of their elderly parents because they have no other option?
Many parents are caught in a Catch-22 situation. They earn too much to get help or subsidised childcare, and yet they do not earn enough to pay someone to do everything that needs to be done. This leads to examples such as the 67-year-old grandmother with a heart condition lifting and laying a five-year-old with a broken leg.
Do we consider longer school days? Would that eat into their childhood? Do we ask employers to do more, when the pressure of paid holidays and sick days is already too much for many to bear? Do we provide additional paid clubs that work like wraparound childcare? Something needs to be done. I ask the Government to decide today to help those who work hard and simply want a little help to enjoy their children, instead of waiting until their children have children to take care of their grandchildren. I believe that now is the time. Let us break the cycle and strengthen the family.
Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)
Having listened to contributions from colleagues across the House, it is clear that we must open up the language we use when speaking about childcare. It is all too common for the debate and, often, the responsibility for practical and logistical arrangements to fall solely on the mother. In doing so, we are at real risk of alienating hundreds of thousands of fantastic fathers from the wider debate. This is particularly evident when we consider the paltry paternity leave allowances on offer from the UK Government.
I know from first-hand experience that when someone has a newborn in hospital, the ticking clock of a return to work is truly the last thing on their mind. I recognise that my husband and I were luckier than most, because he was able to pool his annual leave to secure more paid time off work, but it really should not have to be that way. I pay tribute to the fantastic work of charities such as Bliss, which has fought for more paternity leave in the case of neonatal care for years. The campaign is working: I was pleased to see the Government recently announce plans to introduce neonatal leave that will cover up to 12 weeks when a baby is receiving neonatal care. Frustratingly, the policy is unlikely to come into force until 2023 at the earliest; even then, it is unclear whether these rights will be extended to fathers. For the 300,000 babies who will spend time in neonatal care over the next three years, that is simply not good enough.
It is a dreadful, sorry state of affairs when the UK Government, which, in their 2019 manifesto—although we know how they feel about manifesto claims—claimed that they have a vision for the labour market that includes being able to
“balance work and family life”
but they are unable to support parents with a robust and fit for purpose childcare system. Thankfully, in Wales the situation is in the hands of the brilliant Welsh Labour Government, which have shown their commitment to supporting parents with childcare costs for many years. This includes the brilliant Flying Start programme, which is a targeted early years programme for families with children under four living in some of the most disadvantaged areas of Wales. The Welsh Labour Government also offer everyone 33 hours of childcare per week for children aged three to four with no conditions.
It is clear that a huge number of our childcare providers are still struggling financially, as has already been mentioned. Thankfully, in Pontypridd and Taff Ely, we have fantastic childcare providers, including Little Inspirations, who have branches in Llantrisant and Tonyrefail. However, in the last year nursery closures have increased by 35% compared with the previous year, and the highest numbers of closures were in the most deprived communities. In addition, Ofsted data has shown that over the last 12 months we have lost 442 nurseries from the childcare register. Childcare is one of the very few female-dominated industries, and low-paid workers in this industry are being hit the hardest.
Yet the care providers working in our childcare settings are not the only ones losing out financially. The motherhood pay penalty refers to the pay gap between working mothers and similar women without dependent children, and it has been well documented over the years. The realities of the gap are genuinely shocking and are impacting people every day. The TUC’s recent report into the pay penalty shows that by the age of 42 mothers in full-time work earn 11% less than women in full-time work without children.
To combat this disparity, a number of steps must be taken. We need to enable more equal parenting roles, so that women are not held back at work. We need to see flexible working—and not just in the form of working from home. I am sure that colleagues will be well aware of the recently reported employment tribunal involving estate agent Alice Thompson. Ms Thompson won a pay-out of more than £180,000 after her boss refused to let her leave to pick up her daughter from nursery. I know that her situation will be familiar to so many. Alice simply wanted to work four days a week and finish at 5 pm, when her childcare finished, rather than at 6 o’clock, and her boss rejected her request, claiming that the business could not afford for her to go part time. That is just one example that reflects the extremely difficult situation that so many parents find themselves in. The Government simply must do better.
To conclude, Sir Roger, I sincerely hope that in her remarks today the Minister reflects on the real need for systemic change in our approach to both the funding and availability of childcare across the UK. The system is failing so many groups of people across society: from our childcare workers in unstable employment to single-parent families, mums who are earning less than their counterparts and dads who want to do more but cannot take the time off work. Parenthood is, of course, a privilege, but it is one that should not come with unnecessary and excessive financial burdens. I urge the Minister to work with her colleagues across Government Departments and the devolved nations to take bold action to support future generations and tomorrow’s parents.
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
It is pleasure to follow hon. Members across this House in this debate in particular, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the organisers of the petition calling for a review of childcare in England on securing 100,000 signatures. It would be wise of the Government to listen to the collective voice of the signatories.
It might be thought rather strange that I should speak in a debate on childcare in England. However, while childcare is devolved to the Scottish Government and the SNP have chosen in the first instance to take a different path from England, it is concerning that, as the petition points out, many families are being pushed further into poverty as a result of the high costs of childcare. That, of course, will be exacerbated by the pandemic.
According to the Early Years Alliance, the UK Government’s offer of 30 hours of free childcare per week in England is not well funded enough, as we have heard, leaving parents scrabbling around for a provider that will give them the right hours and flexibility. As we have already heard from hon. Members across this House, the benefits of good quality childcare speak for themselves, and the need to fund the facilities providing this vital care is essential. As we have heard, the issue is not just about mothers; it is about parental leave, paternity leave and shared parental leave. Ultimately, all those options prevent a motherhood penalty.
The Sutton Trust found that the UK Government’s childcare policy was compounding inequalities and harming the life chances of children. Sir Roger, there are only a few seconds left for me to say that—if the clock is correct—
Angela Crawley
Turning, finally, to the Minister, this is her opportunity. I know that she knows only too well the economic consequences and benefits of good quality childcare. Smashing the gender pay gap needs bold, innovative policies, and good quality, affordable childcare is a pretty good place to start.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I would like to thank all my colleagues across the House who took the time to speak in today’s important debate. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), and little Pip, I want to begin by paying tribute to Joeli Brearley and everyone at Pregnant Then Screwed for starting this important petition and for the inspiring work that they have done to support women and parents in this country and to fight against gender inequalities.
On no issue is it more important to have dedicated campaigners like Joeli than on childcare, which is all too often ignored by politicians, despite it being a fundamental building block of our economy and our children’s development, as has been repeated several times in the debate. Its importance is highlighted by the fact that well over 100,000 people signed the petition, including 400 of my constituents in Hampstead and Kilburn.
In the Chamber last week I raised the Government’s own statistics, which show a loss of over 3,000 childcare providers in England in the first half of this year alone. This comes on top of a net loss of over 100,000 providers since 2015. I was very surprised that the Minister responded by claiming that there were no problems with sufficiency in the early years sector, given that a third of English councils do not have enough childcare places for parents working full time. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow raised this in her speech. I was surprised by the Minister’s remarks on childminders, which have now drawn much criticism, including from the chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, who commented:
“To hear the Children and Families Minister so casually dismiss the closure of thousands of childminders—and falsely imply that what they provide is just care, rather than education—is both insulting and infuriating.”
I do not want the outside world to think that that is how politicians in this place think when it comes to early education.
Every year, Coram Family and Childcare publishes a survey of childcare costs and availability, and every year it shows that there is a postcode lottery in childcare provision. All too often, the costs are soaring well above inflation. My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) outlined her own experience of living through this postcode lottery and how much misery it has caused so many people in her constituency. A survey published before the debate by Pregnant Then Screwed found that a staggering 19 out of 20 working parents said the Government are not helping enough with childcare, with a third paying more for it than their rent or mortgage—again, a point that has been made over and over in the debate. That is because a full-time childcare place in the UK costs £14,000 a year. As my hon. Friends the Members for Walthamstow and for Putney constantly said, ours is one of the most expensive childcare systems in the whole world. That should make our heads hang in shame.
The sad truth about the eye-watering costs of childcare in this country is that it was a predictable result of the decision that the Government took to underfund the free childcare policy by a third in the last financial year alone. We know that because the Department for Education itself predicted it. Secret Government documents from 2015, uncovered by the Early Years Alliance, warned over and over again that failing to fully fund this policy would drive up costs for parents. Ministers pushed ahead regardless, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) said, left the sector with a £662-million annual funding gap even before covid hit.
As if that was not bad enough, there was almost no targeted support either for early years or for wraparound childcare providers during a pandemic that has seen their attendance levels and income plummet to the ground. Then came what early years analyst Ceeda calculated as a quarter of a billion pounds’ funding cut this spring term, due to the premature withdrawal of pre-covid funding levels. It is no wonder that 85% of childcare businesses expect to make a loss or break even this year, as research by the National Day Nurseries Association shows.
It is not just about statistics. There is a very real impact on families, who are struggling to make ends meet. My hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) talked passionately about equal parenting, the pay penalty, proper flexible working, and how children are being priced out of education at the most important stage of their development. Not only are private fees for early years childcare well out of reach for many families, including those in Hampstead and Kilburn, but a recent Sutton Trust report confirmed that the eligibility for the 30 hours free childcare scheme excludes the poorest. Are these the policies we want to have in our country, where we exclude the poorest from accessing high quality childcare?
As my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) pointed out, parents are being forced to cut hours and quit jobs because they cannot find or afford childcare. Of course, this affects women disproportionately. Three quarters of working mums were forced to cut working hours in the first lockdown due to a lack of childcare. In 2018, there were over 800,000 mothers who wanted to work, but could not for financial reasons.
Jim Shannon
The shadow Minister is making some very important points. Does she agree that it is not fair for the burden of childcare to fall upon the shoulders of grandparents, who do not have the physical ability to look after children in the way they probably did at one time? I believe that the onus is on the Government and the Minister to come back with a response that helps people.
Tulip Siddiq
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I was listening to his speech very closely, because I was reflecting that there is no way I could have got through six years of being an MP without relying on my mother—who, by the way, turns 65 today. She is someone who helped me with my childcare, because my father is in a wheelchair; she was responsible for looking after the children when I did not get proper maternity leave from this place. I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that the Government will recognise the pressure that is put on grandparents. My mother is 65, but there are lots of grandparents who are a lot older and struggle physically to look after small children. I hope the Minister takes heed of what the hon. Gentleman has to say.
I also want to talk about childcare workers, 93% of whom are women, who are languishing on poverty pay after suffering years of real-terms pay cuts under Conservative Governments. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge pointed out, the average wage in the sector is £7.42 per hour, and shamefully, one in 10 staff earn less than £5 an hour. These talented and dedicated workers are unsurprisingly leaving the sector as quickly as they can. It is clear to anyone who has direct experience of the childcare system in this country that there is something seriously wrong with it, and it could get a lot worse if nursery and childcare closures continue as they are at the moment. This petition should be a wake-up call for Ministers and the Government to rethink their approach to child- care funding.
That is why my Labour colleagues and I have been banging on about the need for targeted support to halt the collapse of the childcare sector. We are not being dramatic, and we are not scaremongering: this is the reality of the situation. Our childcare recovery plan also proposes a real, substantial hike in the early years pupil premium, from £302 per person per year to £1,345, as part of a £15 billion package to give every child new opportunities to learn, play and develop. I believe it is time to give childcare the attention and the funding it deserves, so that we can be a country that values children, parents and family and so that childcare becomes a part of the country’s infrastructure, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North so eloquently put it when she opened this important debate.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Vicky Ford)
It is an absolute pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I would like to begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) on securing this important debate on childcare. Every parent wants their child to have the best possible start in life, and high quality, accessible childcare is a really important part of that. Many right hon. and hon. Members have taken time this afternoon to thank childcare workers, and I agree with them: childminders, playworkers, and each and every member of our early years staff deserve our admiration, our gratitude and our thanks. I also thank Joeli Brearley for having started the e-petition that prompted this debate. Parents such as Joeli value the strengths and opportunities that our childcare sector delivers, and my Department is committed to maintaining a sustainable network of early years providers.
I recognise the strength of feeling about our childcare system, and the Government will continue to consider ways of making childcare more accessible for parents. Many right hon. and hon. Members have pointed out the special importance of childcare to women—to mothers—and as someone who once had three children under the age of four, boy, do I remember that juggling balance that so many Members have mentioned. It has been particularly impressive to hear so many fellow women MPs speak with such passion today. However, I would also like to thank the male colleagues who have taken time to join us in this debate, because it is vital that we all stand together.
I also recognise the importance of the quality of our early education and childcare. Earlier this summer, I visited the Guildford Nursery School and Family Centre and saw how committed its staff are to giving children the best start in life, like so many other hard-working nursery staff and childminders across the country. It has been a true delight to hear so many Members of Parliament mention providers in their constituencies.
Access to high quality early childcare is important because it has such positive benefits for a child’s educational and life outcomes. As we know, childcare is important in helping parents to be able to work. I am proud to be part of a Government who have extended access to early education and childcare to millions of children and parents over the past decade. In 2013, the Conservative-led coalition Government introduced 15 hours of free childcare for disadvantaged two-year-olds. That has helped more than 1 million children to get a much-needed early boost to their education. I encourage all hon. Members to encourage families from lower-income backgrounds to take up that offer, because when they do so children do better at school and it gives them vital skills that set them up for life.
Back in 2017, the Conservative Government announced 30 hours of free childcare for working families, which enabled hundreds of thousands of parents to return to or take up paid work, and many of those families have saved thousands of pounds. Working families can also get help from the Government’s tax-free childcare scheme, which offers a 20% contribution towards their childcare fees and is worth up to £2,000 a year for children aged up to 11 or £4,000 for children aged up to 16 if the child is disabled.
Vicky Ford
I will give way to the hon. Lady, but before I do so I want to congratulate her on her beautiful baby. I hope she is getting a bit of rest.
Stella Creasy
I would get even more rest if this place moved with the times and the law and provided proper maternity cover.
The Minister is talking about the take-up of the 30 hours of free childcare. As has been said, the evidence shows that the vast majority of people taking it up—70%—are from the higher-earner income bracket, and that just 13% of eligible families from the bottom third of the income bracket are taking it up. Why does she think that is the case? Does she recognise that the way it is funded at the moment means that we are excluding some of the poorest families because they cannot afford the rest of the cost of childcare? What does she think is happening?
Vicky Ford
I thank the hon. Lady for her question. When it comes to the take-up of the two-year-old offer, which is particularly targeted at disadvantaged backgrounds, there is a huge discrepancy between different parts of the country. For example, there are parts of London where up to 70% of families have taken it up, and other parts where it is far lower. That is why I encourage Members to get in touch with me if they want and I will tell them about the take-up in their area. As I said, there are areas where seven out of 10 families are taking it up and are continuing to do so. I will talk more about disadvantaged families later.
As the hon. Lady is aware, the Government can also help with 85% of childcare costs for universal credit claimants even if they work only a few hours a week. I know it can be challenging to claim, but it is important to recognise that it is there. In my own jobcentre, the job coaches are working closely with parents to help them with making a claim that so that they can get back into work.
Wraparound childcare is also important as it not only supports parents so they can work but can benefit children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, and their educational and social development. I was absolutely delighted to go around the country this summer looking at our holiday activities and food programme, which has ensured that thousands of school-aged children on free school meals have had access to childcare as well as exciting activities and food. I thank all Members who visited their HAF programmes this summer. It is the first time that we have ever had anything like that type of project for our children. Of course, we piloted it for three years, but this year it has been all across the country, and local authorities are already setting out their plans for Christmas.
The Government invest a significant amount in early education and childcare, including £3.5 billion for each of the past three years on funding our entitlements for two, three and four-year-olds. In November 2020, the Chancellor announced another £44 million investment for this financial year to help local authorities increase their hourly rates paid to childcare providers. All local authorities have seen an increase of at least 8p an hour in the two-year-old entitlement. The vast majority of areas have had an increase of 6p an hour for three and four-year-olds. Significant increases were also made for hourly rate entitlements funding in 2019.
Several hon. Members from London constituencies mentioned the cost of childcare in London. It is important to note that we pay a higher funding rate for those entitlements in areas where business costs are higher. The average hourly funding rate for a three or four-year-old across all of England is £4.91, but the equivalent for London is notably higher at £6.11. The hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) may be interested to know that in her constituency, the amount we pay to Camden is one of the highest in the entire country at £8.51.
My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) mentioned the spending review. As hon. Members know, we are already working on a multi-year spending review. In the Department for Education, we are absolutely continuing to press the importance of early years care and education right across Government as part of that spending review. Given that we are in the middle of spending review negotiations, it would not be appropriate to launch a separate independent review of childcare at this time because the outcomes of such a review would not be able to feed into the speeding review that is happening right now. We expect the outcome of the spending review to be announced later this year. My hon. Friend also mentioned closures.
Vicky Ford
Hang on, this is important. We do not recognise the description of a 35% increase in closures. Between August 2020 and March 2021, approximately 2,000 settings joined the early years register while around 4,000 left. However, the overall number of childcare places has stayed broadly the same, suggesting that some of these closures were mergers, and in parallel some providers are increasing the number of places they offer.
The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) mentioned access to childcare for vulnerable children. It is important to remember that our early years pupil premium provides up to £302 per eligible child per year, specifically to improve outcomes for disadvantaged three and four-year-olds. She also suggested that three and four-year-olds not having access to the full 30 hours of childcare could have a negative impact on their educational development. In fact, the Sutton Trust admits that its research does not conclude that more formal childcare results in better educational outcomes. The evidence for the positive impact on educational outcomes of attending more than 15 to 20 hours of childcare per week is limited. Over that number of hours, it is helpful for childcare, but less so for educational outcomes. There is evidence that those exiting the market are less likely to be providers in disadvantaged areas of the country.
Vicky Ford
I really want to get some of this on the record because it is important to providers. Between June and December last year, a lower proportion of childcare providers leaving the early years register were from the most deprived quintile in comparison to other areas, with 12% of providers that left the market located in the most deprived areas.
What is important is ensuring that there is sufficient childcare and the Government’s priority is to track whether there are enough childcare places locally for parents. It is encouraging to see that the proportion of parents using formal childcare appears to be similar to before the pandemic. Every six weeks, the Department calls local authorities across the country to discuss childcare provision at the local level. At no time since June 2020, when provision reopened more widely after the first lockdown, has any local authority reported a significant lack of sufficient childcare places for parents who need them. The number of places has stayed broadly stable over the past five to six years, despite an average 3% decline in the number of births each year since 2017.
Throughout the pandemic, settings have continued to access a range of business support packages, such as the coronavirus job retention scheme, if they experienced a drop in their income or if parents were unable to attend their usual place. We are also supporting the early years sector by ensuring expert training and development is available to the workforce. That includes an investment of £20 million in high quality, evidence-based professional development for practitioners in targeted disadvantaged areas, which will give early years settings in those areas the skills to help the disadvantaged children who will benefit most from this assistance.
In June, we announced another investment of £153 million over the next three years, including funding for training of early years staff to support the very youngest children’s learning and development, especially in areas such as special educational needs and disabilities.
Fleur Anderson
On the issues raised by the Minister about sufficiency, are councils’ childcare sufficiency reports used to make an assessment of whether there are sufficient places or not, and of the impact of the sufficiency of places on childcare costs in an area? For example, in my borough of Wandsworth, there may be a sufficient number of places but they are not necessarily in the right areas. We have heard reports of childcare places in the most deprived areas closing more than others, and that may be happening across the country. Does the Minister have a sufficient assessment of sufficiency reports to know this?
Vicky Ford
I thank the hon. Member for her great interest in this subject. We see the number of providers joining and entering the market through the Ofsted register, and we have looked at the providers joining and entering based on areas of deprivation. As I said, those leaving the market are less likely to be providers in disadvantaged areas of the country. Only 12% of those leaving the market were in the most deprived areas.
In the last statistics in March 2021, there were reported to be about 1.3 million places in childcare settings. That has stayed stable over the past five to six years, despite the fact that year on year, for the past few years, we have seen on average a 3% drop in the number of children being born. We have regular contacts with local authorities, and we are not hearing about systemic failures in any local area or about parents not being able to access childcare. They may not be able to get exactly the place or the flexibility they would most like, but there is not a systemic shortage.
High quality childcare, delivered by trained, dedicated staff makes a real difference to children’s outcomes. I include and value childminders when I talk about high quality, dedicated staff.
Wera Hobhouse
We have said here a number of times that one in 10 childcare workers lives in poverty. Does the Minister think that is acceptable?
Vicky Ford
I think it is extremely important that businesses involved in the childcare sector pay the national minimum wage. The 8p and 6p an hour by which, as I said, we have increased the average early years funding, have been more than enough to meet the increases that have been announced in the national minimum wage. That was certainly true in those 8p and 6p increases that we gave last year.
What is really important is the quality of our childcare. Parents not only want childcare, but they want to know that their children are loved, safe and well educated, so high quality childcare is important. We have achieved so much here. The last time we assessed our five-year-olds, nearly three quarters—three out of four—of our country’s youngest children had achieved a good level of development. That is a massive improvement, because back in 2013 it was only one in two of our children.
I know that there are many questions about funding. My officials are in regular discussions with the Treasury as we prepare for the forthcoming spending review. Throughout the pandemic, the early years sector has been a cornerstone of protecting livelihoods and family life, letting our youngest children enjoy their early education with minimal disruption and helping to secure a positive future for each one of those children. I reiterate my deepest thanks to all those who work in early years.
Catherine McKinnell
I thank the Minister for that response, but I fear that the more than 112,000 petitioners who signed the petition would disagree with her assessment that there is not a problem to address. Indeed, Joeli Brearley of Pregnant Then Screwed and the 12 organisations that supported the in-depth research and survey of the parent and provider experience of the childcare system would disagree with the Minister’s assessment.
The petition is very reasonable. It is not asking for a specific amount of funding. It is not even diagnosing exactly what should happen. The petition is asking the Government to hand over to experts for a full assessment of what we want our early years and childcare sector to be and to provide.
I agree—I think hon. Members in all parts of the House who spoke in this debate agree—that we need to get the best out of the funding that goes into the sector. I agree that it should not be a party political issue. The way to ensure that that money is spent in the best way possible, however, is not just to turn down the petitioners’ request for an independent review, but to take it away and consider it.
I appreciate what the Minister said: that this does not fit with the current Budget and spending review schedule. However—I implore her again—the petitioners are not asking for a specific amount of money; they are asking for a wholescale review. We can keep going on, sticking plasters over the cracks, pumping some money here or there, or putting a funding pot in place, but in reality we have a postcode lottery, a family lottery, and parents crying out for more help and support. We have many people silently falling out of the workforce, a productivity problem and a crisis point for many families, with many in the most deprived families just not being heard or supported at all.
Stella Creasy
My hon. Friend is making a passionate plea for why we need the review. One issue that the review could settle is the Minister’s claim that the country has not seen the closure of any places, although the evidence from the National Day Nurseries Association is very clear: in 2019-20, there was an increase of 300 nurseries in this country; but in 2020-21, there was a net minus of 400 nurseries. The Minister is shaking her head, but does she recognise that at the very least, an independent review could get to the bottom of that, so that we as parliamentarians could make informed decisions and have informed debates, because she seems to think something completely different from what the sector is telling us?
Catherine McKinnell
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. With the greatest of respect, I think that petitioners listening to the Minister’s response will feel that hers is an alternative reality, an alternative universe, from the one that they are living in. Parents and providers are struggling. Early years staff are undervalued and underpaid. Childcare is becoming a big political issue, and it will not go away any time soon.
I urge the Minister to take away the petitioners’ request. I appreciate that the answer today is no, but I say, “Don’t close the door on this,” because it needs to be looked at. Not only are parents and providers being let down; ultimately it is the children who would benefit from getting the best early years and childcare system in the world—not just the most expensive, and we are nearly there, but the best in world. Let us aspire to that, and let us ask the experts to guide us in a cross-party way on how we can best achieve that.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered e-petition 586700, relating to funding and affordability of childcare.
HS2
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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David Mundell (in the Chair)
Before we begin, I ask Members to adhere as best they can to the social distancing guidance produced by the Government and the House of Commons Commission. Please give each other and members of staff space when seated, and when entering and leaving the room. Members should send their speaking notes to hansardnotes@parliament.uk. Similarly, officials should communicate electronically with Ministers.
Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered e-petition 563380, relating to HS2.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. The petition that we are debating is entitled “Stop work on HS2 immediately and hold a new vote to repeal the legislation”. For convenience, I shall read the petition into Hansard:
“We ask Parliament to repeal the High Speed Rail Bills, 2016 and 2019, as MPs voted on misleading environmental, financial and timetable information provided by the Dept of Transport and HS2 Ltd. It fails to address the conditions of the Paris Accord and costs have risen from £56bn to over £100bn.”
The petition was open for six months and has gained over 150,000 signatures, 459 of which are from my constituency. As we all know, HS2 has been a topic on the public’s mind since Parliament first voted on it in 2009, and many of us represent constituencies that are deeply divided on the issue.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
The construction of vent shafts for HS2 on Adelaide Road and in South Kilburn in my constituency is already causing major disruption to residents in Swiss Cottage and a part of Brent with some of the highest deprivation levels in the country. With the projected cost of HS2 having quintupled since 2010, does my hon. Friend think that the disruption, pollution and environmental damage that will be caused by this project over two decades is worth the £106 billion that it is now likely to cost?
Taiwo Owatemi
I thank my hon. Friend for raising such an important point, which I will come to.
I have been wrestling with whether the cost of HS2, both economically and environmentally, outweighs its benefits. I represent the west midlands constituency of Coventry North West, where HS2 is projected to add many jobs locally, better connect our cities and bolster the regional economy, and I welcome those benefits. I also applaud any efforts to invest in clean and green public transport infrastructure, such as high-speed rail. Building high-speed rail that connects our country with cutting-edge train technology should be something that we can all rally around.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady recall that when HS2 was originally planned, it was going to go not into Curzon Street, but into Birmingham New Street? That would have given her constituency greater connectivity. Moreover, it would have connected with HS1 so that people could travel direct to the continent without changing trains in London. Would not that have been the connectivity that she talks about?
Taiwo Owatemi
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. I will come on to connectivity later in my speech. However, I have my own reservations about HS2. As somebody whose constituency contains woodlands at risk of increased pollution from HS2, I harbour concerns about the environmental damage that the railway will bring locally. I therefore intend to use my remaining time to expand on the petitioners’ key contentions, which beg the question: should the Government continue to fund HS2’s construction?
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
There is no direct advantage for my constituents in Northern Ireland. However, if the Government follow their levelling-up process, suppliers in Northern Ireland should have a chance to feed into the process. Does the hon. Lady agree that, when the Minister replies, there should be a commitment to jobs in Northern Ireland?
Taiwo Owatemi
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. I know he is a champion for his constituents in Northern Ireland.
There are many reasons to be vocal about the benefits of HS2 if it is built as initially promised. In many ways HS2 should be a green and environmentally friendly new railway. It should present an important asset in achieving net zero carbon in the UK, creating an alternative to an emission-heavy mode of transport. By shifting more commuters to rail travel, not only will carbon emissions be 76% lower than those of an internal flight, but it would compete on journey time and cost.
John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
We are starting to move to the nub of the question. First, HS2 was greatly flawed in its initial assumptions about the costs and benefits. The costs have escalated, but, most importantly, covid has brought a dramatic change in demand. At the moment, only 50% or 60% of journeys are made by rail. On inter-city it is probably even less. Does that not fundamentally undermine the case, and is there a need for a reassessment by Ministers? Could we ask the Minister whether he has done that reassessment?
Taiwo Owatemi
I hope the Minister will be able to provide an explanation to the question asked.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
The hon. Lady talks about greening the economy. Is it not the case that HS2 will allow more capacity on the old and virtually full Victorian network so that we can take freight and polluting lorries off the road and on to electric trains on the railways?
Taiwo Owatemi
That is a contentious point. HS2 would emit seven times less carbon than the equivalent car journey. I would, however, ask the Government whether they plan to adjust that calibration in light of the goal that the UK aims to have all electric vehicles by 2040.
Economically, HS2 could bring benefits, including for my own city of Coventry. Nationwide, an estimated 500,000 jobs and 90,000 new homes have been pledged as part of the HS2 project. Currently, HS2’s construction supports 9,000 new jobs and has created contracts for 2,000 businesses, of which some 1,400 are small and medium-sized enterprises.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
Given what we have heard about the clear economic benefits and the additional connectivity and capacity that HS2 will provide, does my hon. Friend share my deep concern that we keep getting reports in the newspapers and elsewhere that the Government are going cold on the HS2 route to Leeds? We have been given a clear commitment. Does she hope, as I do, that the Minister will make it absolutely clear that the Government remain committed to building HS2 in full, including bringing it to Leeds?
Taiwo Owatemi
That is a commitment that I am coming on to and I will ask the Minister to provide more information on that.
Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)
My constituent, Darren Bartlett, has been suffering for years after he had to give up his land and business to HS2. For almost three and a half years, HS2 has not made any compensation available to him. He is in a dire financial situation. The HS2 people have refused to have discussions with him, and he is having to remortgage not just his business but his property.
Taiwo Owatemi
I thank my hon. Friend for raising such an important point. HS2 has caused financial restraints for many people whose life it has impacted—
Zarah Sultana
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I share many of the concerns about HS2 that she has raised. These concerns were made very clear to me when I joined constituents affected by the project earlier this year and saw the impact of HS2 on them and their local area. In addition to the environmental issues that my hon. Friend has raised, what keeps coming up time and again from constituents is noise pollution. Does she agree that it is long overdue for HS2 to put up noise-cancelling barriers to stop the disruption that is plaguing so many constituents?
David Mundell (in the Chair)
I will just say at this stage that because the debate is heavily over-subscribed, those people making interventions, particularly lengthy ones, are unlikely to catch my eye for the debate itself.
Taiwo Owatemi
Thank you, Mr Mundell, and I will try not to take any more interventions.
The benefits that I have just outlined are dependent on the Government following through on the entire project. As was highlighted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), earlier this summer the Department for Transport directed HS2 to stop all work on the leg linking Birmingham with the east midlands, Sheffield and Leeds. I know that the Government have made efforts to quell rumours that this leg of HS2 will be scrapped, but they have not issued any outright denial of that possibility.
That certainly brings into doubt some of the predicted economic benefits of constructing HS2. To be clear, the Government’s business case for HS2 depends upon building an entire railway network, not just fragments of HS2 for the favoured few. Failing to build that network would not only break the Government’s promise regarding the returns on HS2, but destroy their promise on levelling up the west midlands and, indeed, the midlands as a whole.
The Government must be clear about which part of HS2 will in fact be constructed, so that MPs have all the facts. As is evidenced by this petition, the potential benefits of HS2 have often been overshadowed by the controversies over how the Government have so far managed this major project. The petition refers to the extraordinary increase in the bill for building HS2. Back in 2009, the projected cost was £37.5 billion. By 2020, that figure had ballooned to £107.7 billion—an increase of 361%—and that hike is before much of the construction has even begun. That is completely unacceptable—how in the world did it even happen?
A review by the National Audit Office concluded that the key reason the price of HS2 skyrocketed was the Government’s failure to estimate accurately how quickly and cheaply they could build HS2 and the constantly changing scope of the project. In many ways, this project has clearly been mismanaged and there are no guarantees that the cost of it will not continue to rise.
Taiwo Owatemi
Due to the time constraints, I will proceed quickly and then I will give way later on.
As I was saying, there are no guarantees that the cost of this project will not continue to rise and I am deeply concerned that taxpayers will not receive the promised returns on their investment if the cost continues to climb. The taxpayer has already seen a diminished expectation on that return. Indeed, in 2011 the initial economic case presented a benefit-cost ratio for the full train network that was nearly twice the current estimated return. The cost and benefit to the taxpayer must be at the forefront of our minds during this debate.
Separately, there is the very legitimate concern about the cost of constructing HS2, and I will also talk briefly about the cost of using HS2. One of the main reasons why I originally had some hope for the construction of HS2 was the understanding that a high-speed rail link such as HS2 would not only provide better mobility for commuters, but improve social mobility. However, if the only people who are able to take HS2 are the wealthiest among us, I cannot see how it will be used as a tool to boost social mobility—
James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Mundell. There is a Division in the House.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Thank you, Mr Gray, for pointing that out. I will now suspend the sitting for 15 minutes.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
The debate will now continue until 7.45 pm. I call on Taiwo Owatemi to conclude her remarks.
James Murray
I sincerely thank my hon. Friend for taking my intervention. I draw Members’ attention to the substantial impact on, and disruption caused to, residents in my constituency by vent shaft works associated with tunnelling under Ealing North. I recently carried out a survey of residents on Carr Road and Badminton Close in Northolt; I would welcome my hon. Friend’s support in asking the Minister to review the results of that survey, and to join me in pushing HS2 to improve its communication with, and accountability to, residents.
Taiwo Owatemi
I thank my hon. Friend for raising such an important point, which I will come on to.
I am deeply concerned about the environmental destruction that this project is causing to ancient woodland areas. The Woodland Trust estimates that 108 ancient woodland areas are at risk of loss or damage as a result of construction on HS2, and that irreparable damage to an ancient woodland ecosystem and biodiversity cannot be adequately addressed by planting a few saplings over a few years or generations. These environmental concerns alone give me pause for thought.
If HS2 is to be anything close to a success story, it must change course. I am worried that this project will continue with the same mismanagement that has characterised its construction so far, and has increased the projected construction time by about eight years and projected costs by over £60 billion. The same mistakes will continue to plague other phases unless we see change. HS2 Ltd needs to be much better at listening to the communities that it is impacting most, and to take the time to allow contractors to weigh in on what truly works best for local communities.
Finally, I will touch on something larger that is at stake: public trust. When we consider new and ambitious infrastructure projects, the public must trust that the Government will be open, transparent, trustworthy, cost-effective and efficient. With HS2, that has all too often not been the case, and I worry that the public’s diminished faith in Government’s ability to manage such projects effectively will prevent them from supporting positive and ambitious infrastructure projects in future. The end does not always justify the means. I look forward to hearing from the Government how they plan to address the important concerns I have raised, and to hearing the issues of concern to MPs from across the House and their ideas on how to drastically improve the HS2 project.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
I am imposing a three-minute limit on contributions. I call Jeremy Wright.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell, and to speak in this debate. I am grateful to the Petitions Committee for bringing it to this Chamber, and I agree with a great many of the concerns that have already been expressed about HS2. For what it is worth, I always argued that the line should follow existing transport corridors; that would have done a lot less environmental damage.
Ever since legislative authority was given for the line as it stands, I am afraid that HS2 Ltd has too often—there are a few individual exceptions—acted in a thoughtless and high-handed way, failing to communicate effectively about the nature of its works and the road closures and other disruption that they cause. As we have heard, HS2’s budget has risen dramatically, seemingly without anyone being held to account for it, yet in so many of the compensation cases I have dealt with, every penny claimed by vulnerable people whose lives have been ruined by the line has been fiercely contested.
I welcome the appointment of a dedicated HS2 Minister, and my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) has been doing a good job of getting to grips with these issues. However, he will agree that there is much more to do, and much more of the construction phase to go. HS2 Ltd and its contractors have to work much harder on talking to and listening to local residents who are affected by their work, and they and my hon. Friend need to do more to answer legitimate challenges on compliance with environmental standards, and about what was known when about cost overrun.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
The hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) outlined the criteria of honesty, transparency, value for money and openness. Has HS2 not failed the test on all those things? The rocketing costs make people feel like they are on a runaway train that has not even had the opportunity to get out of the station. This is a mess, and it must be fixed.
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Gentleman is right. It is incumbent on everybody involved in the project, including the Government, to make improvements in those respects, and we must expect that to happen.
As we have discussed, there is much to criticise HS2 for, but this petition does not ask us to criticise HS2—it asks us to cancel it. It seems to me that we should not be making a judgment based entirely on frustration, considerable though it may be. The reality is that legislative authority for HS2 has already been given, and this debate does not provide a mechanism to reverse it. Even if it did, given the amount already spent and the work already done on phase 1, it is likely that any cancellation decision now would be to cancel phase 2 of the line—not phase 1, which passes through my constituency and others. That would leave us with a high-speed rail line from London to Birmingham, with all the inconvenience caused to my constituents to build it, but not a wider network. The positive case for a wider network can be made, but the positive case for a new London-to-Birmingham line cannot. Stopping after phase 1 seems to me to be almost the worst-case scenario for my constituents, and I cannot support it.
If HS2 is to proceed, the Minister will need to assure us that it will be delivered with more efficiency, flexibility and consideration for the people impacted by it than we have largely seen so far.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. I thank the Petitions Committee for bringing forward today’s debate, and the 311 constituents of mine who have petitioned. The Government need to get a grip of this project; that has come over loud and clear in the debate so far, and that point will no doubt be echoed in the next hour or so.
We are in the midst of not only a climate emergency, but an environmental emergency. We cannot plough lines through the middle of these cathedrals of nature, while avoiding wonderful cathedrals such as that in the destination city that HS2 is meant to arrive at some time in the future—we know not when. The paths these lines take should be integrated with the rest of the rail network.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
Is not the effect of what is happening with HS2 that we have further delays to Northern Powerhouse Rail, which is hugely important for connectivity across the north of England, and other rail projects?
Rachael Maskell
I agree that the sequencing of this project needs to be re-examined, because we need interconnectivity, and we need it mapped on to the rest of our rail system.
I want to focus on the impact the plans are having on the economy of York. In Crewe, we are talking about 36,000 jobs, and in Curzon Street, 37,000, yet in York there will be just 6,500 jobs, in areas adjacent to the rail system—on Network Rail land, which comes under the Minister’s Department. The question I want answered today is: why is the economic opportunity of HS2, which the Minister has espoused, not translating into reality? Network Rail will redevelop that land for luxury apartments—not for anybody in my constituency to live in, but so that people can commute down to London, sucking out the wealth from my constituency. It does not make economic sense. It does not make sense for transport, and it comes at a cost to our environment. Therefore, the project needs to re-examine its purpose.
The Minister has a responsibility to ensure that jobs come to my city. There is no point talking about spending all this money if it is not going to drive up the opportunity for my constituents, so I ask the Minister to take a look at the figures. We see that 2,500 housing units are to be built adjacent to the station. My constituents simply cannot afford them because of the high cost of living. It does not make sense to push out those job opportunities while saying that they are the whole purpose of the railway. I have to say to the Minister that in the light of HS2’s economic suction from the north and my constituency, and its environmental impact, he has not yet presented a case that stacks up, and that says that HS2 will benefit places such as York. I ask him to look at that again.
Finally, if we are looking at truly levelling up, we have to look at all the opportunities for interconnectivity. In the north we need to see Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester and York as part of the rail network, and have proper integration and speeds, and that simply is not happening. The east-west route is far too slow and costly for my constituents to really benefit from. We have to see connectivity across the network before this project proceeds, not least because we know that people have changed the way that they are moving about our country. At this time, we need to ensure that we are investing in things that will increase our productivity.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I stand with the petitioners calling for HS2 to be scrapped—first, on cost grounds. At a time when the state is reaching deeper into people’s pockets, it is obscene to keep throwing money into this unwanted project. The latest estimate for the total cost is £146 billion; that is 10 times the original estimate.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that covid has completely changed likely travel patterns, and that the big commuting demand will be much reduced? So where is the argument for capacity, which HS2 was supposed to be about?
Greg Smith
I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention; he has read my mind—this is a point that I will come to shortly. The National Audit Office has noted that 50% of the costs for phase 1 are still based on HS2 Ltd’s estimates, consultant designs and benchmarking information, rather than actual costs—real pounds and pence—agreed with industry. Therefore, the overall cost could clearly rise again. HS2’s own revised cost estimates assume that it will be able to find £2.8 billion of savings, yet there has already been a substantial dip into its contingency budgets. We all know that the case for HS2 was ropey to start with; some estimated a 66p return for every taxpayer pound spent. If rumours of the eastern leg being scrapped are true, that must make the business case utterly untenable.
As my right hon. Friend says, there is also the aftermath of covid. The Transport Committee heard last year that rail passenger numbers are unlikely to recover to more than three quarters of 2019 levels—other estimates have it as low as 47%. The pandemic, and new working patterns, should surely allow for fresh eyes to look at High Speed 2.
I fear that the cat was somewhat let out of the bag by Douglas Oakervee, who, at the Transport for the North annual conference last year, was quoted as saying,
“The construction industry was in a very fragile position”.
He went on to justify his recommendation as a way of preventing harm to the construction industry. That is a purely unacceptable rationale.
This leads me to the environmental destruction. Hedgerows, trees and nature reserves, such as Calvert Jubilee in my constituency—destroyed. Water quality and wildlife are being put at risk; environmental standards that were agreed are now not being met, as has been well documented by the Chilterns Conservation Board and the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust. Now, in my constituency, we have uncovered evidence of limestone being applied to land taken, rendering it useless for any future agricultural use. No prizes for guessing what the endgame is there; there is more to this gravy train than just the train.
Worst of all, HS2 brings real human misery to my constituents, and constituents up and down the line of route. This is through the endless road closures; the destruction of local rural roads, which are in conditions that are not safe to travel on; the grossly unfair way that landowners and farmers are treated; and people being left in a state of severe stress and anxiety by not knowing what will happen to their land, homes and businesses—not for days and weeks, but for months and years. I am devastated to tell this House that, from among the hundreds of people in this state of stress and anxiety, there have now been cases of people suffering heart attacks and losing their life, which I fear is not a coincidence.
Let us look at the reality. Let us call time on HS2 right now, ending this waste of money and this destructive project.
Sarah Green (Chesham and Amersham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. My constituents have made no secret of how important this issue is to them. That is why it does not surprise me that so many residents of Chesham and Amersham put their name to this petition. I join their plea to stop HS2 and put on record my opposition to it.
I have had hundreds of emails about this debate, as well as various emails and meetings in which specific concerns have been raised about the construction now taking place. I could fill the time available to us by listing those concerns, but I will resist. What many locally hoped would not happen is now happening. As far as they are concerned, it is happening to them, which is why it does not surprise me that the highest number of signatories to the petition are from Chesham and Amersham.
From the daily correspondence that I receive on this issue, what strikes me is the persistent lack of trust in HS2 Ltd, which is openly acknowledged by the team at HS2. They have assured me more than once that they are working hard to address that with the local community, but we have been here before. Five years ago, in December 2016, a special report by a House of Lords Select Committee highlighted its concerns about community engagement. Three years later, the Oakervee review said something similar. I therefore ask the Minister whether he is satisfied that he is seeing enough improvement in this area from HS2 Ltd. The lack of trust is inevitably compounded by the day-to-day reality of the largest infrastructure project in Europe happening on our doorstep. Let us not forget that those affected have years of this to look forward to—a decade of debilitating disruption.
I will finish by discussing the real fears for the aquifer and water supply. The Minister will be aware of concerns about the use of bentonite. Indeed, my predecessor asked in July 2018 whether there was a plan to use bentonite under pressure when tunnelling under the Chilterns. The reply she received from the Minister at the time was that
“Bentonite will be used in the construction of the diaphragm walls for the 5 intermediate shafts. Prior to the use of bentonite in these locations the construction methodology dictates that the ground surrounding the diaphragm walls will be grouted, therefore sealing and protecting the ground water from the bentonite.”
However, the Minister will know that it has come to light that, during diaphragm wall excavation at the Chalfont St Peter vent shaft late last year, there was a significant loss of bentonite. There is a clear correlation between that loss and changes in water quality in the area. HS2 Ltd chose not to share this information with the community; we know about it only because of a freedom of information request that was submitted to the Environment Agency.
The last thing that local campaigners want to say is, “I told you so”, so I ask the Minister whether he will come and hear from residents, whose fears for our water supply are real and have not been allayed by the assurances that they have received to date. Given the repeated calls for increased transparency and openness over the years, I ask the Minister to come and meet some of my constituents and decide for himself whether HS2 Ltd’s commitment to openness and transparency is being fulfilled.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
I have always voted against HS2, from its inception. My constituents have agreed with me, and I am grateful for the support of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) in this debate. I have yet to see any objective report supporting HS2, and it has been put on red watch by the Government’s economic advisers. HS2 Ltd has continued to spend billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money as it takes a wrecking ball to some of our most beautiful countryside and woodlands and devastates communities. The voters of Chesham and Amersham let the Government know how they felt in no uncertain terms, and they are not alone.
HS2 Ltd seems to have learned nothing about respecting the knowledge of local people. The company has repeatedly treated my constituents with contempt and refused to engage in meaningful consultation, paying lip service by planting a few new trees, putting in footpaths and holding glossy events. When HS2 Ltd has met communities, it has stubbornly refused to listen, and when technically challenged on its responses, it has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its engineering weaknesses. HS2 Ltd must admit the lack of engineering feasibility that this represents.
HS2 should also listen to the massive advantages presented by the professional and forensic analysis from my constituents, which has been made available to the Government. It would reduce dramatically the impact on Staffordshire, North Shropshire and Cheshire during the construction of phases 2a and 2b, deliver a valuable engineering asset that could build and maintain the western leg of HS2, and save the taxpayer approximately £600 million from the HS2 budget, which could be reinvested—please note, Treasury—in local rail projects that would transform rail connectivity across the north and through the midlands to the east coast, and provide the economic boost that those parts of the country richly deserve, including the levelling-up agenda.
I have absolutely no doubt that HS2 is a disastrous white elephant, but there are other opportunities and means whereby the Minister can change course. I strongly recommend that he does.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
The arguments put forward against HS2 are very similar to those put forward by the stagecoach owners against the original investment in the railway system. That is relevant to this debate because one of our problems is that, although the stagecoach owners did not win the argument 200 years ago, over the years equivalent arguments have stopped investment in infrastructure in this country. We have the lowest motorway density in what used to be called western Europe. We are still relying on the railway system that the Victorians built for us, and because it is inadequate we have more cars on congested motorways, creating pollution and potentially many collisions.
My constituents and most of northern England have supported HS2 because of the economic benefits that it brings. In fact, I do not believe it is ambitious enough. In place of HS2 trains being put on the current railway lines to go to Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scottish and northern MPs should be demanding that HS2 goes directly to Scotland and be joined, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) said, by HS1. That was part of the original plan. We have not been ambitious enough in our investment in infrastructure in the past and currently.
Before I finish, I want to deal with two or three of the arguments that have been put forward. The most absurd is the covid argument. This project will last 100 years—or perhaps 200 years, like the current railway system. Hopefully, covid will be over much more quickly than that—over the next six to 12 months—and we will get back to a normal economy and transport system.
It is often counterposed that the Liverpool-Hull railway, or HS3—it has been called many things—should be given priority over HS2. Both are required. One will feed into the other. If passengers are dispersed off HS2, they will need to go on to a line with capacity between Liverpool and Hull, and vice versa; we need to feed into that position.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend also agree that this is about freight? We can only expect freight movements to increase, and we want them to get off the roads and on to the railway. That will be possible only if we create the extra capacity that HS2 will give us.
Graham Stringer
My hon. Friend is right, of course, and she has expertise as a previous Chair of the Transport Committee. HS2 frees up capacity, not only for passengers but for freight. That will take pollution off our motorways in all sorts of ways.
I am opposed to this petition. It will not have any impact. It allows MPs to voice their constituents’ concern, but an expanded HS2 is important for the future of this country.
Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I am very grateful to the Petitions Committee for securing this debate, because HS2 is undoubtedly the single biggest issue in my constituency of Aylesbury. Indeed, 2,999 petitioners are from my constituency—it is second only to Chesham and Amersham—and I have received more than 400 emails asking me to speak today.
I completely share the views of the vast majority of residents across the Aylesbury constituency that HS2 should be scrapped. As I stated at the beginning of my own election campaign, I do not believe that we need this railway. It makes no sense economically, owing to a weak business case and dramatically escalating construction costs. It makes no sense environmentally, with more than 100 ancient woodlands being destroyed for a line that will never be carbon neutral over its 120-year lifespan. I remain absolutely convinced that the scheme will do enormous damage to our area with zero benefit for the people of Aylesbury and the nearby villages.
Let us take some examples. The residents of Stoke Mandeville and Fairford Leys are already impacted by the construction work that is under way. Aylesbury itself is at risk of flooding owing to some of the methods that HS2 Ltd insists on using, despite repeated pleas to do more to alleviate the peril. Indeed, a recent FOI inquiry revealed an alarming lack of detailed knowledge of the impact on the aquifer of HS2’s construction.
The popular and beautiful village of Wendover
“will be more directly affected by the first phase of the HS2 project than any rural settlement of comparable size.”
Those are not my words. That is a direct quote from the House of Lords Select Committee. One key way to mitigate the horrendous consequences of HS2 for Wendover would be the construction of bored, mined tunnel. Time and again, local residents have provided compelling evidence of the case for such a tunnel, but time and again they have been told they cannot have it, so they have asked for a full, thorough and independent analysis of their proposal versus the one in the consented scheme. Even for that, they have again been told no. It is hardly surprising that they are up in arms.
Of course, we should not need a tunnel in Wendover because we should not have HS2 at all. There are so many things the HS2 budget could be better spent on. I have three suggestions. Local train lines—across the north of England and indeed in my constituency, notably the Aylesbury link of East West Rail, which has a better business case than HS2—would dramatically cut traffic congestion on the roads and reduce environmental harm, but we are still waiting for funding approval.
We could use the money for high-speed broadband, which would enable the new ways of working that are now becoming embedded following the pandemic. Parts of my constituency still struggle to get wi-fi despite being less than 50 miles from central London. Indeed, we could just save some of the huge bill, given the hundreds of billions of pounds we have had to borrow in the past 18 months. Any of those options would be much better for my constituency and for the country than this painful, lumbering white-elephant project.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell.
The Government’s response to the petition states that HS2 will be the
“long-lasting legacy for both wildlife and future generations.”
Well yes, it certainly will—a long-lasting legacy of environmental annihilation, eye-watering expense and broken promises.
I want to focus on the environmental harm of HS2, and I would point out that almost 600 Brighton constituents have signed the petition. If a convincing case for a new railway cannot be made on environmental grounds, that shows how fundamentally flawed the scheme must be. We face a climate and ecological emergency, and we need to start acting like we face such an emergency. Only if there are overwhelmingly positive environmental cases for HS2 should it go ahead. Clearly, there are not. However, there are, as we have heard this evening, many genuinely greener alternatives in which such large sums of money could and should be invested within the UK’s transport system. Let me give one more example: the New Economics Foundation estimates that a national rail investment fund of £55.2 billion over the next 10 years—just over half the cost of HS2—including £18.9 billion allocated to the north of England, would help commuters, speed up long-distance journeys, cut carbon emissions and bring benefits to many regions that are not even served by HS2.
On nature, the Government response to the petition says that there will be
“‘no net loss’ to biodiversity”.
Well, even if that were meaningful or credible—frankly, it is neither—it is utterly inadequate. The wildlife trusts have highlighted the fact that ancient woodland is
“by its very nature irreplaceable”,
so an ancient wood that is lost to HS2 is a permanent loss of nature and wildlife, yet 15 hectares of ancient woodland over 400 years old have already been obliterated. It speaks volumes that HS2 keeps no record of the number of trees felled. Can the Minister provide the figure for trees felled? I think that would be interesting.
Finally, on climate, the response by the Department for Transport to the petition claims that HS2
“will play a vital role in delivering the Government’s carbon net zero objectives”,
yet HS2’s own forecasts, even over 120 years, show the project will cause carbon emissions of 1.49 million tonnes. Achieving our climate goals means rapidly decarbonising the transport system, and protecting and restoring habitats such as woodland. HS2 does neither. Frankly, the way in which these decisions are being made does no justice to the seriousness of the situation, given what is at stake with environmental harm. The experience of HS2 shows that we need to change fundamentally our approach to economic decision making and to the criteria for major infrastructure projects. We urgently need to give top priority to the health and wellbeing of people and nature. It is time to stop annihilating nature in the name of short-term financial gain for some rather big construction corporations and the pursuit of infinite economic growth on our finite and fragile planet. The petitioners are right: HS2 should be scrapped.
Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. When I became a candidate for Crewe and Nantwich in 2018, one of the big decisions for me was whether or not I supported HS2. It was not well-paid lobbyists or Government or business interests that convinced me of my position but knocking on doors and speaking to dozens of local men and women who worked on the local railways and told me how vital this project was. Although I recognise many of the concerns raised by Members, and I hope that HS2 representatives are listening to them, I support the project.
Crewe has a proud and close relationship with this country’s railways. It was a village until the locomotive works and the railway station were founded in the 1830s. It built on that industrial heritage to forge a new future as a home for a wide variety of businesses, but with the railway remaining at its heart. That future is at risk if we cannot deliver locally and improve links via the railway.
Members have raised the issue of reduced capacity as a result of covid. It is important to note that some travel routes are already back up to 70% of pre-pandemic levels. It would be unwise to make major, decades-long decisions about transport in this country on the basis of less than a few years of travel patterns, which I fully expect to return to normal.
I think that the west coast main line will return to being the busiest mixed-use railway line in Europe. For my local residents and businesses, that means no capacity for freight, congested timetables and fewer smaller local journeys, because inter-city journeys take priority. The answer for some is to just upgrade what we have, but I remind everybody that the last time we did that we faced similar cost overruns and delays to those currently being experienced by HS2. I have said before in the House that I do not think that arguments about our ability to deliver big infrastructure are valid. We have to become better at doing infrastructure. As we deliver projects, we have to listen to MPs in order to improve them. We should not say no. If we stand still, we are certainly not going to deliver or improve our local infrastructure.
I understand the concerns. I also want to flag up the context of the money we are spending. It is a lot of money but let us keep in mind that we already plan to spend £6 billion a year maintaining and making much smaller upgrades across the railway network, and £40 billion over the next five years on projects other than HS2. In the context of those figures, it is naive to think that we can build a major new railway line without substantial forms of public investment. Are we really saying that this country is never going to build a big, major new railway line? I do not think that that is wise or that it reflects the ambition in my part of the UK, all of the north and the rest of the country—an ambition that HS2 helps to deliver.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
The Government talk about levelling up, and there can be few more glaring examples of regional inequality, and few where the role of central Government is critical, than our rail infrastructure. That is why I have been campaigning for some time for greater connectivity to and between major northern cities via the east coast main line, but HS2 matters, too, particularly the eastern leg. If the Government are serious about investing in the north, they must build and integrate all phases of HS2, along with Northern Powerhouse Rail, and deliver major upgrades to the east coast main line.
I know from some of the emails that I received before this debate that many people want HS2 to be scrapped, and for investment in local rail links in the north to be prioritised instead. I understand those concerns, and we absolutely need to correct the chronic under-investment in the north-east transport network, but it should not be an either/or proposition.
Nobody would argue that London should have only one major infrastructure project at any one time, and neither should that be the case for the north. Moreover, as hon. Members have said, the primary purpose of HS2 is to free up capacity on existing lines. Without it, we will struggle to improve local commuter and freight services. Our existing lines struggled to keep up with pre-pandemic levels of demand, and they will not be able to accommodate more or longer trains. We need a significant, coherent programme of rail infrastructure improvement across the north of England. That includes delivering HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in full and improvements to existing lines, particularly the east coast main line. If the Government’s intention is simply to build 21st-century rail links between London and Birmingham while passengers and businesses in the north are left behind, it will make a mockery of levelling up. I hope the Minister will reassure us today that that is not his intention.
I return to the need for investment in the east coast main line. If the eastern leg of HS2 goes ahead—I hope it does—it will deliver a continuous new high-speed railway between London and the midlands, and a junction with the east coast main line in North Yorkshire. However, from that point on it is envisaged that HS2 trains will travel on the existing east coast main line to serve the north-east and beyond. The line carried 50 million passengers each year before the pandemic. It is used for long-distance, regional and local passenger and freight services, but it has just two tracks, suffers from chronic capacity issues, affects the reliability of existing services and stymies the potential to add further services.
The single congested track between Northallerton and Newcastle is one of the worst examples of capacity problems on the east coast main line. After decades of underinvestment and a failed, piecemeal approach to rail infrastructure in the north, the Government have an opportunity to invest in capacity and connectivity, attract investment and truly boost the north by delivering HS2, NPR and east coast upgrades.
Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell.
I start by saying that the time allocated to the debate today is woefully short. That adds to the public’s sense that people are not listening to them, that they are being silenced and that the Government do not want to listen to opposition to HS2. Nearly 2,000 people in Tatton signed the petition and I stand squarely with them and the other thousands of people to say, “Stop HS2.” Later, I will give a reason why a vote needs to be held again in the House of Commons.
I would like to mention a few groups and people from Tatton because they have worked tirelessly to unearth the failings of HS2. They are Ashley Parish Council; Lach Dennis and Lostock Green Parish Council; Mid Cheshire Against HS2; Kathy O’Donoghue; and Ros Todhunter for her technical expertise.
Many colleagues have talked about the failings and there is not just one failing, but many. Indeed, the more we look into the project, the worse it gets, from its ballooning costs to the destruction of land and countryside, to its being out of date. We need high-speed broadband —1 gigabit capability—which would connect everyone, everywhere, not HS2.
Let us talk about the cost. It was £37.5 billion. It is now £150 billion. A scheme might be viable at £37.5 billion and perhaps even at £50 billion, but when does it become unviable? Are the Government saying that they will pay for it whatever the cost? I bring up the very serious point that Lord Berkeley made in the other place on 9 September. He said that he had
“received from senior managers in HS2 —I think you can call them whistleblowers”
information. They had
“produced a detailed estimate of this project from the beginning.”
That was news to him because:
“They had always denied that…but they have an estimate and the problem is that it came out at £48 billion, at a time when Ministers were telling the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House that the cost was £23.5 billion. It was on the basis of that £23.5 billion the House approved phase 1 of the HS2 Bill.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 September 2021; Vol. 814, c. 980.]
If that is the case and we were given misinformation, is not it right that the vote needs to held—and heard—again?
I have some final questions in the time I have. What is the cost of cancelling the scheme? On what is that estimate based? On what measurements does HS2 level up the north? Can we look at that serious allegation in the House of Lords and, if it is true, have another vote?
Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell.
More than 155,000 people have signed the petition that we are discussing, including around 200 of my constituents. Some have written to me directly, raising their concerns about the spiralling costs of HS2 and its impact on the environment and climate emergency. I share their concerns.
As Members have observed, travel patterns have changed significantly over the course of the pandemic and businesses have adapted to new ways of connecting over the internet. With more people working remotely, it is important that the Government revisit the arguments that were originally put forward for HS2. I ask hon. Members who argue strongly against this to reflect on the opportunities that the internet offers to businesses in how they operate going forward, and on the generations coming through who are so adept at using those technologies and developing them.
If the Government wish to encourage greater use of rail by passengers, they should act on the high costs of train tickets, particularly at peak times, which are frankly prohibitive.
In response to a written question that I tabled to the Minister in May this year, the Minister said:
“There is significant uncertainty around how travel patterns will change post-Covid.”
He also said the Government has
“not yet completed modelling the sensitivity of its major project business cases to post-COVID demand.”
Will the Minister update us on what the Government are doing to understand shifts in business behaviour and their impact on the case for HS2?
As we prepare to host COP26, the UK should be leading the way in the fight against climate change. In May 2019, this House declared an environment and climate emergency and called on Ministers to outline urgent proposals to restore the UK’s natural environment, yet there has been no route-wide environmental impact assessment for HS2. As has been mentioned, the Woodland Trust has pointed out that 108 ancient woodlands are at risk of loss or damage as a result of the project. The Government should take urgent action to understand the environmental impact of HS2 across the whole route.
Finally, I turn to the management of the project. In its 2020-21 annual report, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority gave phase 1, the London to west midlands section, an amber/red rating, meaning that
“Successful delivery of the project is in doubt, with major risks or issues apparent in a number of key areas.”
It gave phase 2b of HS2, which would extend the line to Manchester and Leeds, a red rating, meaning that
“Successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable.”
It is clear that High Speed 2, the Government’s flagship national transport project, is in chaos.
The climate crisis is real, it is here, and it is with us. The financial costs of the project have spiralled and work patterns are changing. I urge the Minister to give very serious attention to these most pressing concerns, and I look forward to his response.
Dame Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell.
This project first came to my attention back in 2009, when my party manifesto pledged to consult on this massive white elephant seemingly to make up for rejecting a third runway at Heathrow. As a new Back Bencher back in 2011, I led a debate begging the Government to look again at the economic case for the project then.
HS2’s heroic forecasting of up to 4% year-on-year passenger growth was, even then, undermined by the experience of HS1, which had achieved less than half its forecast. The economic case for HS2 had assumed that all time spent on a train was wasted, so a 20-minute time saving between Birmingham and London could account for huge economic gain. The green credentials of HS2 assumed that the power required to run it would be 100% generated through renewable sources. At the time, the cost was forecast to be £32 billion, with HS2 opening by 2026.
So, where are we now? Train passenger increases bottomed out long before covid and everybody can now work on a train using wi-fi. Government figures show the costs of the project have risen exponentially to well over £100 billion. Here we are in 2021, with enabling work only just begun.
The High Speed Rail (Preparation) Act—the paving legislation—received Royal Assent in November 2013, effectively giving HS2 a blank cheque. I was one of the 38 Members who voted against it. Then we set up a compensation and mitigation forum, with a number of MPs who were determined to protect their constituencies. At the time, we were all promised that no expense would be spared to ensure that our communities and countryside were looked after. Well, how wrong that proved to be.
The toll on lives and livelihoods has been massive. Andy, Ben, Murray and Anne in Radstone have had to battle for years to get HS2 to confirm what was agreed in writing during the hybrid Bill: a proper sound barrier to protect their village and a lowering of the line. Five years later these issues are still outstanding. Pauline and Doug’s successful holiday business was shut down by HS2 taking their land. Four years later, they are still awaiting compensation. They are stuck in their old home and have no income. The beautiful village of Chipping Warden is now surrounded by construction materials that HS2 has just dumped in this lovely countryside.
For me as an MP, dealing with what can only be described as the appalling treatment of my constituents by HS2 has taken on average 25% of my time since 2010, and it has caused real mental health issues for hundreds of local people. My hon. Friend the Minister, who has responsibility for HS2, is working very hard to help, but I will just say it straight: HS2 is an appalling waste of money and I am ashamed of the way that it is being implemented. We need a fresh vote.
Robert Largan (High Peak) (Con)
HS2 is probably the most poorly explained and poorly understood policy in our national discourse. Over the past decade, a series of myths have been perpetuated about it, by a combination of muddled thinking and the efforts of well-funded self-interest groups. I therefore welcome this opportunity to address some of those myths head-on.
First, despite its name, HS2 has never been simply about shaving 30 minutes off journey times down to London. It has always been about tackling the capacity challenge on the country’s most important strategic railway, the west coast main line. If we were to cancel HS2 and do nothing, within a few years this most vital artery of our entire national railway network would quite simply grind to a halt, causing huge damage to our economy, especially in the north and midlands.
I have seen many people claim that the internet and remote working will take care of this problem all by itself, ignoring the fact that—excluding the period of the pandemic—rail passenger figures have gone up in every single year since the internet was invented. They also ignore the issue of rail freight. I am all for harnessing technology, but with the best will in the world we cannot deliver millions of tonnes of goods via Zoom. We are already seeing the consequences of being overly reliant on road haulage, with the problems being caused by the shortage of continental HGV drivers. A failure to invest in our rail freight capacity would only make this situation worse.
Secondly, let us examine the cost of HS2 and let us give the anti-HS2 lobby the benefit of the doubt, taking their absolute worst-case scenarios on both costings and completion date at face value. Doing that, we would be looking at spending just over £5 billion a year; to provide some context, that is about half of what we spend on overseas aid. It is a lot of money, but investing around 0.25% of our GDP every year for a limited period to fix the most important railway network in our country is hardly disproportionate.
Thirdly, perhaps the most common argument against HS2 is that we should prioritise fixing existing commuter rail services instead, which is an argument that buys into a completely false-choice narrative. After all, London was not forced to choose between Crossrail and Thameslink; the north and the midlands should not be forced to make a choice, either. This argument also completely misses the point of HS2, which is to free up capacity on existing commuter lines and enable other transport improvements, such as Northern Powerhouse Rail. When the Transport Committee visited Birmingham, we heard very compelling evidence from Andy Street that HS2 also allows improvements such as the midlands rail hub.
My constituency is a good example of this situation. I have two railway lines, which have very limited capacity, that run through one of the busiest corridors in the country—Stockport to Manchester. HS2 would free up that capacity and allow for significant improvement in rail services for places such as Buxton, New Mills, Chinley and Whaley Bridge.
Finally, and most erroneously, a myth has developed that HS2 will be bad for the environment. If people are serious about tackling climate change and decarbonising the economy, I cannot see how they can credibly oppose HS2, a project specifically designed to reduce our reliance on domestic flights and to get cars and HGVs off our roads, shifting people and freight from a high-carbon form of transport to a low-carbon one.
In conclusion, therefore, completing HS2 is good for jobs, good for the economy, good for public transport and good for tackling climate change. It is vital that we keep HS2 on track.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Finally, I call Alexander Stafford. Please can keep your contribution to two minutes.
Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)
Thank you for calling me, Mr Mundell; I am conscious of the time.
I stand here in Westminster Hall today to oppose HS2, as I have opposed it ever since being elected. Over 700 of my constituents signed the petition. And I was actually joined at one of my street surgeries just last Friday by Sandra Haith, a stalwart member of the Bramley anti-HS2 group. She gave me another petition that was signed by 8,000 constituents a couple of years ago. In Rother Valley, a northern seat and a seat that the Government want to level up, we say that we do not want HS2.
I want to challenge this fallacy that HS2 is involved with levelling up. It is quite the opposite: HS2 takes money and resources away from levelling up. I say that HS2—I am particularly talking about the 2b arm that runs roughshod through my constituency, destroying 400 homes—damages the levelling-up process. Why is that? First of all, we have heard about £150 billion. What my constituency could do with £15 million would be transformative. Give us some of that; do not give us a rail line that we cannot get on to. That money is what we need.
On top of that, we have talked about the trans-Pennine route here today; that is what we need. But what I hear from suppliers and construction companies is that there are not enough resources. There is not enough concrete; there are not enough tradesmen at the moment actually to build anything else. That is because HS2 is this gaping maw that is sucking in resources, sucking in money and sucking in everything, but not actually delivering anything. That undermines the whole concept of levelling up, so I say to the Government: we need to stop HS2 and the 2b arm.
If newspaper reports are to be believed, the 2b arm will be scrapped. I welcome that and I hope the Minister will confirm that. Hundreds of my constituents, whose homes are being destroyed or compulsorily purchased, are being left in limbo. They do not know what is going on. We cannot just mothball it. We need to cancel it so that they can get on with their lives.
I have one more point: we are destroying 400 homes in the Rother Valley. At the same time, Rotherham council is building new homes on the green belt, which is ridiculous. We are destroying the homes that we have and building on the green belt to make up for the loss. The HS2 project is a disaster, and 2b needs to be fully cancelled.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
I thank the hon. Member for sticking to the time, and I thank Mr Newlands who has reduced his time available so that other Members can participate in the debate. I call Gavin Newlands.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
It is strange but indeed a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. The debate has been excellent, with impassioned contributions from both sides, although clearly skewed to one side of the debate. I do not have much time to reflect on many of the speeches, but I will single out the Transport Committee face-off between my colleagues on the Committee, the hon. Members for High Peak (Robert Largan) and for Buckingham (Greg Smith). I am sure it will be discussed tomorrow in Committee.
That it took the UK so long to reinvest in rail after decades of de-investment and line closures and to attempt to offer a much more realistic alternative to domestic flying is to be regretted. In fact, there is an argument to be made that, given the changed working practices born out of the covid pandemic, HS2 is perhaps already too late. However, in principle we remain in favour of high-speed rail, with the Scottish Government recognising the economic benefit that a well-planned and well-delivered project could bring.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Gavin Newlands
I have already halved my speech. We would also look to eventually have high-speed rail all the way to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Will the Minister tell us by what year high-speed rail will be delivered to the border? The Scottish Secretary could not answer that question last week. As an England-only project, HS2 falls within the remit of the UK Government with oversight by English MPs. The SNP does not usually attempt to interfere in devolved decision making for England unless there are budget implications for Scotland.
Although we support the principle, it is fair to say that the HS2 project has now regressed and become short-sighted. It does not place proper emphasis on connectivity across these islands. The fact that there is no discussion to link up to Wales directly and not even giving the Welsh Assembly any Barnett consequentials is shameful. As an England-only national infrastructure project, HS2 delivers spending consequentials to Scotland. Will the Minister confirm that that will continue to be the case to enable the Scottish Government to continue to build the carbon neutral transport infrastructure for Scotland? As the cost of HS2 continues to increase, UK Ministers must make sure that all devolved nations are not left out of pocket because of their decision to spend so much on one project in England.
We are also not oblivious to the environmental issues that many of us, even Scottish MPs, have been inundated with. It is important that any work on HS2 takes into consideration the wider environmental impact. As we have heard from many Members this evening, that certainly has not been the case thus far. The Scottish Government are of course looking to decarbonise Scotland’s transport network through decarbonising rail and investing in green buses and public transport. Scotland’s electrification scheme is an ongoing exemplar to the rest of the islands, particularly the DFT, which has electrified lines at half the pace of the Scottish Government over the past 20 years or so.
We are beginning the process of bringing ScotRail into public ownership to create a network that works for the people of Scotland and not just private profit. Scotland and the other devolved Administrations have robust processes for identifying investment priorities, each setting their own strategies and priorities for transport. Transport infrastructure, as you know, Mr Mundell, is devolved. Decisions on investment were taken by the Scottish Government through an infrastructure investment plan and the second strategic transport projects review. It will consider infrastructure proposals that are founded on robust evidence and that support the vision and outcomes of that strategy and meet the needs of the people and businesses of Scotland, not the political whimsy of the Prime Minister, whose track record in this area is nothing short of calamitous.
The Minister has said previously, and will no doubt say again today, that HS2’s connectivity will benefit the whole UK, so it is therefore important to make my final point—I know you would not agree with it, Mr Mundell, but you are an impartial Chair today. The Union connectivity review was established without any meaningful discussion with the devolved Administrations, and it undermines devolution. The UK Government are now threatening to withhold funding to Scotland unless the Scottish Government sign up to the review, which was carried out without Scottish Government input. That shows that the review is not about collaboration, but about the UK Government inserting themselves into devolved areas of government. The UK Government must respect the devolution settlement and stop undermining it for the single purpose of being able to put Union Jacks on Scottish projects.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Indeed, I am neutral in this debate, so I will now move on. Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi has eight minutes.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I am grateful to hon. Members for speaking so passionately and eloquently about what can be a very divisive and emotive issue for our constituents. Hon. Members have put forward their well-considered views on what is such an important topic for the future of our transport system, and I know that people who have signed the petition have important concerns that must be addressed. Although I believe that HS2 should continue to be built, and built in full, I feel that the Government have failed to address such concerns adequately.
The debate comes at a very important time for the HS2 project. A year ago today, formal construction on the project began—building from London to Birmingham, rather than starting from the north, as Labour advocated. In that time, HS2 has launched two giant tunnel-boring machines, provided 20,000 jobs and done much more besides. It has taken over a decade to get to this point. Back in 2009, a Labour Government announced the birth of the project in the face of growing rail usage by passengers and freight, which was caused by:
“Passenger choice, better rail services, road congestion and environmental factors”.
The project aimed to cut journey times and, crucially, increase capacity substantially.
Until recently, that remained unchanged. Between June 2018 and June 2019, the number of passenger journeys reached a staggering 1.77 billion. As home working became the norm, questions naturally arose around HS2, as hon. Members have highlighted. One of the main critiques from the petition is the substantial impact of the pandemic. There is no denying that the past 18 months have had a substantial impact. At its lowest last year, the level of rail usage dipped to a mere 4% of the norm. As people tentatively return to offices, many have chosen to drive rather than use our railways, with train commuting at just 33% of 2019 levels. However, the answer is not to give up, end construction and abandon the progress that HS2 could make on decarbonising billions of passenger and freight miles.
Andrew Bridgen
I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman received the 85 megabytes of documentation from whistleblowers within HS2 and the Department for Transport, which indicated that phase 1 is now unlikely to be open for passengers before 2041 and that the whole project is going to be £160 billion in today’s money. Phase 1 is already £70 billion, and the enabling works are running massively over budget. They are being suppressed, and that is going to be thrown into the main budget at the end.
Mr Dhesi
I thank the hon. Gentleman, who has supported the point that I have made thus far and will continue to make in my speech—namely, that the Government do not have a grip on the project. It is right that the opinions of whistleblowers and others in our communities are taken into account, because we cannot have ballooning costs and we must ensure that the project is delivered in full but also within budget.
As I was saying, we cannot abandon the progress that HS2 could make on decarbonising billions of passenger miles and, as hon. Members have pointed out, freight miles. We cannot reverse the construction progress made or the jobs created. It is about making our railways work better for passengers. It means committing to HS2 in full, including the eastern leg to Leeds. I know that people feel passionately about that, especially in the east midlands and the north, including those to whom I have spoken in and around Leeds. It is about ensuring connectivity for onward travel at HS2 stations, whether that is bus stops, taxi ranks or park and ride. It is about making flexible season tickets actually flexible, reducing delays, improving our rolling stock and guaranteeing that it is modern, clean and accessible. The project should be run efficiently, and issues, such as those raised about the local environment and local communities, should be addressed.
As I am sure the Minister knows, I am not alone in these concerns. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) has written to him about ancient woodlands and the environmental impact of HS2 on behalf of her constituents, as well about the uncertainty around the project.
Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)
Speaking on behalf of the people of Denham and the ancient woodlands in Denham Country Park and Colne Valley, there has been destruction to the ancient woodlands and aquifer there. We are at the coalface. I ask that we remember the environmental damage being done.
Mr Dhesi
I thank the hon. Lady. I gave way to her because she is my neighbour and I know she wanted to get those things on the record on behalf of her constituents. I agree with her to the extent that when I last spoke extensively on this matter in Parliament, it was when the Government accepted Labour’s amendments on two key issues: reporting on the impact on our ancient woodland and protecting it, and properly consulting local communities. I hope the Minister is mindful of these two important factors in the continued construction of HS2.
Ultimately, it is those in the villages, towns and cities along the route who best know the environmental and logistical issues HS2 will bring. Prioritising engagement and transparency is the best way to deliver this project. In order to encourage even more people to travel by rail as one of the least polluting mass transport forms, rail should be the most convenient, affordable and connected option. We cannot lose sight of the initial reason for building this project. If we fail to provide these solutions for passengers, they will simply resort to more polluting and convenient forms of travel.
Matt Western
Does my hon. Friend agree that, given the number of Members attending today and the scale of the project, this sort of debate is worthy of the main Chamber and having more time?
Mr Dhesi
I thank my hon. Friend. Yes, I am always happy to engage in a debate in the main Chamber. Given the level of excitement and passion among hon. Members, I think the Government and the Leader of the House should look closely at that.
Just last week, the Rail Delivery Group warned that a further 20% shift from rail to roads would lead to an increase of some 300 million hours of traffic congestion. We cannot allow the pandemic to push us backwards in our plight of decarbonising transport. The impact of returning commuters and building HS2 is wider than just transport, with £30 billion in high street spending that is crucial for keeping businesses open in our towns and city centres. Many businesses and commuters have made crucial plans around the guarantee of HS2 being delivered, and the Government have promised that it will stimulate the economy and rebalance the north-south divide.
However, continued failures of Government to properly commit to the eastern leg to Leeds paints a very different picture. No integrated rail plan, no Northern Powerhouse Rail and no eastern leg—does the Minister think that is good enough? Siemens, Hitachi, Alstom, Aecom, British Steel, Mace, Babcock and many other businesses certainly do not. This week, they noted that
“scaling back the line would have a ‘devastating impact on confidence’ in the industry”
and that
“it is the communities in those regions who will be most let down should the eastern leg not move forward”.
I ask the Minister to address this in his response. The Government’s usual dither and delay will not cut it. The mismanagement of HS2 has left Government contemplating a decision to abandon those promises. Ballooning costs and persistent delays, which have become characteristic of this Government, have hurt communities, leading to some losing their confidence in such a project. That is why I urge the Government and HS2 to get a grip on this.
Although the Labour party stands behind the completion of HS2, that does not mean that constituents’ concerns can be ignored. I hope the Minister has listened today and will provide some concrete reassurance on the environmental, cost and business case for HS2. If we do not commit to it in full, significantly increase capacity in our network and encourage a seismic shift towards rail, I fear net zero may be out of reach and communities will be left behind. We must therefore ensure that the Government deliver on their promises.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Can the Minister ensure that we have a minute at the end for Ms Owatemi to respond to the debate?
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Andrew Stephenson)
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) for opening this debate, and right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions.
I welcome the continued public scrutiny of the high-speed rail programme. I will address some of the key issues raised during this debate, although I probably have only about seven minutes left to reply.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
Unfortunately, I did not get called in the debate, but the Minister already knows my strong opposition to the scheme. I want to press him on the benefit-cost ratio. The Oakervee review said it had already dropped from 2.3 to 1.1, and post pandemic we can expect it to come down even further. Does he agree that we need another review so that we can properly assess the value of the scheme?
Andrew Stephenson
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I will talk about the benefit-cost ratio if I get there in time. The last benefit-cost ratio for the scheme was of course published when the last full business case was published in April 2020. It is worth saying that this is a long-term investment in the future of our country, and we should not base long-term investment decisions on what has been happening over 18 months.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I am one of those who are deeply sceptical about the value for money of this project. I can think of considerable other ways to invest that money that would have a much stronger economic benefit. On the impact of the covid pandemic, has the Minister considered the long-term impact of the growing use of Zoom, electronic communications and so on? Surely any sensible Government would look at the impact of that on business travel, commuter travel and so on as part of this project.
Andrew Stephenson
I thank the right hon. Lady for her point. Of course, the Government are looking at this in a cross-Government way. We are looking at changing working patterns, which have impacts not only on transport investment but on regeneration and a whole range of things. We will say more about our thinking in the coming months. As we said in the Queen’s Speech, we intend to bring forward a western leg Bill. Obviously, it would have to be accompanied by projections for the whole network, not just the western leg, so I hope we will publish more information on that in the very near future.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
I look forward to the Minister publishing more information. I also look forward to the integrated rail plan, which I am keen to see, with recommendations to scrap the Golborne spur leg, which impacts my constituency. It is a £2 billion line that basically goes nowhere. It brings all the pain and no gain to Warrington, so I ask him to prioritise scrapping it.
Andrew Stephenson
My hon. Friends the Members for Warrington South (Andy Carter) and for Leigh (James Grundy) continue to push me on the Golborne spur. That is one of the many decisions that will be taken as part of the integrated rail plan, so I hope to be able to say more about that soon.
Mr Khalid Mahmood
I spoke earlier about my constituent Darren Barnett and his colleagues, who are stuck in a financial straitjacket, both economically and personally. They are not able to move on because HS2 management in Birmingham has not made the funding available. Will the Minister meet them to explore how we can move this issue forward?
Andrew Stephenson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point, and I am happy to meet him to discuss this issue. After doing the land and property review shortly after I became a Minister, I looked at a number of these tricky cases. I now review all the cases that are brought to my attention by right hon. and hon. Members on a fortnightly basis. I am more than happy to add that case to the list and meet him personally to see whether we can find a way forward.
Jason McCartney
I thank the Minister for coming to Marsden in my constituency to meet constituents. It is on the TransPennine route. Can we get rid of a myth this evening? Investment in HS2 is not instead of but as well as upgrading the TransPennine route, as well as Northern Powerhouse Rail and local infrastructure. We will get all the benefits only if the eastern leg is delivered and all those investments are made. That would improve jobs, connectivity and the environment, and it is good for our constituents.
Andrew Stephenson
I agree with my hon. Friend. I have about two minutes left, so I will say that HS2 is going full steam ahead. It is a railway of which we hope the country can be proud for many generations to come. Construction has now begun in earnest, with more than 300 active construction sites along the line of route from Birmingham to London. This year, we have achieved significant milestones, and momentum behind the project is growing. Today, we announced that HS2 is now supporting more than 20,000 jobs, just one year since the Prime Minister declared the formal start of construction of the Birmingham to London stretch of the route. This year, we will celebrate many brilliant feats of engineering, including the start of tunnelling under the Chilterns, with our two tunnel-boring machines having now tunnelled 1.5 km underground.
Many Members have expressed various concerns, and I am more than happy to meet them after the debate. I know that HS2 is a project that inspires strong feelings on all sides, as all major infrastructure projects do. All right hon. and hon. Members present know that the Government carefully considered the merits of proceeding with HS2, which has almost certainly been subject to more parliamentary scrutiny than any other infrastructure project. Our firm conclusion was that HS2 should go ahead, and it is now progressing, as I have outlined. In setting out the decision to proceed, we made a clear commitment to draw a line under past problems. This is a once-in-a-generation major infrastructure project that will shape this country for well over 100 years, showcasing our skills in engineering and construction.
Many comments have been made during the debate. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright) made a very reasonable speech, and I look forward to visiting his constituency next week. The hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) raised her concerns about regeneration plans around York station. I heard about those plans when I visited the National Railway Museum, and I am more than happy to meet her to talk in more depth about them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) has been consistent in his opposition to HS2. I was grateful that he recently took the time to introduce me to some of his councillors and residents. The hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Sarah Green) raised her concerns about community engagement, aquifer and bentonite. Let me be clear that the continued supply of high-quality drinking water from the Chilterns aquifer is a high priority. I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) made clear his opposition to HS2, but also his desire to see changes to phase 2a. I am happy to continue to engage with him on the changes that he would like to see. The hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) made some valid points about the opposition that infrastructure projects have always attracted over the years, and I thank him for his support on pushing ahead. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) raised some concerns on behalf of his constituents, as he has been doing consistently since he was elected. I look forward to continuing to work with him to mitigate those impacts.
Esther McVey
For the questions that the Minister could not answer, will he write with full answers?
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Sincere apologies to everyone who was not called because of the shortness of time, as Ms McVey has pointed out. I call Ms Owatemi to conclude the debate.
Taiwo Owatemi
Thank you, Mr Mundell. I thank everyone for participating in such an important debate. What we have heard reflects how difficult it has been to strike a balance between achieving high-speed rail and managing that ambition in a genuinely clean, green and cost-effective way. Indeed, I echo the concerns raised by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and many others about the devastating environmental impact that HS2 is having, with more than 15 hectares already utterly destroyed.
I also highlight the concerns raised by the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) about the environmental and economic issues associated with the Wendover section of HS2. The offhand rejection of the Wendover tunnel proposal has demonstrated the need for the Government to actually commit to an independent investigation into a more truly environmentally friendly and cost-efficient mechanism for building sections of the railway should its construction continue.
I look forward to seeing the steps that the Government take in response to the points that have been raised today. I thank colleagues for joining me in the debate, and I thank you, Mr Mundell, for chairing it.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered e-petition 563380, relating to HS2.
Written Statements
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Contingencies Fund Advance: Live Events Reinsurance Scheme
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Digital and Culture (Caroline Dinenage)
I am tabling this statement for the benefit of all Members of this House to give notice of a Contingencies Fund advance for the live events reinsurance scheme.
A requirement for a Contingencies Fund advance has arisen due to the need for the Government to partner with the insurance industry to deliver a live events reinsurance scheme.
The scheme will support live events across the country—such as live music shows, music festivals, sporting and business events—that are at risk of being halted or delayed due to an inability to obtain this insurance. Her Majesty’s Government are partnering with insurers to offer a cost indemnification insurance scheme which will make cover available against the cancellation, postponement, relocation or abandonment of events due to new UK civil authority restrictions in response to covid-19. Cover will be available to purchase alongside standard commercial events insurance for an additional premium. The duration of the cover will be from September 2021 to 30 September 2022, with a review in the first half of 2022.
Parliamentary approval for additional resources of £14,000,000 for this new expenditure will be sought in a supplementary estimate for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Pending that approval, urgent expenditure estimated at £14,000,000 will be met by repayable cash advances from the Contingencies Fund.
This scheme will support the UK’s economic recovery from the covid-19 crisis by giving events the confidence they need to plan for the future, whilst also ensuring that we deliver value for money for taxpayers.
[HCWS283]
Contingent Liabilities: Live Events Reinsurance Scheme
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Digital and Culture (Caroline Dinenage)
I am tabling this statement for the benefit of all Members of this House to bring to their attention the Departmental Minute issued today that provides the House with notice of a contingent liability created by my Department. This is in relation to the live events reinsurance scheme.
The live events reinsurance scheme was announced by the Government on 5 August 2021 and will support live events across the country—such as live music shows, music festivals, sporting and business events—that are at risk of being halted or delayed due to an inability to obtain this insurance. Her Majesty’s Government are partnering with insurers to offer a cost indemnification insurance scheme which will make cover available against the cancellation, postponement, relocation or abandonment of events due to new UK civil authority restrictions in response to covid-19. Cover will be available to purchase alongside standard commercial events insurance for an additional premium. The duration of the cover will be from September 2021 to 30 September 2022.
Based on the risk share set out and the initial appetite put forward by insurers, the scheme will create £750 million of cover at any one time, although this could increase if there is market demand and insurer willingness to offer more cover. The scheme’s lifetime exposure is unlimited. To retain control over the fiscal risk, Government have retained the right to stop writing new cover at any time, built in a review point in the first half of 2022 and are requiring any individual insurer to seek explicit permission ahead of exceeding a net exposure of £400 million or more.
It is normal when reporting contingent liabilities to provide 14 working days’ notice before the liability is incurred. There is an exception in cases of special urgency. This is one such occasion. In order to ensure that event organisers have the confidence to plan ahead it is important that we launch this scheme in early September.
A copy of the Departmental Minute is being placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
[HCWS284]
Grand Committee
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Arrangement of Business
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
My Lords, welcome to the Grand Committee—a plastic-free Grand Committee for the first time in a long time. If there is a Division in the Chamber, the Committee will adjourn for five minutes.
Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland (EUC Report)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Earl of Kinnoull
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee The Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland (9th Report, Session 2019–21, HL Paper 66).
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, the protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland has never been far from the news since it was agreed. Activity over just the last few days shows how timely today’s debate is. The encouraging thing is that dialogue is seen by all as the correct route forward. The two reports provide analysis of the protocol approximately seven months before and seven months after it came into effect on 1 January this year. I will introduce the first report, undertaken by the former European Union Select Committee, which I chaired. My noble friend Lord Jay of Ewelme will introduce the second report, which was undertaken by the new Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland.
I thank the Chief Whip for bringing forward this debate at this time. I also most warmly thank the staff of all the committees concerned. I particularly thank Chris Johnson, who was the principal clerk at all the relevant times, and Stuart Stoner, who has the unique distinction of being the clerk to both committees when the reports were settled.
The European Union Committee’s report on the protocol followed its previous scrutiny of the revised withdrawal agreement and political declaration negotiated by this Government in October 2019. That report included a much shorter initial analysis of the protocol and was published in January 2020. It was clear to us that, as it was such a technically complex and politically contentious document, further detailed work on the protocol was a necessity.
Our fresh inquiry started in February 2020. There followed a careful process which included discussions on the ground with politicians north and south, business leaders and academic experts. The Government published a Command Paper on 20 May on their approach to the protocol, which we took into account. We published our report on 1 June 2020. The report was intended to be a reasonably complete guide to the protocol on which any interested party could rely, with analysis of the protocol, its recitals, its 19 articles and seven annexes. In our conclusions and recommendations, we highlighted the main elements of the protocol, the tensions and contradictions at its heart and the “many unanswered questions” about its operation that remained outstanding. The government response of August 2020 was commendably on time and addressed some of the issues we had raised but was less helpful on many others, on which the Government were simply silent.
A moment ago, I said “tensions and contradictions” because there is not only the matter of the recitals at the front of the protocol and how they relate to the true construction of the articles, and especially their implementation, but also the matter within the articles themselves. In particular, there is an inherent tension, or perhaps an apparent contradiction between and among, Articles 4, 5 and 6. Article 4 states:
“Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom”.
This is reinforced by Article 6, which states:
“Nothing in this Protocol shall prevent the United Kingdom from ensuring unfettered market access for goods moving from Northern Ireland to other parts of the United Kingdom's internal market.”
However, these are offset by Article 5, which applies the entirety of EU customs legislation, including the union customs code, to Northern Ireland. Article 5 thus retains a single regulatory zone for goods on the island of Ireland, achieving the key aim of avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Yet this requires the imposition of new customs processes and regulatory checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
The first paragraph of our summary noted that:
“On the one hand, the UK Government has been unable to explain precisely or consistently what it agreed with the EU. On the other … the EU’s insistence that ‘the rules are the rules’ has left Northern Ireland businesses fearing that there will be no flexibility to apply the Protocol proportionately. This has led to a diminution of trust between the two sides, with the upshot”—
in the words of a witness—
“that Northern Ireland has felt like ‘a pawn in the game’.”
Those words date from 1 June 2020 and events since then, notably in the last few days, suggest that the drafting has withstood the test of time. A good number of the issues that we highlighted in June 2020 remain matters of contention today. Indeed, the report anticipated many of the concerns set out over a year later in the Government’s Command Paper, Northern Ireland Protocol—Next Steps, published on 21 July this year. There are many potential illustrations of this point. To pick just two, in paragraph 25 of our report we said:
“The Protocol must ultimately be viewed through the lens of the peace process, and therefore judged by the impact it has on the people, communities and economic prosperity of Northern Ireland and Ireland.”
The first of a few questions for the Minister is: will he confirm whether or not he agrees with that assertion?
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, I was just drawing the Committee’s attention to a couple of paragraphs in our report in which we referred to issues that we felt were most important in 2020, and which are still current today. The second of my two examples is in paragraph 91:
“There is a real danger that businesses based in Great Britain could conclude that it is economically unviable to continue to operate in Northern Ireland … thus undermining Northern Ireland’s economic model, its future prosperity and, potentially, its political stability.”
Perhaps the Minister might comment on that as well.
Chapter 12 of our report concerned the governance of the protocol. This is in three layers: the Joint Committee, which sits at the top of the withdrawal agreement; a specialised committee on Northern Ireland; and the joint consultative working group. Much of the detail of how the protocol should operate lies within these very powerful bodies. The Joint Committee, after all, has even the power to alter the withdrawal agreement itself. We were concerned in June of last year that it was not meeting and beginning to crack through the many matters of implementation detail. Indeed, the Minister has answered more than once at the Dispatch Box questions from me on this topic. Perhaps he might give us an update as to the recent and currently planned meetings of these bodies and their current workstreams.
In our final conclusion, we said:
“it is incumbent on all parties, including the UK Government, the EU, the Irish Government, and the political parties in Northern Ireland, after the divisions of the past four years, to work in a common endeavour to prioritise and urgently address the interests, stability and prosperity of the people and communities of Northern Ireland. As we concluded in our 2016 report, anything less would diminish the efforts of all those who have worked so hard for peace and good relations across these islands.”
These issues will be resolved only by dialogue in a spirit of trust. My final question to the Minister is therefore this: in the light of the publication of the Government’s July 2021 Command Paper and the further extension of the grace periods announced last week, what steps is he taking to ensure that the ongoing talks with the EU will take place in such an atmosphere of co-operation and trust, above all putting the interests of the people of Northern Ireland first?
Our report highlighted many other issues, and I am sure we will hear about many of them. In particular, it highlighted the vital importance of parliamentary scrutiny of the operation of the protocol. I was therefore delighted when, in December 2020, the Liaison Committee of this House agreed that the new European Affairs Committee, which I chair, should appoint a dedicated committee on the protocol. At this point, I will pass the baton to the Chair of that committee, my noble friend Lord Jay of Ewelme, to introduce his own report.
Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend the Earl of Kinnoull. The appointment of a dedicated sub-committee on the protocol was a welcome and important step, and it is an honour to chair it. Its appointment has enabled the House to take advantage of a formidable range of experience in Northern Ireland affairs in your Lordships’ House, much of which is around us today. I am delighted that many members of the committee will be speaking in this afternoon’s debate.
The sub-committee’s membership includes strong and divergent views, both on the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and on the protocol itself, yet we were united in our determination to agree a report unanimously and by consensus. We did not consider that our task was to argue for or against the protocol itself, but rather to scrutinise its operation in an objective and evidence-based manner. That is what we have tried to do, and we hope that that gives added force to our conclusions.
The report takes account of evidence given to the sub-committee by the Minister. We were very grateful to hear from him, and we trust that he will be willing to appear before us again in the future. The report also takes account of oral and written evidence from business, community and civil society representatives, political parties in Northern Ireland, academic and political experts, and the Irish and EU ambassadors in the UK.
The report is billed as an introductory report by the protocol committee, which first met on 21 April. It endorses the six key elements of the committee’s remit, as set out in the Liaison Committee report: document-based scrutiny of new or amended EU legislation within the scope of the protocol; scrutiny of the implications of relevant domestic UK legislation and policy for Northern Ireland; scrutiny of the Northern Ireland-related work of the governance bodies established under the UK/EU withdrawal agreement; monitoring the protocol’s political and socioeconomic impact on Northern Ireland; reviewing the impact of Brexit and the protocol on the UK/Irish bilateral relationship; and developing interparliamentary dialogue in relation to the protocol, including with the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Irish Oireachtas.
I emphasise in particular the importance of the committee’s scrutiny of EU legislation as it applies to Northern Ireland. We are no longer able to examine draft legislation round the EU’s council table, so parliamentary scrutiny of the legislation that will affect Northern Ireland really matters. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, for recognising the importance of comprehensive and comprehensible explanatory memoranda.
Chapter 2 gives an account of the negotiation and implementation of the protocol and of developments since it came into force on 1 January. The committee identified five interlocking problems or failures by the Government or the EU that have contributed to the tensions that have arisen: lack of transparency about what was agreed; lack of readiness, notwithstanding the best efforts of business, for the protocol’s provisions to be implemented; lack of balance and understanding of the protocol’s impact, in particular on Northern Ireland’s relationship with the rest of the UK; lack of flexibility in the application of the protocol; and a lack of trust between the two sides.
Chapter 3 sets out the economic impact of the protocol. The initial negative impact of the protocol in the first weeks of its operation had many causes and was more limited in scope than some media reports would have us believe, but businesses were undoubtedly hindered by the lack of clarity in advance about the protocol’s operation. The long-term impact of the protocol on trade flows is not yet clear, but there are early signs of a growth in north/south trade. On the other hand, businesses told us of repetitive and disproportionate new logistical processes for goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. We heard serious concerns about the impact of the expiry of the grace periods and the absence of mitigating measures, and fears that businesses in Great Britain will withdraw from the Northern Ireland market because of the actual or perceived administrative burden of the protocol. Yet we also identified potential economic benefits under the protocol, given Northern Ireland’s unique access to both the UK and the EU single markets, including as a destination for foreign investment. However, political stability is a prerequisite if such benefits are to be fully recognised.
Chapter 4 sets out the political and social impact of the protocol. We acknowledge the destabilising impact of first Brexit and then the protocol on the political situation in Northern Ireland and on the delicate equilibrium encapsulated in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement as questions of borders and identity have once more come to the fore. We heard about the concerns of the unionist and loyalist communities that Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom has been undermined by the protocol. Yet the unrest and sense of alienation in loyalist communities has several deep-seated causes, and there are also deep concerns over the democratic deficit at the heart of the protocol whereby significant aspects of EU law apply to Northern Ireland without its consent. While that deficit can be mitigated, it cannot be eliminated. This is a difficult issue, to which the committee will return later in the autumn. We also stress the importance of meaningful engagement by both the UK and the EU with the people and communities of Northern Ireland, including women and young people who have felt sidelined in discussions so far.
Chapter 5 of our report considers mitigations and solutions. We called on the UK and the EU, in a renewed spirit of urgency, partnership and trust, to agree practical solutions to ensure the proportionate application of the protocol in order to meet the commitment that it should impact as little as possible on the everyday life of communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. Business leaders and others proposed over 20 practical mitigations, including a UK-EU SPS veterinary agreement. We also called for measures to maximise Northern Ireland’s influence both within the UK and with the EU, and stressed the key roles to be played by the Northern Ireland Executive and the intergovernmental institutions established under the Belfast/Good Friday agreement.
Some witnesses argued that the disruptive effects seen since the protocol came into force already justify the use of the safeguarding mechanism in Article 16. Others argue that any unilateral action by either side had destabilising political and economic consequences. In any event, Article 16 is not a means to abandon the protocol, and is a measure underpinned by an obligation to continue dialogue to resolve the issues of concern. It would surely, therefore, be preferable for both the EU and the UK to seek to identify mutually acceptable solutions.
Our report also acknowledged the principled opposition of many in the unionist and loyalist communities to the protocol and the alternatives that some of them have put forward; yet, for many nationalists and republicans, the protocol is a necessary and the only means to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. We stressed that the UK and the EU had an obligation both to consider alternatives and to work together to seek resolutions within the protocol.
Our report was agreed a matter of hours after the Government’s Command Paper was published on 21 July. It does not therefore take account of the Government’s specific proposals. The committee’s intention is to scrutinise the Command Paper and the EU’s response in the coming weeks as talks between the two sides continue and, we hope, make progress. In that context, I note the Minister’s announcement last week that the current arrangements for the protocol will continue and that the grace periods will be rolled over, and the European Commission’s response that no new infringement procedures will be opened for now. We all hope that this opens the way for constructive discussions between the UK and the EU, but the gap between the two sides remains large. The cliff edge has, if you like, been replaced by a slippery slope.
What updates can the Minister give us today on the discussions that have taken place since the Command Paper was published? How long can those discussions realistically continue? What assurance can he provide that the opportunity that this breathing space has provided will not be wasted and that both sides will explore the room for compromise that will be necessary if agreement is to be reached?
I finish by reiterating the final conclusion of our report:
“addressing the issues of conflicting identity that first Brexit, and then the Protocol, have brought to the fore seems for the moment an insoluble problem. That was also true of the political situation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. But through a slow and painstaking process led by political leaders in Northern Ireland and successive governments in London and Dublin, the peace process took root and flourished, leading to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent steps towards a power-sharing arrangement … This process took time, patience, dialogue, and most of all trust. The same is true in addressing the problems that Brexit and the Protocol present for Northern Ireland. There is therefore an urgent imperative for all sides to make concerted efforts to build trust by recommitting themselves to that process of dialogue, repairing the damage caused to relations across these islands during the past five years, in the interests, as the Protocol rightly acknowledges, of communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland.”
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
My Lords, as a member of both the former EU Committee of this House and the current European Affairs Committee, I want to start by thanking not just my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, who has led both committees with skilful even-handedness and good humour but, as he did, the staff of both committees. Their professionalism and excellent work are on show in these two reports, particularly over a period as challenging as that experienced since the onset of the pandemic, and testify to the calibre of those on whom we rely so much here in this House.
The core insight of the June 2020 report was simple: that there is a clear contradiction between the protocol’s rule that EU customs legislation applies in its entirety to Northern Ireland, and the Government’s long-standing and continuing claim that the protocol, which they co-authored, would guarantee “unfettered market access” for goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. It is a contradiction between the reality of a signed treaty and the political claims that continue to accompany it. The contradiction is still worth noting, not to re-run the Brexit debate nor to score points, but because only by understanding that it is a contradiction and that trade flows both ways between Northern Ireland and Great Britain cannot remain unaffected or unchanged by adherence to the protocol will we be able to distinguish real, lasting solutions to the current impasse from illusory solutions.
Once we understand the fundamental nature of the protocol in that respect, a few things about the way forward become clear. First, the problems of the moment are not merely differences of interpretation or implementation; they are more fundamental, and the ultimate compromises required on all sides to achieve a durable solution will be correspondingly greater. Secondly, there is no solution to the problem that can be engineered by simply dismantling the protocol. It was an essential pillar of the Brexit agreement for both the EU and the UK sides, in complex ways. Simply scrapping the protocol would have knock-on consequences for Northern Ireland, the UK and the EU, and for stability, democracy, borders and trade, that would make things considerably worse for all rather than better. Thirdly, it becomes clear that the current phase of delicately fudging the protocol with a litany of grace periods subject to shifting deadlines offers short-term respite but cannot provide a way out of the impasse.
The truth is that the multiple problems of the operation of the protocol, which the report of the sub-committee of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, has done such an excellent job of conveying, did not arise out of the blue during the implementation phase; they were baked into the treaty the Government signed. The Government know this to be the case, as do Northern Irish unionists, whose opposition to the Brexit deal was crystal clear from the outset and who now oppose the protocol for the same reasons they opposed it before it came into operation.
The protocol made Brexit technically doable by accepting rules that changed the commercial arrangements between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. That is the nature of the beast to some significant extent, whatever tweaks to the protocol might be achieved in the months or years ahead by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and his team. I make this point because it is important for a Government demanding changes to the protocol, as our Government have done now for some months, to be candid and transparent about what the true negotiating space is. I am not clear that that is the case at the moment.
Of course, both the EU and the UK Government need to shoulder responsibility for some aspects of the current state we are in. The EU has clearly acted inflexibly in some respects. In particular, as the July 2021 report shows, the supplementary customs declarations required for moving goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland are not suited to the regional supply chains where the risk of goods moving into the EU single market is low, but the problems of the UK Government’s position are more serious, because they continue publicly to demand “interpretive” changes to the protocol which are in fact substantive alterations to it. Their rhetoric, such as that on unfettered access, continues to fuel unrealistic notions that a revision of the protocol can get rid of all commercial restrictions on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Yes, more flexibility on the part of the EU is required, but getting rid of contradictory ambitions is a more pressing requirement on the part of the UK Government.
In the short term, I am sure that Members across the House will welcome the idea of grace periods on existing terms of trade being extended to allow more time for discussion on the timetable for introducing the protocol’s provisions. From the standpoint of stability, it is obviously far from optimal to have unilaterally declared grace periods that keep getting extended. However, given the position in which we find ourselves—the DUP withdrawing from North/South Ministerial Council, and the threat possibly to withdraw in the near future from the power-sharing structures altogether —the extension of grace periods as a temporary measure last week by the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, was a necessary move, and one that looked to be co-ordinated, at least in some tacit way, with the European Union.
However, extending grace periods on SPS rules, agri-food certification, customs declaration arrangements and so on is not a long-term way out of the current mess. Indeed, while, in the short term, the greater risk is that differences over the protocol threaten peace and devolved power-sharing arrangements inside Northern Ireland, the longer-term danger is that the fudges required to delay the protocol and avert these threats never get unblocked—a situation in which the temporary fixes become permanent simply because the politics do not exist to go any further. It is a world in which grace periods, extended serially, would become the norm—governance by grace periods, if you like.
There may be a temptation for many to think that this would not be such a bad place for Northern Ireland to be in eventually; after all, the world is full of impasses with interim arrangements whose fundamentals never get sorted, because political moves beyond the interim are unmanageable. It would be a mistake, however, to contemplate this as a durable future state of affairs for Northern Ireland, in part because the UK signed an international treaty, of which the protocol was a key aspect. Avoiding its implementation as part of a long-term political strategy would do immense damage to the UK internationally. More importantly, it would be a very bad outcome for Northern Ireland. In the medium term, investment in Northern Ireland requires the economic, institutional and political certainty that continuously extended short-term grace periods just cannot provide. It is also crucial for Northern Ireland, especially given its history and the intricate web of bespoke institutions, rules and understandings on which the Belfast agreement was built, that the arrangements on which economic and social life depend continue to enjoy basic consent. That is not the case at the moment, but it has to be an ambition if the protocol is to enjoy long-term confidence.
We already know something about what the solution to the protocol might look like: it will be messy, complex and please no purist on any side. What we do not know is whether those party to bringing this solution about will have the political courage to make the compromises required. However, we do know something about the political conditions that will be conducive to a successful outcome. They will require the Government to reject the dangerous idea, suggested by some on their Back Benches, that the protocol can be abandoned without thereby creating serious consequences for stability, democracy and prosperity in Northern Ireland. They will require those in Northern Ireland who are passionate about the union to work within, rather than outside, the multiple structures established since the Belfast agreement. They will also require the EU to seek resolution through long, patient negotiation rather than through taking legal action. I hope we can all agree that, whatever our party and whatever our view on Brexit, we will do whatever we can to make all those conditions come to pass.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, I too congratulate both the European Union Committee and the new Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland on producing two excellent, balanced and detailed reports. I also add my thanks to the staff, not least Christopher Johnson and Stuart Stoner, for the work they continually do on these committees.
I had the privilege of serving on the EU Committee for four years with the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and, indeed, went on an excellent fact-finding visit to Dublin, Belfast and Derry/Londonderry shortly after the referendum. The European Affairs Committee and its sub-committees do an extremely important job and have produced some excellent and highly detailed reports since Brexit. It is perhaps a shame that the Government do not always pay quite as much attention to their findings as I believe they should. It is also testimony to the finely tuned diplomatic skills of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, that he has managed to produce such a balanced report from what we might call a diverse membership with such a wide cross-section of views.
Back in December 2016, the House of Lords European Union Committee published a report on UK-Irish relations following Brexit, highlighting the potential issues that would be faced politically and economically by the people on both sides of the border on the island of Ireland. That report also regretted that there was not a more honest debate about these issues during the referendum campaign.
In debating the current post-Brexit situation in Northern Ireland, it is hard not to repeat the simple fact that the Government promised three fundamentally incompatible things: no north-south border, no east-west border and their insistence on their red line that we had to leave both the single market and the customs union. It is also worth recalling that the Northern Ireland protocol we are debating today is the Government’s own policy and that it was their choice to sign up to it in order to “get Brexit done”. However, to coin a phrase, we are where we are. It is equally important to try to find a way to move the debate forward.
As other noble Lords have already indicated, quite a lot has happened since both the committee reports we are debating today were published—not least the publication in July of the Government’s own Command Paper on the protocol. At the end of last week, we also had Commission Vice-President Šefčovič’s visit to Northern Ireland, where there were some very welcome changes of tone.
I will concentrate my remarks this afternoon on three areas raised by the sub-committee’s introductory report. The first point is the very urgent need to reach agreement on a UK-EU SPS/veterinary agreement. As paragraph 246 of the introductory report states,
“an SPS/veterinary agreement of any form is manifestly in the interests of Northern Ireland”.
Does the Minister agree with the report that not to reach such an agreement, when it would make such a positive difference to the lives of people in Northern Ireland, would indicate that the Government consider regulatory sovereignty a higher priority than political and economic stability in Northern Ireland? Can he further say whether there are areas he may be willing to compromise on to reach such an agreement?
The second theme that I would like to highlight from the report—already raised by the noble Lord, Lord Jay—is trust. Paragraphs 317 and 318 highlight the importance of the dialogue and political leadership over several Governments and many years that helped bring about the Good Friday/Belfast agreement. That dialogue, trust and constructive leadership have sadly been lacking in the last five years since Brexit.
There was a welcome change of tone, as I have referred to already, from the European Commission Vice-President last week, when Mr Šefčovič ended his visit by saying that the EU was not looking for a political victory in Northern Ireland. I hope that the Government will adopt a similar tone. The business community and the majority of the wider community in Northern Ireland want certainty and solutions rather than dialled-up rhetoric. For there to be trust, there has to be a level of openness and transparency that has been very much lacking up until now.
In an extremely thoughtful article in response to the publication of the Government’s Command Paper in July, Professor Katy Hayward from Queen’s University highlighted some of the political consequences in the months ahead—in particular, that the protocol will inevitably feature heavily in next year’s Assembly elections. In their dialogue and negotiations over the next few months, I hope the Government will factor in the potential impact of these negotiations, as well as their tone, on the forthcoming Assembly elections. The Government’s July Command Paper highlights that the lack of unionist and loyalist buy-in has brought tension into the Executive and Assembly, but the Government never publicly acknowledge that there is a parallel lack of buy-in to the whole Brexit process from the majority of Northern Ireland voters.
My third and final point follows on from this: that is, the need for enhanced political dialogue and inclusion at all levels. As paragraph 205 rightly states:
“There is a widespread perception that the Protocol was imposed on Northern Ireland without meaningful engagement with its communities, and without a full and transparent explanation of the impact it would have.”
There has also been extremely little done to sell the potential positive benefits of the protocol for Northern Ireland, with its unique access to both EU and British markets. Can the Minister say whether the Government intend to provide an information campaign on these potential benefits and how they plan to improve dialogue with all sectors in Northern Ireland, including civil society? As we approach the next stages of negotiations ahead of the end of the various grace periods in the weeks and months ahead, will the Minister give very serious consideration to the proposals contained in paragraph 269, which sets down some very constructive suggestions for strengthening Northern Ireland’s influence within both the UK and the EU?
Lord Caine (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this important debate today, and a privilege to serve on the European Affairs Committee’s Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland Sub-Committee, so expertly chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme. Our committee, as has been said, brings together a wealth of experience on Northern Ireland including three former Ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive, a former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and my own rather more modest contribution as a special adviser for some 13 years. We not only represent all strands of opinion in this House, but also the main unionist and nationalist traditions in Northern Ireland. For the avoidance of doubt, while I strongly associate myself with the former, I will always value and deeply respect the latter. The fact, therefore, that our committee was able to produce a unanimous report does, I believe, give it a significant weight, and I trust that it will be regarded as a serious and well-informed contribution to this vexed issue of the Northern Ireland protocol.
I played absolutely no part at all in the negotiation of the current version of the protocol, as my time in the Northern Ireland Office came to an end on 24 July 2019, at the time Mrs May relinquished office. I did, however, have what might be described as a walk-on part in some of the discussions that formed the backdrop to the previous version of the protocol. I would like to share a couple of thoughts on that today which I believe are still relevant.
First, it always seemed to me that in that crucial period after the triggering of Article 50 and in the run-up to what became the joint report of 8 December 2017, the UK Government far too readily accepted the EU-Irish interpretation of what was required to protect the single market, prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland and preserve the Belfast agreement in all its parts. It did so, I regret to say, with very little involvement of the department of state responsible for Northern Ireland. Indeed, the first time most of us saw the draft of the joint report was on the morning of Monday 4 December 2017, while the Prime Minister was on the train to Brussels to finalise it.
Our Democratic Unionist confidence and supply partners had been given an oral briefing the night before—but, crucially, no text—on the basis of which, Mrs May’s political advisers assured her that everything was fine. Well, it took little more than a few seconds to glance at the text to see that this could not possibly be the case. We were frankly shocked at what we saw. On seeing it, even the then Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office rushed into the Secretary of State’s office and said, “I don’t see how the DUP could possibly agree to this”, at which point I added, “I don’t see how the Secretary of State and I can possibly agree to this”. At a meeting the following day in the Cabinet Room, I stated that the document had every hallmark of having been drafted in Dublin, at which point one very, very senior official replied, “That’s because it largely was”.
As a result, as is well known, Mrs May was forced to return from Brussels that day, and there then ensued four days and late nights of discussions with the DUP, including my noble friend Lord Dodds of Duncairn, and the Commission in an attempt to salvage the situation and keep the Government together. In classic EU negotiating fashion, we were unable to remove any of the agreed text and therefore had to resort to adding language, including paragraph 50, on unfettered access, to counter paragraph 49, which contained the dreaded backstop, in an attempt to come up with something we could live with. Early on the Friday morning, Mrs May did indeed fly to Brussels and sign the joint report. Regrettably, the die had been cast and whatever way we tried to present the situation, the principle that Northern Ireland would be treated separately from the rest of the United Kingdom had been conceded. Thereafter, the debate was about how that separate treatment might manifest itself. To me, this was a fundamental mistake that has dogged us ever since.
My second, briefer, point concerns the EU, which, for whatever reason, seems to see Northern Ireland through predominantly nationalist eyes and the 1998 agreement almost exclusively through strand 2, the north-south relationship, with everything else subordinate to that. This was made very clear to me at a meeting with the apparently now Eurosceptic Monsieur Barnier in Brussels in June 2018. To my astonishment, I found myself having to explain to him that the 1998 agreement did not establish Northern Ireland as some kind of hybrid state—half in and half out of the UK—that the only choice in the agreement is full membership of the United Kingdom or a united Ireland, and that by disregarding the views of the pro-union majority, he risked undermining the very stability ushered in by the agreement that he was purporting to uphold. At that point he rather bizarrely accused me of wanting no deal, to which I had to reply that, as a remain voter in the referendum, I wanted to leave in good order, consistent with the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom. It was not a very happy encounter, but it did underline the apparent unwillingness of the Commission to consider all strands of the 1998 agreement equally.
As is frequently said in Northern Ireland, and as was just repeated by the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, “we are where we are”. To paraphrase Burke, we need to confront the world as it is, rather than how we would like it to be. For my part, I do not doubt the intentions of the Prime Minister and my noble friend the Minister in agreeing the protocol in good faith, and I do not for a second underestimate the near-impossibility of the predicament they found themselves in in the autumn of 2019. I also strongly supported the commitments around unfettered access as set out in the Northern Ireland Conservative manifesto at the 2019 general election, sections of which I drafted. But what is abundantly clear is that, however well-intentioned the protocol is, in its current form it is simply not working, and our report contains many examples to support that view. It has disrupted trade, damaged businesses, hit consumers and contributed to growing political instability in Northern Ireland. It has to change fundamentally, and in this respect I warmly welcome the Government’s Command Paper published in July and the approach of my noble friend.
Let me conclude with a few thoughts. We have been told throughout that checks are an essential part of protecting the EU single market and, as a rules-based construct, the EU’s position is one we all respect. However, it seems to many of us that what has been insisted upon is wholly disproportionate to the actual risk. Leaving aside the utter absurdity of having to check products going from Great Britain to supermarkets in Northern Ireland owned by retailers who have no stores outside of the United Kingdom, it has always seemed to me that the notion of using Northern Ireland to flood the EU single market with illegal produce is somewhat exaggerated when one considers the logistical and transportation challenges involved. To make any money, one would have to be doing it on such a grand scale that it would quickly and easily be detectable by any law enforcement or intelligence agency, of which we still have an extensive capability within Northern Ireland.
Therefore, while I accept that some checks might be necessary, they should only be proportionate to the risk. The Government, our committee and others, including both the Democratic Unionists and the Ulster Unionists, have set out positive and constructive proposals as to how such checks can be mitigated. After all, the EU has obligations under the laws of international trade and treaties it has signed to adopt a proportionate approach to border-related checks and control. It accepts in the protocol that it should
“impact as little as possible on the everyday life of communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland”.
I sincerely hope that the EU engages seriously around the alternatives because, as my noble friend and the Prime Minister have both made clear, the current situation is not sustainable; indeed, it is becoming increasingly dangerous. It is no good Maroš Šefčovič insisting in Belfast last week that the protocol is not the problem but the solution. Such a position is regrettably a conflict with reality. Without urgent action and remedy, we now risk rushing headlong into a full-blown political crisis from which the institutions established under the 1998 agreement could take years to recover—if they do at all. It would be a supreme irony if the EU’s theological and dogmatic interpretation of the protocol that it insists is designed to protect the 1998 agreement resulted in the destruction of that agreement; an agreement that a number of members of this Committee, on all sides, have spent many years trying to uphold, myself included.
Common sense, pragmatism, proportionality and an understanding that arrangements that do not command widespread consent across the whole community in Northern Ireland can never work are needed from the EU now—perhaps that common sense and pragmatism which were in such short supply in early 2016 but which, had they been forthcoming, might have prevented us from being in this position in the first place. Of course, addressing overzealous implementation of checks does not deal with some of the more fundamental constitutional and democratic issues thrown up by the protocol, something to which I hope the committee will turn its attention shortly, but it would be a start and I wish my noble friend every success in his endeavours.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, on chairing these committees. Although the principal committee’s report is over a year old, many of the issues that it pointed to on publication have come to pass. It has been an excellent reference document for those of us who are concerned with what is going on and, indeed, anticipated some of the problems. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, can take some pride in the fact that the sub-committee—a pretty diverse bunch—managed to get a unanimous report. We are therefore here to praise him, but perhaps the day will come, on subsequent reports, when we are here to denounce him, so we had better not get too carried away.
There is an interesting and significant point in the fact that people were able to agree this report. It illustrates that you can achieve something. Enough people in this room sat for years trying to negotiate what became the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. As it was possible to sort out some of those problems, which literally dealt with blood and guts, it is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that we can sit down with our European partners and deal with this.
The whole thing was not properly thought through from the beginning and people did not grasp the significance of the relationship that we had built up with the European Union over 40-odd years. I am no spokesperson for the EU and do not believe in its federalist tendencies, but the fact is that this Parliament signed up to every single, solitary thing. In many respects, it did so carelessly. Being on the committee dealing with those matters in the other place was almost like being put in a sin bin. We agreed to things of far-reaching significance, which many in this Parliament did not fully appreciate. We are living with the consequences of that now.
To take a case in point, throughout the reports are many criticisms of the fundamental contradictions that exist in the Government’s position—from the point of the referendum to the present circumstances. I will just illustrate one, which our helpful Library note spells out from the start, in its first sentence:
“Under the terms of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland agreed between the EU and the UK as part of the Withdrawal Agreement, Northern Ireland has a unique status.”
That is the fundamental point: our status has changed. People can huff and puff, but that is a fact. It goes on:
“It is part of the UK’s customs territory but is subject to the EU’s customs code, VAT rules and single market rules for goods … SPS … rules to protect animal … health”,
et cetera. So it has changed. For proof of that, when some people decided to take legal action against the Government and challenge the protocol, what was the Government’s defence? “Oh, but we’ve changed the act of union” was their defence. That is being appealed and it would not be appropriate to comment further on it, but I am just making the point.
In parallel with that, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said in the earlier part of this year that there was no border. When he was interviewed later in the year, before the Summer Recess, he had to concede that it was a comment that had not aged well. It was nonsense when it was made and it is still nonsense. The Government have to be much more realistic about where they are. As a former colleague of mine in local government who made malapropisms from time to time said, the cows are coming home to roost. That is what is happening to us now. All these contradictions are confronting the business community and people who are trying to make a living. We as a country are spending hundreds of millions of pounds on providing mechanisms, through the trader arrangements, to deal with the paperwork and to try to keep businesses going. This is an unsustainable position.
The noble Lord, Lord Jay, on numerous occasions used the word “trust”. We have to have a negotiation. We can call it whatever we like—discussions, chatting to the vice-president, or whatever it is—but we have to sit round the table. The European Union is our nearest and most significant trading partner. Looking at the world in the past few months, one can see the necessity for this. The EU was willing to play a significant part in solving our problems in Northern Ireland from the days of Jacques Delors, who was the first person to agree the funding streams that are still going on, so surely, with that sort of approach, it ought to be possible to get a negotiation going that will deal with the downstream consequences of all this.
Under these rules, we are effectively being treated as a third country. My noble friend Lord Caine was talking about Sainsbury’s sausages, but that is what he meant. What nonsense this is. Our committee was given statistics by Professor Shirlow of the University of Liverpool. He pointed out that trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland is equivalent to 0.0008% of European GDP and that only a very small proportion of that would be at risk of entering the EU single market. People on the island will know immediately if there is any attempt to flood the EU single market with inappropriate goods. My party has called for the law to change—I was delighted to see this in the Command Paper—to make it an offence to use the territory of the United Kingdom to send unregulated goods into the single market. That would send a signal to the EU and our traders that that is not something we will allow.
Other issues in the report and the Command Paper can be used as a strong basis. One thing stands in the way of taking the positives from this. If you are trying to get people to invest in the unique situation of having access to both markets, there is one roadblock, which is the requirement for the Assembly to approve it after four years. If you are going to market something to an inward investor, that is a huge roadblock. That is saying that there is a question mark over the investment before you even get started.
While we have that sort of arrangement, which is not satisfactory anyway, getting any gain or advantage will be hugely challenging. There could be potential, but we also have the democratic deficit. I think that the phrase used during the referendum was of a “vassal state”; well, we are the vassal region. We are taking rules over which we have no say or input whatever. It is a constitutional carbuncle. When my noble friend replies, can he tell me and the Committee on what basis did the Government attempt to establish what consent existed for the protocol? Who indicated consent for the core elements within it? How did they judge that?
What we should now be doing—I hope that our committee addresses this—is to encourage a dialogue, sitting down away from the war that goes on in the press. We are in a difficult period in Europe, with elections coming up for the French president and a new chancellor in Germany. These are important times. As my noble friend said, we risk instability in Belfast if we do not deal with this now. We have to sit down with our colleagues in Europe and settle this.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
Before the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, addresses us, I just let the Committee know that the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria and Lord Bhatia, are not speaking today.
Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure, as a member of the Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, to take part in this debate today, particularly as it is happening physically. This is the first time that I have had the opportunity to speak in Grand Committee in this format. That is not to detract in any way from the excellent work that our staff have done to make our meetings happen virtually and work so well and smoothly in the circumstances, but it is so much better to be able to debate these things in person, in my view. Indeed, for me, it is the first time that I have been able to interact with other members of the committee in this way, so I really welcome that.
I welcome the report and thank both our chair, the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for the work that they have carried out to bring us to this point, as well as our excellent staff, particularly Stuart Stoner. Before I come on to the report, I allude to one aspect of the work of the committee, which is that it also carries out an enormous amount of scrutiny work of legislation, statutory instruments and delegated legislation affecting Northern Ireland. It is just worth putting on record, as the Minister is here, that this is an extremely important part of the committee’s work. Given the lack of any other real role for the Northern Ireland Assembly, the other place or this House in that, it is absolutely essential that we get the widest possible and most generous co-operation from the Government as we carry out our important work.
On the report, I welcome the fact that we have been able to reach a consensus; that is an extremely powerful statement. It was done on the basis that we came to the finalisation of its contents without prejudice to the views that each of us held on the substance of the issue of whether the protocol was a good idea or not. We looked at the factual situation and what could be done so long as the protocol exists. There is a fundamental division, nevertheless, as is reflected in Northern Ireland, on the suitability of the protocol as a matter of principle. There is no shying away from that. My noble friend Lord Caine has gone into some of the background and history and has most helpfully put on the record some of the narrative of what happened in the lead-up to the events of January 2017 and some events since.
The issues at stake in Northern Ireland in terms of trade, sovereignty, the democratic deficit and political stability affect everyone and not just the unionist community. Diversion of trade, obstacles to access to goods at a reasonable price—and to the same range of goods as previously—access to medicines and access to a whole range of manufactured goods for businesses and consumers are issues that affect everyone and not just unionists. It is vital therefore that we address them in the interests of everyone in Northern Ireland.
On the trade aspect, which is looked at mainly in the first report, we have found quite significant disruption. There is no doubt that many firms based in Great Britain, even where there is no technical reason why they cannot bring goods from Britain into Northern Ireland, have just given up on the grounds that it is too much hassle and too much work to get their heads around the processes. It is staggering that, between them, the trader support scheme, the digital assistance scheme, the veterinary arrangements and all the other checks amount to some £560 million of public expenditure. At a time when we are talking about other pressures on public expenditure and the need to introduce measures of taxation to plug the gaps, these are enormous sums of money being spent on administrative schemes that do not produce a single contribution in any shape or form to our economy and our productivity. It is pure bureaucracy.
We have the issue of the diversion of trade. There is reference to increased trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. I urge noble Lords to look at the recent comments of Esmond Birnie, an economist at Ulster University, who says that that needs to be looked at carefully, because it is not necessarily the advantage that people talk about but adds to the costs of business. If it had been advantageous for Northern Ireland businesses to bring goods in through the Irish Republic, they would have been doing it before now, because they are businesspeople and it would have been easier to do so. It must be an added cost.
We have heard it argued that we have the best of both worlds. Yes, one can send goods into the single market of the European Union without checks and restrictions, but one has to be able to get the raw materials and so on into Northern Ireland, mainly from Britain. If we have that problem, the advantages of getting things into the single market are not what they appear at first sight.
So this trade and economic aspect to the protocol is immensely concerning and causing enormous problems. Esmond Birnie has referred to an £850 million per annum detriment to Northern Ireland, which I am sure the committee will want to look at in more detail in future deliberations. However, it is not just the trade aspect; we also have the issue of sovereignty, which other noble Lords have referred to, and the serious issue of the Government’s admission that they have altered the Act of Union 1800 to accommodate the protocol, which is a direct admission that the sovereignty of Northern Ireland and of the United Kingdom has been impacted significantly by the protocol. That cannot be dismissed lightly. The direct application of laws of a foreign jurisdiction on a part of the United Kingdom without any say whatever by anyone in the legislature in Belfast or here at Westminster is quite simply in this day and age totally and utterly unacceptable. The issue of taxation without representation led to cataclysmic and far-reaching consequences previously and it will lead to far-reaching consequences if it is not addressed in the Government’s approach going forward.
Then we have the effect on stability in Northern Ireland, and the Belfast agreement, the St Andrews agreement and subsequent ones. You cannot have a situation where people are saying, as Vice-President Šefčovič was, that the protocol is there to protect the Belfast agreement and is the only way to do so, when in fact the result of its application—without the consent of anyone in Northern Ireland—is to undermine all those agreements and to cause the sort of instability we now see being played out in Belfast. It will have an inevitable consequence. A noble Lord referred earlier to the fact that, if the institutions come down, it will take a long time—as we have found from bitter experience—to get them restored again, and it would be very difficult to suggest how quickly this might occur if it were to happen in this situation.
The Government have produced their Command Paper. I welcome the narrative in it and the very strong commitments made to look at renegotiating Article 13(8) and the principles they have outlined, but I say to the Government that there is urgency to this. Do not forget that on 29 January—this has not been mentioned thus far—the European Union took steps, though thankfully withdrawing from the ultimate step, to instigate and trigger Article 16, undermining at a stroke the whole rationale of the Northern Ireland protocol. That caused enormous impact, not just for the unionist community but throughout Northern Ireland. We are still feeling its reverberations.
When he responds, I urge the Minister to clarify that he notes the urgency of this matter and to give a timescale in which he can come forward with some idea to replace our current arrangements.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I have very little experience of Northern Ireland and am in awe of the expertise in front of me in this Committee. I did work under the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, in his chairmanship of the European Union Committee and on the first of the reports he described today, but I was then exiled for bad behaviour to the icy wastes of the International Agreements Committee. I learned a very great deal from this new report and have very little to add to it, except three glosses.
However, I will first comment on one or two things that have happened since, particularly the July White Paper, the speech the noble Lord, Lord Frost, made in Oxford on 4 September, Vice-President’s Šefčovič’s speech the other day and the statement at the weekend from Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. I should say at the outset that I too dislike the protocol intensely. Like the previous Prime Minister and the present one, I thought that a customs frontier inside a state was something no Prime Minister could possibly accept. I was a bit surprised when the present Prime Minister enthusiastically signed up for it. But, as the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, memorably said, we are where we are.
I am surprised to see the White Paper attack the protocol so strongly. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson calls for it to be thrown away, but he does not tell us what he thinks should replace it. I must say, in my view, the return of a hard border across the island of Ireland would be a complete disaster, not just for Northern Ireland but for the United Kingdom and its reputation and external relations, particularly with the United States—I used to work there and know about that. The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, at Oxford was more constructive, but only marginally. The core of his attack on the protocol came when he said that
“solutions which involve ‘flexibilities’ within the current rules won’t work for us. The difficulties come from the way the Protocol is constructed, not just the way it is being implemented.”
So why did we agree to it?
I confess I find Mr Šefčovič’s answer rather plausible:
“Everyone around the table understood what these compromises meant in practice,”
he said on 9 September.
“And the implementation of this agreement will continue to require compromise from both sides.”
That is, of course, a central theme of the Committee’s report: the need for both sides—the UK and the EU—to demonstrate greater flexibility in operating the protocol. I agree.
Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is perfectly correct when he says that the protocol could be changed by mutual agreement, as Article 13(8) acknowledges. I suspect that some of our EU friends would be perfectly willing to consider certain of the changes demanded in the White Paper—for example, Article 10 of the protocol, in respect of subsidies in Great Britain. Certain other proposals would plainly never secure mutual agreement—for example, the suggestion that the EU should concede that the application in Northern Ireland of their single market laws should not be under the jurisdiction of their court, as the protocol says, but should be a matter for international arbitration. It seems to me that Mr Šefčovič was again nearer the mark when he said:
“The Protocol is not the problem. On the contrary, it is the only solution we have. Failing to apply it will not make problems disappear.”
Renegotiating it
“would mean instability, uncertainty and unpredictability in Northern Ireland.”
Now for my three glosses on the report. First, I recall from my Foreign Office days how, following the Good Friday agreement and the Belfast treaty, we immediately strengthened inward investment teams in the United States and other diplomatic missions, and it worked: the end of the Troubles, as we saw it. Northern Ireland’s highly educated and efficient workforce made it a very attractive destination for investment. It should be even more attractive, now it is the only place in the world where manufactured goods will circulate freely throughout the EU and the UK—a point the report makes. It is not a point the White Paper makes. Finding the next Bombardier would be much easier if the Government were to stop attacking the protocol.
To me, the most surprising passage in the committee’s report is at paragraph 122, where the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is quoted as, not seeing
“a case for the Government setting out”
the inward investment benefit of the protocol and adding, rather elliptically:
“I do not think it totally makes sense to encourage a situation that generated more of something that is a problem”
I am not absolutely sure I understand exactly what that means, but in my book, inward investment is not a problem and deterring it by encouraging uncertainty and instability is. Do we not owe it to Northern Ireland to do better? Surely, a Government who believe in the market should not be complaining about the relative growth of intra-Irish supply chains and direct trade flows between Northern Ireland and the rest of the single market directly, rather than over the land bridge across Great Britain. Water tends to flow downhill, and the more efficient the Northern Irish economy, the better for the people of Northern Ireland. I believe the Government should start to sell the single market opportunity.
Secondly, I was glad to see that the committee intends to come back to the question of the democratic deficit. For me, that is a central and serious problem. Since Northern Ireland is not represented in Commission, Council or Parliament, ways must be found to ensure that these institutions take account of Northern Irish concerns in the single market laws they write, and Northern Ireland must apply. The report lists a number of ways. For my part, I strongly agree with the suggestion from both the DUP and the UUP that Northern Ireland Ministers must be allowed to play central parts—not merely attending as observers—when the withdrawal agreement Joint Committee considers EU laws that would apply in Northern Ireland. I also believe the Dublin Government could help. I have long been impressed by the pleas from the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for greater use of the north-south institutions created by the Belfast treaty. I was very sorry to see Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s threat to boycott them. I think that would be a serious self-inflicted wound.
My additional suggestion would be to consider the precedent of the informal arrangements the EU makes to inform acceding states about laws that will apply to them on or shortly after accession. I was in COREPER and saw ambassadors from non-EU states sitting in on our debates, in working groups, before their countries joined the European Union. Such arrangements might be hard to negotiate, but we should be trying. Something similar, specific to Northern Ireland and to single market laws, might be possible. It would be completely outside the treaties and so would depend on trust and good will.
This brings me to my final point. For me, the sub-committee’s key finding is at paragraph 223, where it concludes:
“in order to maximise the prospect of the EU taking a flexible approach to the implementation of the Protocol, the Government needs to rebuild trust by demonstrating its good faith. This requires open and constructive engagement, meetings its legal obligations and fulfilling its outstanding political commitments.”
I was in Washington when John Major and Tony Blair transformed our standing in America with Bill Clinton and John McCain by demonstrating that they were trustworthy on the Northern Ireland issue.
Of course, it would be possible to cut down the number of supplementary customs declarations. I am sure that point is absolutely correct; it is an absurd number now. I suspect that that is what Mr Šefčovič had in mind when he said last week:
“Let’s see what can be done to further ease the supply of goods”.
We should take up that offer from him. With great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, I find it implausible in practice that he would reject
“solutions which involve ‘flexibilities’ within the current rules”.
I hope the noble Lord drops the confrontational chest-beating tone. A good rule in negotiation is not to insult the other side.
I end with an olive branch—something the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said which seems 100% correct. In paragraph 268 of this admirable report, the sub-committee has him saying:
“it is important that we all try to act in a way that is conducive to a good negotiation”.
That is quite right. “Physician, heal thyself.”
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, it is a privilege to serve on the Northern Ireland sub-committee, under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme. I pay particular tribute to Stuart Stoner for his contribution, and to Breda Twomey, who was in charge of the administration. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, achieved something that is quite surprising: agreement, by all members of the committee, to this interim report. As the noble Lords, Lord Caine and Lord Empey, both pointed out, a diverse bunch of people were on that committee and to get them to agree an interim report was quite something.
But things have moved on. If I may coin a phrase, we were where we were. On the day we published our report, 21 July, the Command Paper that has been referred to was published. Paragraphs 45 and 70 called for UK-EU negotiations so substantive as to create a new settlement to supersede parts of the protocol. The response of the EU was:
“we will not agree to a renegotiation of the protocol.”
Two days later, the Minister formally requested a standstill of current arrangements in accordance with paragraph 77 of the Command Paper and a freezing of the EU’s existing legal actions. While not obliged to do so, the Commission halted its proceedings arising out of the British unilateral action last March to extend the grace periods.
Then we had the ministerial Statement on 6 September, which was another unilateral declaration to continue the grace periods and easements currently in force to which the European Commission had not assented. The Commission replied the same day to the effect that both sides were legally bound by an international agreement to fulfil their obligations under it, emphasising that it would not agree to renegotiation. At the moment we are in a position of stalemate. The European Commission said:
“Our focus remains on identifying long-term, flexible and practical solutions to address issues related to the practical implementation of the Protocol”.
To my mind, that sounds an admirable aim. The question is: will it happen? The Commission also said:
“Our approach to the Protocol is based on the achievement of stability, certainty and predictability in line with the objectives of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement and in order to protect the Single Market.”
That is a statement of intent which, again, seems perfectly reasonable and desirable.
The next thing to happen was the speech of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, which introduced the fantasy world in which he threatened to break up the power-sharing Government in Northern Ireland if the protocol was not abandoned. The Belfast Telegraph described it in terms such that Boris’s bridge to Northern Ireland would be built before that happens. The Minister said in his speech to the British-Irish Parliamentary Association on 4 September that his purpose is not to scrap the protocol but to rebalance it. Does he support the new stance taken by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson? I am sure he will answer that question in his reply. If he is not prepared to do what Sir Jeffrey Donaldson suggests—to abandon the protocol—why is he not prepared to use the dispute mechanisms he agreed to in the protocol? Why has he proceeded by unilateral diktat?
This was anticipated many years ago. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of the Shaws, said in 2017, when she was a member of the European Union Committee:
“Going forward, the Government will have to ensure that it can agree a clear, certain and robust enforcement mechanism to ensure that any rights and obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement (and subsequent partnership arrangements with the EU) can be upheld in the event of a dispute.”
The noble Lord, Lord Caine, told us just now that the protocol is not sustainable. But is it beyond resolution? There are problems and one of the concerns I have voiced in the committee has been about the democratic deficit—which is an important issue of principle that has to be resolved.
Professor Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, in an article for UK in a Changing Europe in July, said:
“Such matters can be resolved largely through the work of the Specialised Committee, whose continuing technical talks are leading to some legislative change in the EU to allow flexibilities for Northern Ireland. Or, if more substantial, the Joint Committee could adopt a decision to amend the Withdrawal Agreement if ‘necessary to correct errors, to address omissions or other deficiencies, or to address situations unforeseen when this Agreement was signed’ … The UK government is seeking fundamental changes of the type and scale it thinks requires renegotiation, but fails here to present evidence as to what cannot be resolved through the existing means.”
Why did the Minister agree to the European Court of Justice being the final arbiter? Why did he concede that final jurisdiction to Michel Barnier of all people, who revealed last week that he believes that the legal sovereignty of France is threatened by the rulings of that court? Perhaps Monsieur Barnier is trying to tune in to the populist urges of his right-wing party in his bid to be its leader. The impression is strongly given in this country—the Minister can perhaps deal with this—that he cannot now stomach the role he agreed for the European court and therefore now avoids, shies away from, the dispute mechanisms he agreed to in the withdrawal agreement.
Analysis from the Institute for Government shows that between 2003 and 2016, compared with other EU member states, the UK resolved its cases in the ECJ early, ended up in court less often than most and won more often than most. This was due to the quality of British lawyers—well, I would say that wouldn’t I?—and their skill in presenting and arguing their case. We have nothing to fear from that court. Why replace it with a set of unknown, ad hoc international arbitrators as the final decision-makers?
We on these Benches did not seek to leave the European Union, and I suggested at the time that it would lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom, a threat which has not gone away as the cold light of day falls upon the promises that were made, but my approach within the committee, as committee members will know, has been to be more optimistic for Northern Ireland. I see that there is a prize to be grasped: the prize of prosperity due to the unique circumstances of its access to both the single European market and the UK, a point strongly made by my noble friend Lady Suttie and recently by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I was heartened to find that my perception was strengthened by our witnesses, who spoke of the increased trade with the Republic of Ireland and the many business inquiries from all over the world. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, referred to the constitutional carbuncle that will take place in 2024 when a decision is to be made about the continuation of the protocol. That puts considerable pressure on the political parties that will be fighting next May’s elections.
The possibility of prosperity is the future which Sir Jeffrey Donaldson should grasp. That is what this Government at Westminster should be working for: to sort out and minimise the practical problems by negotiation within the terms of the dispute mechanism. That is the way we will find certainty and ultimately stability for the whole of Northern Ireland and its people.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, the report from your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee and its Northern Ireland sub-committee and the introduction to both by our two chairs do not stand alone. They need to be considered alongside the Government’s July White Paper on the same subject. Indeed, the fact that the Government chose to table their proposals for modifying the Northern Ireland protocol just 24 hours ahead of the committee’s report without waiting to consider its views or, indeed, without taking the opportunity to provide in evidence, which the noble Lord gave to the committee not long before, their own thinking was, I fear, a singular and lamentable act of disrespect to Parliament.
Although a member of the European Affairs Committee, I can without immodesty say that the report is a balanced, unvarnished account of the difficulties that have arisen over implementing the protocol, since we did not modify or criticise any of the sub-committee’s findings. I wish I could say the same of the White Paper, but it is an altogether more partisan document, designed as much to dismantle and renegotiate as to implement what was agreed so recently between the UK and the EU.
The hard fact is that the protocol was agreed by the two parties to it and was then endorsed and ratified by the two parliamentary institutions on both sides, thus becoming binding international law. It must seem odd to some looking at this that its principal negotiators on our side, the Prime Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Frost, now find so much in it to challenge despite probably having more experience of the way the EU operates than any of their predecessors in these jobs. Did they really not understand what it meant, or did they understand and conclude the agreement without any intention of implementing it? I shall be interested to hear which of those two the noble Lord, Lord Frost, opts for.
No one disputes that implementation raises a number of sensitive and complex problems which need solutions. They are reviewed in detail in the committee’s report. They cannot and must not be ignored. No one disputes either that solutions need to be found in a spirit of pragmatism and flexibility, but pragmatism and flexibility are two-way streets; they are not something you can ask just one side to show. You have to be prepared to show it yourself as well. I am afraid that pragmatism and flexibility are not encouraged by modifying deadlines and the protocol unilaterally, as the Government did earlier in the year, nor by threatening to invoke the main safeguard clause if we do not get our way, nor by seeking pretty fundamental changes in the governance procedures laid down in the protocol, nor by dismissing out of hand the idea of negotiating sanitary and phytosanitary conditions on a temporary basis, which would remove many implementation problems. Better surely to practise the qualities we are calling for, pragmatism and flexibility, and to eschew megaphone diplomacy.
A clear example of megaphone diplomacy was last week’s speech by the relatively new leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. That sort of bluster and blackmail will serve no useful purpose, provoking, as it has already done, a reiteration of the EU’s refusal to renegotiate the Northern Ireland protocol, so recently concluded. It reflects too a refusal by the DUP to recognise the validity of a protocol which was agreed by the UK Parliament despite the DUP’s objections. That is the very conjunction which resulted in Britain’s exit from the EU despite the majority of Northern Ireland voters having voted to remain. Surely what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
There are obviously major issues at stake here, including the overall health of the UK-EU relationship, which can hardly be said to be flourishing. We should not forget that triggering the Article 16 safeguard clause would open up the possibility for the EU to retaliate. Do we seriously accept the assertion that it is the protocol which endangers the Belfast agreement rather than a breakdown over implementing it being the immediate cause, with the main cause, of course, being Brexit? I know that that last statement will be considered a bit provocative, but how else is one to interpret a reversion to pre-Belfast agreement rhetoric by the leader of the DUP, which we heard last week?
Then, what price the prospects for a UK/US trade deal in circumstances where the protocol fails to be implemented or is set aside? The Government quite rightly take the view, and have often said so from the Dispatch Box, that Britain’s interests are best served by upholding the rules-based international order, but this protocol is part of that order. A post-Brexit Britain whose word is no longer its deed will pay a heavy and unnecessary price. It is surely preferable to negotiate calmly and purposefully to implement the protocol that we put our name to. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, when he replies to this debate, will confirm explicitly that that is the objective that the Government are pursuing.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, the Northern Ireland protocol stands on a palpable absurdity, namely the idea that checks on goods between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland will upset the political equilibrium, possibly even threaten the peace, but that such checks on goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain are just fine and dandy. It is because we have all been dancing around that anomaly that we are meeting here in this Committee. All the ripples have been caused by trying to come to terms with something that is simply absurd.
I add my voice to all those who have complimented our chairman. Our committee indeed has, to use his phrase, “strong and divergent” views. There speaks nearly 40 years of diplomatic experience. That is one way of putting it. None the less, we have come up with some serious proposals with consensus. I think that we were able to do so for one reason, which is worth bringing out: of all the witnesses we heard from, there was not one that was actively pro-protocol. There was certainly a variety of views. I was very impressed. It was the first time that I had been on a Select Committee and everything that people said about the balance, fairness and thoroughness was absolutely right. We heard from every different quarter of opinion. There were those who thought it was a price worth paying, those who did not, those who put the blame on Brexit and those who put the blame on the protocol, but there was not one voice arguing that the protocol was an improvement on the status quo ante—not one.
I can broadly group under two headings the complaints that I heard from the various witnesses who appeared before us. One lot are what we might call the practical objections. They were uniform, I think, across Northern Ireland. You could not tell which tradition someone was from when they voiced them. They were concerns to do with sausages, pet passports and all the other pragmatic difficulties of overzealous implementation. I think there would, in theory, be quite easy solutions to them if there were a modicum of good will. The second lot, I think it is fair to say, were objections voiced largely from unionist and loyalist sources and had to do with what we might loosely call the democratic deficit—the idea that Northern Ireland will have laws, even taxes, imposed on it by people that it cannot vote for. Those are much harder to deal with, at least within the protocol. We can safely disregard the various ideas that they can be resolved by somehow allowing Northern Ireland to be politically further annexed by the EU. They are a very difficult set of problems to resolve.
If I were an EU negotiator, I would be super-flexible about the first lot, thereby maximising the difficulties of any UK Government wanting to deal with the second lot. It would not really be any skin off my nose. We heard my noble friend Lord Empey quote the figures of the miniscule amount of the EU economy accounted for by Great Britain/Northern Ireland trade—0.008%. However, it seems that the Brussels negotiators do not have the same diplomatic skill that I see arrayed on the Bench opposite, albeit with a little gap now with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, having absented himself. Instead of showing flexibility on the practical side and digging in on sovereignty—which is what we might expect them to do—they have been difficult and obstreperous about every issue, even requiring rabies shots for pets moving from Great Britain. It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that they relishes our discomfort and are seeking to use the protocol as a pressure point, a way of exerting pressure on the UK to secure our long-term adherence to EU standards. We heard some of the figures: 20% of EU external checks are applied to 0.5% of its trade, if you count Great Britain-Northern Ireland trade as external trade. Why are they doing this?
It is extraordinary, listening to the debate in this Chamber, another Chamber, more widely in the media and, I have to say, from three speakers so far how often the only answer we get is, “Well, you signed it”. Seriously, is that all you have? How does that take us forward? It is true that it was signed, as what we might call an unequal treaty. History is littered with examples of treaties that ceased to be valid and were then abrogated or annulled. An apt example, given both the subject matter and this being its centenary year, is the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921. It was repudiated in stages by successive Irish Governments, first breaking their residual constitutional links with the UK, then declaring a republic and leaving the Commonwealth. I note en passant, as we old Brussels hands say, that when that the final break was made in 1949 the UK Government were remarkably affable about it. In fact, King George sent the following message to the Irish President:
“I hold in most grateful memory the services and sacrifices of the men and women of your country who rendered gallant assistance to our cause in the recent war … I pray that every blessing may be with you today and in the future.”
I wonder whether the European Union will be similarly accommodating if a similar repudiation happens. Somehow, I doubt it. Maybe that is something we can all agree on around this Room.
When a treaty is not working, when a treaty is a product, as this one was, of the Benn Act and of a Parliament that was not working to get the best possible terms, it will obviously have to go in one way or another. It seems to me that there are three options. In declining order of drama, there is outright repudiation, the triggering of Article 16 or asking for some changes within the existing structures. The first is the cleanest, and there is precedent, but so far I see little appetite for it.
There is already ample justification for the second. Article 16, just to remind members of this Committee and other noble Lords, contains the following clause:
“If the application of this Protocol leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade, the Union or the United Kingdom may unilaterally take appropriate safeguard measures.”
Leaving aside “environmental”, it seems to me that we have already passed that threshold on the others. In terms of economic disruption, Northern Ireland sells more to Great Britain than to the Republic of Ireland, the rest of the EU and the rest of the world put together. We heard from one of our witnesses that Northern Ireland-Great Britain trade is now subject to £10 billion of extra costs, and three-quarters of Northern Ireland businesses said they had been negatively impacted. As for societal difficulties, when, according to the opinion polls, half of Northern Ireland is against it—it is now almost exactly half and half—that is normally taken in the Northern Ireland context as a pretty good argument to desist from your course of action and try something more consensual.
As for trade diversion, that is not in doubt. We heard that north-south trade increased by 50% as businesses in the Province shifted their sourcing and trade, but to portray this as a good thing, to portray the cause of extra cost and bureaucracy forcing trade diversion as somehow an economic step forward, is rather like arguing that it was a great thing that the blockade in the Second World War led to people growing more potatoes in their gardens. The most basic principle of trade is that we should trust businesses to do what is rational and profitable. If they cannot do so because of needless paperwork—applied, to repeat, not in any proportionate spirit but for the sake of making trouble—it seems to me that must be reckoned a net cost.
So one way or another, the current deal is going. The only question is whether it goes in agreement with our European partners or through unilateral action. I have to say—I know this goes against the spirit of the meeting—that my noble friend the Minister has shown heroic restraint so far in asking nicely for changes, rather than making them unilaterally. When we think that the European Union triggered Article 16, albeit briefly, on no grounds beyond pique that the UK vaccine programme was ahead of its own, we have ample cause in terms of the economic and societal impacts that we have already seen.
I hope we can do this consensually. I hope that Northern Ireland becomes a bridge between the UK and the European Union, but there is no veto here: one way or another, the protocol has to go.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, when I used to appear at referendum campaign rallies with the previous speaker, I always made it clear that I would only speak before him. Unfortunately, today, I have to follow him and can say what a great speech that was. I also pay tribute to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Caine. I am really looking forward to the book, which will be well worth reading. We were all enlightened today to hear a little more about the negotiations going on way back under the former Prime Minister.
Like most committee reports, by the time they have been published and debated, they are a little out of date as events have moved on, but I welcome the reports, as far as they go, and accept that they are preliminary and that this project is ongoing. I suggest the committee tries to meet some of the younger pro-union loyalists next time, who are now beginning to speak out in Northern Ireland. The problem for establishment committees such as this is that they go for the well-known, regular commentators, and they know what they are going to say before they turn up. Those at the grass roots of what is happening in Northern Ireland get ignored, not listened to.
We saw that just last week, when Vice-President Šefčovič—I apologise to him for my pronunciation—spent two days in Northern Ireland. He refused to meet the leader of one of the main unionist parties, the Traditional Unionist Voice party, Jim Allister. He did not meet any of the loyalists I am talking about in their communities. The whole idea of outreach, which the EU has made a great deal of, needs to be looked at.
There are two points I want to put on record at the beginning. First, there is a tendency for those who voted to remain in the referendum to tell us leavers that we own Brexit, that we own the protocol and that it is our fault. I campaigned for Brexit very strongly and I would do it again, but I campaigned for the whole United Kingdom to leave the European Union in totality. I did not see on my ballot paper a little bit put off saying, “Do you want to leave the United Kingdom, but to leave out Northern Ireland?” I strongly believe that we do not have Brexit in Northern Ireland, and that is part of the problem.
Secondly, we hear a lot from many people, including those in government, that Brexit made an Irish Sea border inevitable, but anyone who says that is actually stating that Northern Ireland voters did not have the right to take part in a nationwide referendum on the same basis as those in the rest of the United Kingdom, and that the outcome of that referendum applied in Northern Ireland without any qualifications. Those who say that do not really believe in the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If they are being honest, they should say that they are not unionists. The trade checks are not done in the Irish Sea, anyway. They are on the land of the island of Ireland, at Larne, Belfast, et cetera. All those who said we could never have a land border on the island have exactly that; the only difference is between one part of the United Kingdom and another, not between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
In Northern Ireland, the good, decent, honest people who feel British and believe that they were guaranteed the right to be British unless there was a majority who did not wish to be, are expected to put up with this. Would noble Lords be sitting here debating in the same way if it had been the other way round—if it was a nationalist community saying, “We don’t want a land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic”? The pro-union community is expected to put up with it. We know why we have this. It is because the collusion between the Irish Government and the European Union, and the threats of violence, led our Government to go along with saying that there can never be a trade border on the island of Ireland at the frontier—which is where any normal country would think it should be. The Belfast agreement would be broken, according to nationalists and many here, by a land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but it is not broken by having a border between one part of the United Kingdom and another. The Belfast/Good Friday agreement was based on balance and the balance has now gone completely the other way.
I am very surprised that the committee did not say more about the court judgment at the end of June, which I know the Lord Speaker has said we can refer to, when Mr Justice Colton confirmed that
“the government has removed critical aspects of the Acts of Union 1800; the legislation that effectively created the United Kingdom.”
As one of the applicants for the judicial review along with Jim Allister, Ben Habib, Arlene Foster, Steve Aiken and the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, I find it very concerning. It has huge political ramifications as well as legal significance. It represents a direct challenge to what the Prime Minister said in response to Sir Jeffrey Donaldson in Prime Minister’s Questions, when he said explicitly that this provision had not been repealed by the withdrawal agreement and the protocol. We are going to appeal. The case raised complex legal issues, but they will eventually be settled, and I am sure many noble Lords here will be delighted that it will be going to the Supreme Court and keeping our lawyers in business. The Acts of Union are a constitutional statute and the courts do not seem to have considered a case like this before where constitutional statutes clash.
As there are many lawyers here and I am sure they read the European Journal of International Law, I want to refer to a recent, excellent article by Professor Joseph Weiler. He has written about the treaty of Versailles, Brexit, the Irish protocol and the Versailles effect. As someone who used to be head of the European University Institute in Florence and a very strongly pro-EU person, he quite explicitly argues very coherently about why the European Union has been so wrong in the way it has handled the whole of the Northern Ireland protocol. I suggest that Members might like to refer to that.
The grace periods have been extended and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Frost, for all that he has done. I know he is battling against very difficult European Union representatives who still seem to want to find ways of punishing us more for leaving. The grace periods have been extended, but that does not change what is currently happening. They were going to bring in much worse things, both in trade issues and in other ways; those have now been put off, but it does not change what is happening. There are still checks in Larne and companies in Great Britain not wanting to send anything to Northern Ireland. Not a week goes past but there is something else and another company says, “We can’t really be bothered with this; it’s not worth the hassle, we really don’t want to do it.” Tinkering with the protocol is not good enough. Even if we manage to get trade flowing freely, as long as we in Northern Ireland are left under European Union rules and the European Court of Justice, that will not be acceptable to people in Northern Ireland who want to stay part of the United Kingdom.
When people talk about compromise, they have no understanding of the strength of feeling. The United Kingdom Government cannot compromise any more. They need now to stand up, be strong and speak up for the country they are meant to be running. This Government have a choice to make. I am very pleased that Sir Jeffrey Donaldson—I am not a member or necessarily a supporter of the DUP, but I support anyone in Northern Ireland who speaks up for the union whatever their political party—has come out and said that since the east-west dimension of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement has been broken, why should we carry on with the north-south?
I think it is rather sad that one Unionist is now saying let us have more north/south bodies. Would that really make things better? I do not agree with that, and I am very pleased that Sir Jeffrey has spoken about this. We need to take his warning very seriously. The Government have now got to make it clear that the protocol is not sustainable, as the noble Lord, Lord Caine, and others said. It is not sustainable; it has to go. The Government have to choose: do they want to see stability in Northern Ireland, do they want to see institutions maintained and to keep that balance that has been so difficult over many years, or do they want to keep the protocol? They cannot have both. That is the dilemma the Government face. I hope that committees like this will understand that this is a crucial time. There is no point in having more committees, meetings and lots more reports over the next six months. We do not have six months. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, understands that and I hope the Prime Minister understands that and will now recognise that this protocol has to go, one way or another.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it was my pleasure to be a member of the Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, under the direction and chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme. I acknowledge the work of our staff, led by Stuart Stoner, because they have undertaken sterling work on our behalf. I also acknowledge the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, the chair of the parent committee, because the noble Lord, Lord Caine, and I went to that committee along with our chair to find if it would approve our consensus report. I am very glad to say that happened.
I am pleased that the Minister is present today and I hope that he will be able to give details of the timeframe for discussions with the EU on the protocol. I hope that these discussions will lead to solutions and provide for much-needed political and economic stability in Northern Ireland while, at the same time, ensuring that the people, communities and businesses can avail themselves of the unique opportunities and benefits of the protocol, because there are benefits: being able to trade in the UK internal market and the EU single market.
I devote my remarks to our committee’s report. I believe it should form the basis of future inquiries, including examinations of the Government’s Command Paper, which came out a number of days prior to the publication of our own report in late July, the EU’s response to that Command Paper, the ongoing discussions between the UK and EU, the way forward and subsequent political and economic developments since July 2021 up until today. Our committee contains members from different political perspectives on Brexit, the protocol and the constitutional issue. There are three of us from Northern Ireland who all served together on the Northern Ireland Executive as Government Ministers, but we come from different political perspectives. I come from a Democratic Irish Nationalist background, while the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Dodds, come from a Unionist perspective, but I believe there is beauty in diversity. There are benefits in diversity. I hope that the necessary solutions to the protocol can be found in those diverse perspectives.
I campaigned to remain within the EU and feel that the root cause of the current economic and political problems lies with Brexit and particularly the hard Brexit that the Government sought, and which some elements of Unionism also sought. I believe the protocol is a practical solution to a difficult issue: to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland. I am also opposed to any other border in the Irish Sea or anywhere else, as are my political colleagues. As we have said, on numerous occasions, borders create impediments, they create barriers and they do not lend themselves to solutions. It is important that a solution is finally found to all this.
Unfortunately Brexit and the protocol are also aligned with political identities and the constitutional issue in Northern Ireland and Ireland. Bearing in mind the political statements of the past few weeks, it is not a binary choice between the protocol and collapsing political institutions and withdrawing from north/south bodies and the North/South Ministerial Council, as suggested by the leader of the DUP. It is not the protocol versus devolution. The issue is recognition of the reality that Northern Ireland needs a bespoke and unique post-Brexit solution to trade and normal relationships because of our unique geographical position on the island of Ireland and the nature of our politics, whether we are from a unionist or nationalist perspective. That fact was recognised by the former First and Deputy First Ministers in a letter to the former Prime Minister in August 2016. Devolution cannot be sacrificed because some parties choose to put their narrow self-interest above the interest of our communities.
A point highlighted by Professor Hayward in her recent paper is that Northern Ireland business representatives do not want a cancellation of the protocol. The Minister should take heed of that. What they have been requesting since before the end of the transition period is certainty, stability and clarity of procedures. They complain about the complexities of the situation. Our report reflected that position and the difficulties and challenges that the business community have faced. There are those who think that there are benefits in the protocol, and Manufacturing NI referred to the increased opportunities for inward investment. None of us should gainsay that fact.
Our committee also concluded that the EU and the UK
“have a continuing obligation to consider alternatives”
to the protocol and
“an equal obligation on all sides to find resolutions within the Protocol.”
Of course, we also referred to the fact that proposed solutions have to prove how they can be compliant with the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. In our view, technical solutions to
“ease some of the burden of the Protocol’s practical operation can be found, as long as there is goodwill and flexibility on all sides”.
We concluded that like the negotiations, which have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, which culminated in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement,
“time, patience, dialogue and most of all trust”
need to be applied to addressing the problems that Brexit and the protocol present for Northern Ireland. As our committee declared, rather than taking unilateral action, it would be
“preferable for the UK and the EU … urgently to identify mutually agreeable solutions”.
Those are the words that I heard coming back to me last week from Vice-President Šefčovič. He talked about not wanting a victory, but to listen, understand and try to provide solutions. I hope that that is the way forward and that the UK and the EU can find solutions to the protocol within the protocol that will provide a solution to the business problems that have been encountered and which do not wreck our existing political institutions.
I urge those who have indicated that they wish to walk away from those institutions that there is far too much work to be done in Northern Ireland, in terms of the Executive, the Assembly and the north-south bodies, in terms of the current pandemic, in terms of the climate emergency and in terms of the plethora of other legislation that has to go through before the Assembly elections in May of next year. Can the Minister tell us about the progress of those discussions and say how far down the road we are to finding solutions? Let us always remember that there is beauty and benefit in the diverse views that have been presented today. Let us hope that that helps provide solutions that also address the democratic deficit and allow Assembly Members a greater say in how the protocol is effected and is worked out in terms of the wider community and businesses in Northern Ireland.
Lord Moylan (Con)
It is a pleasure to rise in the wake of the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick. I want to make a small preliminary remark, which is that, although I count myself as a unionist in the general terms of supporting the United Kingdom, I am not and never have been connected with the unionist tradition in Northern Ireland. In fact, before I entered your Lordships’ House, I do not think I had met a unionist politician from Northern Ireland, with the exception of one meeting with the former First Minister, Peter Robinson, and even then, he was judiciously balanced by his deputy, Martin McGuinness. That is the extent of my connection with the unionist tradition.
I make that point because the points I want to focus on today in the time allotted are ones that I regard as having constitutional and democratic significance for every part of Northern Ireland and every person there, irrespective of which community they belong to and whether they belong to any community at all. In my doing so, it may be thought that I am making some remarks about the report of the committee which are less than wholly obliging. If that is the case, let me assure noble Lords that it is not meant to detract from the report as a whole, which I found extremely valuable, informative and useful, and I have learnt much both from the report and in sitting in this debate. I can say that without hurt to anyone since I appear to be the last Back-Bench speaker.
Let me come to my three points. First, there is a tone throughout the second, more recent report of a parity of treatment of the two parties to the Northern Ireland protocol, the British Government and the European Union, and that, in so far as the mechanisms are not working, blame can be equably distributed in a sort of Olympian fashion between the two. This is a huge mistake. While it may be perfectly true that, looked at purely from the point of view of the Northern Ireland protocol, the two parties have entered it as sovereign equals, the responsibilities of the British Government in Northern Ireland go way beyond simply the management of trade and a trade border in a way that is simply not true of the European Union. It is the British Government, working with the devolved Administration when appropriate under the devolution settlement, who are responsible for housing people, for their health, for their transport, for their connectivity and, crucially, for their safety and security. Those responsibilities are not shared by the European Union and they place a different burden on the British Government as they approach and interpret the protocol.
His Excellency the EU ambassador is quoted in the report as saying that the EU has
“an economic, diplomatic and even an emotional and financial commitment to Northern Ireland”.
That is all very well, but that is not to share in the responsibility for the government of Northern Ireland and the accountability to the world at large and to the democratic world at large for how the country is conducted. That should be recognised. In my own case, that would lead me to cut the British Government a bit more slack in this Olympian allocation of blame between the two parties. The pressures and demands on them are so very much greater.
Secondly, as referred to in the report and explicitly referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, the fact is that a significant constitutional change in Northern Ireland has been imposed. I know that the Northern Ireland protocol, in paragraph 1, page 1, or something—really early—says that it represents no change from the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. I have always thought, however, that that is a little bit like the burglar leaving a note saying that he has not actually burgled you. It reads well, but it bears no relation to the facts. The fact is that there has been a very significant constitutional change and it is one that clashes with the Good Friday agreement. We have seen, for example, that the vote that is to take place in the Northern Ireland Assembly has required legislation since the protocol was put in place in order to change the Good Friday agreement so that the vote can take place on the basis that the protocol agreed.
That seems to leave us in no doubt that, whereas the pre-eminent constitutional document under which Northern Ireland was governed until recently was the Good Friday agreement, it now seems that, without that being abrogated or abolished, none the less the pre-eminent document that now governs it is the Northern Ireland protocol. Nobody in Northern Ireland has been asked about this. The riposte that people in Northern Ireland voted by a majority of 55% to stay in the European Union just does not cut it, because people were not asked should Northern Ireland stay in the European Union. In fact, that would have been to ask a question that invited a major contravention of European Union law, because the European Union does not admit bits of states to membership, only whole states. The question asked was whether the United Kingdom should leave or stay, and the answer was not necessarily what the people of Northern Ireland wanted, but the outcome was clear by a majority vote. It was a vote for the status quo; I think we can all agree on that. And I think we can all agree that what they have got in return is not the status quo. That is why I think that argument simply fails.
This deserves more prominence. If we were talking about a change in Government and a change in constitutional status for another country, there would be many people in your Lordships’ House who, quite understandably, would say that such a change would require the consent of the people involved. That has not been achieved. After all, we offer referendums for much lesser matters than this. The people of London were offered a referendum, in which they voted yes, in order for the introduction of the Greater London Authority. That is merely, if I may say so—even though I had some involvement with the Greater London Authority—a modest constitutional change compared with what has happened in Northern Ireland, yet the people of London were consulted and asked. This is the sort of thing that should be high on the committee’s agenda and something that the Government, if I may say to my noble friend the Minister, should be much more voluble about. However implicated they may be in it, it simply is not right.
My third point, which is also mentioned in the report—I trespass on dangerous ground for me because I am not a lawyer—is the reference to Article 3 of the first protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, which of course guarantees as a human right, without any qualification on the face of the convention that I can see, the right to a regular, secret vote for a legislature. That is presumably the legislature that is making your laws, as opposed to a different legislature. That is implicit, and I think we can all agree on that.
A judge in Northern Ireland has decided that the current situation does not breach that convention right. I understand this is subject to appeal, but I will not go further into the legalities of that. My reading of the judgment was that he did not actually dispute the facts, but felt that there were circumstances justifying departure from the application of the right, but I am not a lawyer and will be careful what I read into that.
I will make a slightly different point. Even if it turned out that the current situation—in which amendments to the existing legal framework can be made without any say by the people of Northern Ireland in laws that they are obliged to live under—was compliant with the convention, is that what we would want in Britain? Would the rest of the world welcome that? My noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere disappointed me slightly when he said that these are difficult issues. They are not difficult: the response to a lack of democracy in a democratic state is democracy. We should start to address that.
I would like to see these issues brought more to the fore in the discussion. They affect the entire community and we would expect other countries to address them and put them at the forefront, if we were talking about them. We owe it to the people of Northern Ireland and ourselves to do the same when discussing their affairs.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, as a Scottish Borderer, I want to tread lightly in this debate on the Northern Ireland protocol. I am a creature of the multifaceted and complex union. I love it with all my heart. As a Borderer in the Scottish Borders who often refers to a different act of union, it has been fascinating to be here, in the context of this debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Caine, added an extra level of complexity and perhaps contradiction to the debate, as I heard him powerfully say that the May approach was unacceptable and the Johnson approach now requires substantial change. I look forward to the book I hope he writes. If he does not mind, I would be tempted to flick through to the end to see if there is a happy ending.
My version of my noble friend’s comment is that we do not like where we are, but the destination is not necessarily where we want to get to either. At its heart, it is why many of us have struggled with Brexit. As the noble Lord, Lord Jay, said, the sub-committee report was published on the same day as the Government’s Command Paper, and any reader of them both on that day, at the same time, would have seen the strength of consensus and unanimity in one and the relative weakness of going alone in the other. One called for building trust in dialogue and discussion; the other, for unilateral argument and renegotiation. One showed what a destination of travel may be; the other faced a dead end already.
As others have, I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for introducing this debate so comprehensively and setting the tone. I am a happy member of the European Affairs Committee and a great admirer of the sub-committee’s work, not least its ability to bring about unanimity and consensus. I thought about which of his previous postings would have required the noble Lord, Lord Jay, to have the greatest skill and diplomacy to bring about this consensus, but I suspect it was a combination of them all. As the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said, the committee sought to make, and in many ways made, sense of the tensions and contradictions described within the protocol.
The Government have been trying to deliver two competing narratives within our union for a number of years: that the freedoms now enjoyed as a result of leaving the EU single market, for GB, will liberate us; but for the other part of the UK, remaining in the EU single market will enrich it. Neither is necessarily true, no matter how many times it is said. This debate laid bare that concern.
The Minister in charge, Michael Gove, described the Northern Ireland protocol as the “best of both worlds” in this regard. He is in accord with the EU Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič, who cited a Northern Ireland businessman last week describing it as
“jam on both sides of the bread.”
However, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, who negotiated this “best of both worlds” deal now says he does not “entirely buy this”, giving evidence to the sub-committee to that effect. His own agreement, which he negotiated and which Michael Gove was so pleased to initial, represents what he now says is an
“unacceptable disruption to day-to-day lives”
of people in Northern Ireland.
There are two paths ahead: either to work to resolve problems and be open and honest about the consequences of this form of Brexit, or to seek to frame this as an EU intransigence argument. This is not a new approach—we have heard it quite a lot since 2016. The difficulty with saying that it is the EU intransigence in others is that tension is built and temperatures are raised. I believe the Government’s position is to take the undesirable parts of the protocol, rework them—rebalance them, as they said—and take away its worst aspects. However, their narrative has been challenged by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, whom we heard last week. To quote from his speech:
“There are those who say the Protocol is here to stay and advocate working it and there are some who limit their ambitions to addressing its worst aspects. However what flows from the protocol is so fundamental and the problems it creates so great that the consequences of adopting such a strategy would damage Northern Ireland.”
These tensions and contradictions are still in play today.
The contradictions arising from compromises, as the sub-committee said, were a result of the form of Brexit the Government chose. To avoid a border on the island of Ireland, a sea border within our trading area was inevitable. To honour the treaty obligations, Northern Ireland would continue to be part of the EU—in law-making, judicial processes and taxation agreements—but with no representation. That is deeply unpalatable, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, indicated, as any unionist within any part of these islands would have done.
These compromises were a result of that type of Brexit. As the Vice-President put it last week in the speech the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, referred to:
“This solution required compromise. Everyone around the table understood what these compromises meant in practice.”
I think Ministers did too, but for political reasons then chose not to outline the consequences. Whatever the motive, I agree with the sub-committee in paragraph 70:
“Yet the Government did not make adequately clear to the people of Northern Ireland what the Protocol would mean in practice.”
We are where we are. But where we need to be is honouring these treaty obligations. A year ago almost to the day, Sir John Major said:
“Over the last century, as our military strength has dwindled, our word has retained its power. If we lose our reputation for honouring the promises we make, we will have lost something beyond price that may never be regained.”
As the noble Lord, Lord Jay, indicated, that means time, patience, dialogue and trust. Concerted efforts to build trust in this area are for the Government and for all parliamentarians to address.
I am glad that the sub-committee will address the issues of democratic deficit in its next work. I look forward to its work, because these are deeply problematic challenges. As the noble Lord, Lord Wood, put it, permanent grace periods deliberately setting aside some of these difficulties are not the response. In my view, perpetual grace is perpetual grievance, because it means that areas of complexity are not resolved in a consensus-building way but continue to be blamed on the others. For example, there are elements the Government Command Paper did not mention; decisions made by the Johnson Government, not the EU, over the last year have meant challenges to trade within our union. For the first time in our history, a Government of the UK are compelling UK businesses that trade within the UK to Northern Ireland to register with them as an exporter. Any goods from GB to Northern Ireland will have to be separately conformity assessed and separately labelled.
This has been delayed for a further year by the Government—to the great relief of the business community, because it is not ready for it—but nevertheless, this is the Government’s policy. Since last month, over the summer, new parcel and shipping taxes for consumers, set by a foreign power and over which they have no representation, are now being paid by people within the United Kingdom. There is no mention of any of them in the Command Paper. Will the Minister say whether these measures will stay? If the Government want to rebalance the approach to remove these challenges, what is their response to the challenges that they have put in place?
I asked the Minister previously about this, and he said in reply
“we are proposing … an extremely light-touch measure to allow trade to flow freely within the UK customs union and single market”.—[Official Report, 21/7/21; col. 268.]
However, there are barriers and restrictions and what the Government have not done in building their case to say that there are costs and burdens on business is to strip out the areas that they have introduced compared to those that the EU has asked for in its interpretation of the protocol. It is now up to the Government to own the areas of their agreement so that people can believe their word. They indicated in their Command Paper that they have paid £1.2 billion to ameliorate the costs. What is the likely ongoing cost of trade support for businesses?
Finally, I turn to an area where I simply cannot understand the Government’s position. The Vice-President of the Commission indicated in his speech last week that there were significant potential gains for Northern Ireland from being part of the single market. The Government have indicated that that is not the case. Will the Government and the European Commission work together to promote Northern Ireland as a place of investment and of economic prosperity? Whatever destination we may end up at, we know that Northern Ireland will still be part of the European single market under this treaty obligation. It is not just for the Northern Ireland business community to make it a success; it is for the Government and the European Union working together to ensure that Northern Ireland flourishes as a wonderful part of the union.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, especially as he ended on something of an optimistic note. There was not a lot of optimism in his contribution, but he at least spoke of future prosperity for Northern Ireland, which I think is a desire we all share.
I thank the committees, and especially the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for their excellent work in leading this important task. The noble Earl began by recalling someone saying that being in Northern Ireland at the moment has felt like being used as a pawn in a game. It is a dreadful assessment, and it ought to stop us all in our tracks. Both reports emphasise the value of establishing a relationship of trust between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jay, about scrutiny of EU legislation as it affects Northern Ireland is important and I look forward to the Minister’s response to his question.
The committee sees some reasons for optimism about Northern Ireland’s ability—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise for interrupting, but, as we have all been anticipating, there is a Division in Chamber. The Committee will adjourn for five minutes—I believe that is the accepted time—in order to allow Members to record their votes.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
The five minutes we were allotted for voting have elapsed, but a significant number of Members of the Committee seem to have gone elsewhere. Since we are on winders, I am afraid we cannot really proceed without them. Anybody who knows where they are and could chivvy them might be doing us all a favour.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
My Lords, rather than delay the Committee any further, I think we will proceed, although I believe we are still missing one Member, who, let us hope, will return shortly.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am sure that the lure of a cup of tea was probably greater than the speech that I am about to finish, or that the Minister will provide as well.
The committees have done vital work but, so far, the Government have been unable to clarify a way forward. Perhaps not today—that might be too much to ask—but we look forward soon to the Minister providing answers to the question of what the future will look like for Northern Ireland and when we will see arrangements on a long-term, secure and predictable footing. As the noble Lord, Lord Wood of Anfield, said, the Government need to be candid—as candid as they can—about what the protocol does, as opposed to what the Government say or have said in the past it does. Does the Minister agree with the noble Lord that failing repeatedly to implement the protocol and having government by grace period is disastrous for the UK’s international reputation?
Various solutions have been proposed, but we all seem broadly to agree that a red line needs to be that any suggestions requiring border infrastructure on the island of Ireland should be disregarded. Many issues will have to be overcome, but I do not want to have to explain to the next generation of young people in Northern Ireland that a hard border, with all the consequences we fear that would bring, came about because this generation wanted the freedom to reduce food standards despite saying that they had no intention of reducing standards. As the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said, regulatory sovereignty should not be prized at the expense of political stability. I realise that that is a very stark way of putting this. I expect the Minister will say we can have both—I do hope so—but it would be useful to know how he intends to do that.
I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Empey, very much. It was really engaging. I was just saying to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, that I could listen to him all day.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am sure they do. He urged realism and pragmatism, and encouraged dialogue, and he is obviously right on all those points. We used to hear a lot of talk about technological solutions to this problem. Can the Minister update us on whether the Government are still pursuing those technological solutions and describe to us what they could involve?
The current situation of deadline followed by extension followed by deadline is a nightmare for business. Options are available: alignment, equivalence, domestic legislation. The choices we have are sometimes considered in a very rigid and limited way, posing alignment against equivalence. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, said, we need a bespoke solution for Northern Ireland.
The Government have rejected alignment, and the EU has rejected equivalence. That is fine, but we need flexibility and compromise, and, as we have heard repeatedly today, we need trust. We could introduce domestic legislation, for instance. What response have the Government had from the European Union to the option of imposing penalties on businesses which are found to have failed to comply with the rules?
In his speech at the British-Irish Association on 4 September, which was referred to by other contributors, the Minister said that these are
“existential issues of territory, of identity, of borders, all against a background of a peace process and institutions in Northern Ireland which can only bear so much weight … So we badly need to look reality full-on. To put our arrangements here onto a more durable and sustainable footing, one that represents genuinely mutual benefit”.
I welcome this. I could not agree more. This is the kind of approach that we need from the Government. I note that the tone from the European Union also seems to have changed in recent weeks. However, other than saying in the Command Paper that Article 13 of the protocol allows for subsequent agreements to replace it, the Minister does not really tell us what he thinks should be done. Still, this is a change of tone, and we should welcome it.
While we have the Minister here, I want to ask him about Article 10 of the protocol, which has not received much attention today. Can he provide the Committee with his assessment of whether, and in what circumstances, Article 10 has any impact on state subsidy in Great Britain, not just in Northern Ireland? What legal advice was sought before agreeing to Article 10? Did he know that restrictions on subsidy in Northern Ireland could “reach back”—which I think is the legal term used—into the rest of the UK? I ask this because not only because I am interested in the answer but because I know from the Command Paper that the Government think that Article 10 is now redundant. I can see why they would make that claim, but it reveals their approach to these negotiations. After all, the Prime Minister described the protocol at the time as an ingenious solution. Did he know when he made that comment that he was potentially compromising on state aid? If he did not, he really should have done.
The Government have an appetite for immediate gratification, agreeing things to get through the immediate crisis. This can work; we get it—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
I am terribly sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness again. She is most unfortunate to have had both these votes in her speech, but there is a Division again in the Chamber. The Committee will adjourn for five minutes to allow Members to record their votes.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
I sense the Committee is anxious to be under way again, so let us say five minutes have passed.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Thank you, I feel like I should appeal for injury time or something. I was talking about the Government’s appetite for immediate gratification and was about to ask the Minister whether he has reached the point where he accepts that a change in approach is needed.
It seems very clear that in their haste to sign an agreement the Government either did not do their homework and think through the implications or, perhaps more likely, knew what they were signing up to but did so with insufficient regard to the UK’s need to keep its obligations. This is particularly troubling when we seek to establish new trade relationships around the world. The country and our partners abroad will be asking themselves whether this is just bad faith or incompetence. Whichever it is, it is coming at a real cost for Northern Ireland and the UK.
We need serious long-term solutions, and it seems pretty obvious to most people, from contributors to this debate to the CBI and the Ulster Farmers Union, that we need a veterinary agreement. We have nothing to fear from cast-iron commitments to high standards. After all, that is a commitment the Conservatives made in their manifesto. Finally, I stress to the Minister that instability is once again building, and we cannot have another year of stop-gap solutions. We need a long-term agreement which will reduce the barriers to which the Government agreed.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord Frost) (Con)
My Lords, I begin by thanking all noble Lords who have contributed to today’s debate, and everyone on the two committees, the European Union Committee and the Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, who prepared the two reports that we have discussed today.
It has been an incredibly rich debate and very many interesting points have been raised. It is fair to say that quite a lot of them have been discussed extensively already, one way or another, over the last five years, but I will do my very best to deal with the points made in the limited time I have available. Much has of course changed since the European Union Committee’s report from last year. Nevertheless, as has been noted, the report correctly anticipated many of the difficulties we are now facing, in particular, as many noble Lords referred to, the complexity of balancing the commitments in Articles 4 and 6 of the protocol with those in Article 5.
The introductory report from the Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Jay, identifies many of the issues that we must confront if we are to deliver a sustainable solution for Northern Ireland. Of course, as has been said, the date of its finalisation coincided with the publication of the Command Paper, which means that the very latest evolution of the position could not be fully taken into account. The report is no less powerful and useful for that in its scrutiny of the operation of the protocol and I am grateful to the committee for it. The Government will respond later this month; lots is happening but, in doing so, we will of course provide the most up-to-date response possible, with an eye on the situation in Northern Ireland and on talks with the EU, which both continue to evolve rapidly. That timing will also us time to comment on the planned joint consultative working group which—to the point from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull—will take place tomorrow and on a potential specialised committee, which may take place during this month. If that is the case, we will reflect those in our response.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for his comments on scrutiny. It is of course our intention—I repeat it again—to ensure that the committee has what it needs to do its job in these very unusual circumstances.
As I was listening to the debate, I was reminded of the very well-known opening line from Anna Karenina:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
What I have heard is nobody being particularly happy about the protocol, but everybody having a different set of problems with it. Unfortunately, it is the responsibility of the Government not just to analyse but to act, and that is what we intend to do. That is what we have set out in the Command Paper and that is how we intend to take things forward.
Against the background of the comments on the two reports that we have been debating, the Government of course agree with the analysis that there has been significant economic disruption in Northern Ireland. As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, noted, this affects everybody in Northern Ireland, not just a part of it. Much of the problems that we face can be attributed to the EU’s rigid focus on protecting the single market over and above other elements of the protocol. This has forced businesses to engage in these burdensome and disproportionate customs and agri-food requirements and has caused significant trade diversion as companies reorganise their supply chains. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, that companies could consider—indeed, they arguably are, in the worst case—the viability of operating in Northern Ireland at all.
We have also seen a degree of political instability and community unrest, exacerbated by concerns—about which we have heard today—that there is a democratic deficit with large volumes of EU law applying without any say for the people of Northern Ireland. I agree that significant constitutional and democratic issues are raised by the protocol. My noble friend Lord Moylan put them very clearly. They are also touched on in the court case, the judicial review, which several noble Lords referred to. I will not go further on that as it is under appeal, but it is obviously a significant case.
I will pick up a couple of points made by a number of noble Lords. The issue of why the Government agreed the protocol in the first place was, not surprisingly, touched on by many—the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, the noble Lords, Lord Thomas, Lord Kerr and Lord Empey, and, perhaps most strongly, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. Many noted that the protocol was agreed by this Government and wondered why we agreed a deal the difficulties of which are so evident. In answer, I refer to my noble friend Lord Caine’s description of the circumstances that led to the unsatisfactory joint report at the end of 2017. As he rightly said, that shaped everything that followed.
In paragraphs 13 and 14 of the Command Paper, we set out our analysis of the situation. We point out the consequence of the then Parliament’s decision to undermine the Government’s negotiating hand at a critical moment in these talks. As we say in the Command Paper, in those circumstances, it was right to agree the best compromise we could, which allowed the UK as a whole to leave the EU in a genuine and meaningful way, without being locked into the backstop and enabling a free trade agreement such as that which we subsequently agreed. We feared that some of the elements of the protocol that were forced upon us in those final days and insisted upon by the EU would turn out to cause problems, and we were right in that analysis. Nevertheless, as many noble Lords said, that is how we have got to where we are now.
The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, asked whether this is the best of both worlds, having agreed the protocol. Is the right to access the single market important? I am with the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, on this: he pointed out, as is correct, that Northern Ireland’s economic links are overwhelmingly with Great Britain. Access to the single market does not, in our view, compensate for disruption of those links. The important thing is the economic unity of the UK; the protocol purports to protect the UK single market, but it does not, at the moment.
If there is relative calm in Northern Ireland at the moment, it is because the proposals in our Command Paper are recognised as serious and enjoy a lot of support, and because there is an expectation that the EU will take them seriously. We therefore agree with the assessment of the committees’ reports that the UK and EU must collectively take urgent action to address the situation as it now is. If our proposals in the Command Paper were agreed, they would satisfactorily address many of the reports’ conclusions, including those on at-risk goods, supplementary declarations, parcels, medicines, livestock, pets, VAT, quotas—the list goes on.
As we know, the problem is that the protocol is not delivering in its current form. It is not delivering on its core objectives: to minimise disruption to everyday lives, to respect Northern Ireland’s integral place in the UK’s internal market and, above all, to preserve the delicate balance in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, in all its dimensions. Once again, I very much agree with the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, that the protocol must ultimately be viewed through the lens of the peace process.
This situation needs to be fixed. We would prefer to do so by negotiation and have set out proposals to that effect. We believe they are extremely reasonable. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, noted, they work with the grain of the protocol. They do not scrap it or sweep it away. We agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wood, that simply scrapping the protocol is not a solution. There will always need to be a treaty relationship between the UK and EU covering Northern Ireland. The question is: what? Our proposals would put that on to a different and more sustainable footing.
Substantively, they would differentiate goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland according to destination and we, as the UK Government, would take on the responsibility of managing those processes ourselves. They would enable goods of both standards, UK and EU, to circulate within Northern Ireland, thus eliminating one of the major impediments in practice to maintaining the UK’s single market.
In this context, the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Suttie, and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, again raised the question of an SPS agreement. Our proposals as set out in the Command Paper would deal with the issue of agri-food and food standards by this dual-standard proposal for Northern Ireland. As we say in the Command Paper, a tailored SPS agreement could certainly help support those arrangements, but they are not essential to them. We have put forward such a proposal. It has not been discussed as much as we would like, but perhaps it will be in the future.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, also raised Article 10, which, as she rightly noted, is touched on in the Command Paper. It is correct to say that Article 10 is to a large extent superseded. We will soon have a clear, legally binding framework for state aid and subsidy policy within the UK. It makes sense to fit arrangements in Northern Ireland into that context rather than the other way round.
To make all this work, we are ready to put in place exceptional arrangements for data sharing to reassure the EU, and, as has been noted, we are ready to penalise those looking to export to the EU goods which do not meet EU standards. These would be significant changes to the protocol, but they are still highly unusual by international standards. They would represent a huge compromise by the Government: to enforce others’ rules within this country.
If these arrangements under the protocol are to be sustainable, they must be underpinned by an amended governance framework. I am afraid I do not share with the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, the benign view of the European Court of Justice and the way it has worked. Our view is that, in the sensitive situation of Northern Ireland, the best way forward is to remove the role of the EU institutions and the jurisdiction of the court by negotiation if we can. I have met many in Northern Ireland. I know that the pre-eminence of these institutions has fostered a sense that Northern Ireland is being treated like an EU member, to be held in compliance in relation to rules over which there is no say and without any of the checks and balances that apply if you are a normal member state.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, raised north-south bodies and went a little further by suggesting that a sensible way forward would be for Northern Ireland to have some representation within the EU institutions while these arrangements applied in Northern Ireland. It probably will not surprise the noble Lord to hear that I am not a fan of that solution. The UK is not a member state of the European Union; it is not represented in the EU institutions. It could not make sense for a part of the UK to be so represented. More to the point, I do not think it would help reassure those concerned about their identity and the status of Northern Ireland within the UK if we went down that road. It is not a useful way forward. As my noble friend Lord Hannan noted, it would pull Northern Ireland further into the EU’s orbit in a way that would exacerbate some of the difficulties rather than help resolve them.
The reality is that disputes in Northern Ireland are best resolved not through imposing the EU’s legal order but by finding compromises through arbitration that can balance all the objectives of the protocol and win the support of everybody in Northern Ireland. We believe that is the right way to proceed.
As I have said, we would prefer to proceed by negotiation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and the conclusions of the committee that this is the most constructive way forward. I welcome the comment of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, that she has noted a change of tone in the way that we have pursued things in recent weeks.
We now need the space to conduct the necessary discussions with the European Union as part of a meaningful political process. That is why, straight after publishing the Command Paper, we proposed a standstill in operating the protocol to create room for exactly those negotiations. That is also why, as I have noted, last week we announced that the protocol will continue to operate on its current basis for now. The current processes for moving goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are maintained, and the grace periods and easements remain in place.
The Commission has noted this decision and has said that the current legal actions are on hold. We too welcome this change in tone from it, which I think allows room for discussion. It will also ensure that businesses can have confidence that there are no cliff edges in operating the protocol and that consumers in Northern Ireland can continue to be supplied. However, the extension of grace periods is not and cannot be a permanent solution to this problem and something more durable needs to be found. I can certainly reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, that our aim is not to continue this situation indefinitely. The current situation is designed to create space for discussions; that is its purpose.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
Can the Minister please give way? I am grateful. For clarification, regarding the democratic deficit and the need for consultation, in paragraph 71 of the Command Paper the Government are calling for
“more robust arrangements to ensure that, as rules are developed, they take account of their implications for Northern Ireland—and provide a stronger role for those in Northern Ireland to whom they apply”.
Can the Minister outline what the Government intend by some of these mechanisms, because they do not state it in the Command Paper?
Lord Frost (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. The point that he mentions in paragraph 71, the issue of engagement of the Northern Ireland institutions in this process, is one of the most sensitive of all and I do not think it would have been right for us to set out a specific way forward in the Command Paper.
The difficulty we have is the lack of democratic consent for specific measures as they come through from the EU’s law-making process. At the moment those are imposed without consent. We are proposing a reordering of the governance arrangements of the protocol so that the consent, if it exists in Northern Ireland for such measures, can be more real, meaningful and based on genuine debate. There are a number of ways of achieving that if the EU wants to go down that road and that is a pre-eminently political question for people in Northern Ireland, as well as one for the UK Government. That is why we have set out the issue without proposing a specific way forward, but it is very much an issue for discussion.
We want to proceed by negotiation and that is part of it. I want to be clear about what is possible for us in doing so. First, the Command Paper sets out how the tests for Article 16 are, in our view, met. I urge the European Union to take that judgment seriously. It would be making a significant mistake if it thought we were not ready to use Article 16 safeguards if that were the only apparent way forward to deal with the situation in front of us. As my noble friend Lord Hannan commented, there is ample justification for doing so.
Secondly, if we are to avoid this situation there needs to be real negotiation between us and the European Union. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, correctly referred to the need for an atmosphere of co-operation and trust. Others, such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Suttie and Lady Chapman, and the noble Lord, Lord Empey, echoed that. The question of trust has come up a lot in these discussions. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, asked for assurances that the time we have before us would be used constructively and the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, asked for an assessment of progress on that negotiation. We have had several technical discussions. I will give the floor to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
The noble Lord mentioned Article 16. Can he answer two questions? First, does he agree with the view expressed in the debate—which I do not agree with—that the European Union triggered Article 16 in January? My understanding is that the Commission sought the powers to trigger but never triggered. The more important question is: have the Government done any analysis at all of the sort of compensatory measures the European Union would likely take if we triggered Article 16 in circumstances it considered unjustified?
Lord Frost (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. The issue of what the European Union did or did not do at the end of January deserves a bit of comment. There are two aspects to this. The first is the question of Article 16: was it triggered or not? In a way, obviously, the intention is as important as the fact. It is our view that it was triggered, however briefly. It was certainly the intention to do so. The second aspect of what the EU did in January—the reason why Article 16 was used—sometimes gets less comment. It intended to use it to put in place a process across the land border on the island of Ireland, something that for the previous five years we had been told was impossible, undesirable and disastrous. That is as much why this struck and changed the debate so much as the very fact of Article 16.
On the second point, if we were to use Article 16, it would obviously be open to the EU to consider countermeasures if it wished. I do not want to get too far down the hypothetical road, but it is obviously a possibility. Of course, there has been a good deal of analysis of that. We would have to see what the situation was in those circumstances, but everyone has an interest in avoiding needless deterioration of trade and needless further economic difficulties for either side, at a time when supply chain and trade costs are so significantly raised already. That will obviously be a matter for the European Union, and we have to take it as such.
To return to my flow, regarding where we are in talks at the moment, we have had a series of technical discussions with the EU and continue to do so. These have been quite helpful, but they are nevertheless talks about talks; they are not yet a process that gets to the fundamentals, and we need to get into that. We must get into something more substantive as a matter of urgency.
A real negotiation does not mean the EU coming up with its own plans for solutions within the framework of the existing protocol and presenting them to us, take it or leave it. To be honest, I have been a bit concerned by a couple of the comments I have heard from Commission representatives in recent days, which seem to suggest they might be considering that way forward. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, picked up the comment by Maroš Šefčovič the other day, when he said:
“A renegotiation of the protocol … would mean instability, uncertainty and unpredictability in Northern Ireland.”
Unfortunately, we already have all those things in Northern Ireland. The question is: how do we move on from them? I do not take Commissioner Šefčovič’s words as a dismissal of our position. I take them as acknowledgement of it, but also as a fairly clear indication that there is more to be done. I urge the EU to think again on that point and consider working to reach genuine agreement with us so that we can put in place something that will last.
I am conscious of time and will wind up quickly. The negotiations need to begin soon. I will not put a timescale on that, but it needs to be urgent as the situation is urgent.
Finally, I would urge the Commission to be sensitive to the situation in Northern Ireland in its actions. The EU has a treaty with us, and as my noble friend Lord Moylan made very clear, that does not make it a part of the Government of Northern Ireland. We are very happy to receive representatives of the Commission in Northern Ireland at any point, so that they understand the situation there, but I gently suggest that they should be cautious in coming to public judgments about the situation, or suggesting it is for the EU itself to decide how to resolve it. I do not think that will make the situation calmer; it will make it more difficult.
The situation we face is complex and challenging, self-evidently, but there is still a real opportunity for us both to find durable arrangements. That is our intention and our wish, and that is where we will be putting all of our effort in the next few weeks—in arrangements that can win the confidence of communities in Northern Ireland. We are ready to seize this opportunity and we urge, as strongly as we can, the EU to do the same. Bold action is needed to build a new, sustainable consensus. Once again, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to the debate, and I look forward to continuing it, as I am sure we will, in many different fora in the future.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
I suppose the refrain of the afternoon is that we are where we are, which is almost at the end. I would like to add my thanks to all noble Lords who have taken part in what has been an absolutely absorbing and very high-quality debate, with views from every side of this very difficult set of problems.
I want to make three very brief observations. First, I note the sheer scale of the achievement of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and his committee in producing a punchy and very helpful report by consensus, knowing what strong feelings there were sitting around that table. I hope that the Government, when they read the output of that committee’s work now and in the future, will listen all the more carefully knowing where it has come from. It is a remarkable achievement. My second point was prompted in this debate by what the noble Lord, Lord Woods, said, right at the start: a grace period extension is not a solution. It was very heartening to hear the Minister grapple with this issue and say that dialogue is the way forward, and to see him look very determined indeed to get that dialogue going. It will not be an easy road. This brings me to my third point, one I think everyone has raised this afternoon, which is trust and the importance of it. Trust is the necessary fertilizer of any successful dialogue, and it is important to carry on building that trust. Every single thing communicates in trust, which needs to be built by all sides. It is not just the Government or just the EU; it is also the concern of other parties involved in this very difficult negotiation. Everyone here should be part of that process and, having said that, I beg to move.
Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)
I too am grateful for all those who have taken part in the debate this afternoon. I am grateful too, to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, for the answers he has given so far. I look forward to further answers in response to the committee’s report in the days to come. It has been a fascinating debate and it shows that you can discuss even the most difficult issues—and there are some pretty difficult issues here—with calmness, a certain dignity and, from time to time, a historical aperçu, if I may use that expression.
The committee will be looking at some quite tricky issues in the months ahead. Ahead of that, I have taken very careful note of the Gypsy’s warning issued by the noble Lord, Lord Empey.
Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Introductory Report (EUC Sub-Committee Report)
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Jay of Ewelme
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee Report from the Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Introductory report (2nd Report, HL Paper 55).
House of Lords
Introduction: Baroness Casey of Blackstock
Armed Forces: Gambling Disorders
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to legislate (1) to require annual medical screening questions related to gambling disorder in the military, and (2) to annually assess the prevalence of gambling disorder among members of the armed forces.
The Lord Bishop of Blackburn
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I ask the Question standing on the Order Paper in the name of my colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Goldie) (Con)
My Lords, this Government have no such plans. We take problem gambling seriously and monitor for the emergence of problem gambling instances within the Armed Forces. We provide welfare support and financial awareness training for our people. The Ministry of Defence also blocks gambling websites on its networks to reduce their accessibility. I am satisfied that our existing approach to awareness of gambling-related harm, where it is identified, is appropriate and proportionate.
The Lord Bishop of Blackburn
I thank the Minister for her reply. Compared with the United States of America, there is a real dearth of UK literature reviewing the gambling habits of serving personnel and veterans. What plans do the Government have to encourage, or possibly fund, academic research into this area as part of an evidence-led approach to reviewing the issue of problem gambling in the military?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
The right reverend Prelate will be aware that a study by Swansea University, sponsored by the Forces in Mind Trust, is currently taking place to understand the levels of gambling participation and attitudes to gambling in ex-service personnel. We have not seen the report, but we hope that it will enable officials within the MoD to evaluate the extent of gambling participation, its nature—that is, leisure pursuit by comparison with addiction—and if there is anything more that can be done.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, military veterans are eight times more likely to become problem gamblers than those in the general population. That is the view of the Army Headquarters Regional Command, in its headline facts on page 3 of its transition IPPD information sheet which itself is entitled Gambling—A Serious Risk to Military Personnel. The appropriate questions are: why are soldiers more vulnerable to gambling, why do military veterans have such a heightened prevalence of problem gambling as opposed to the general population, and what is the MoD doing to understand what lies behind that prevalence and how it can be tackled before the vulnerability forms?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
These are all pertinent questions, and we are looking closely, as I say, at what this University of Swansea study will disclose. There is anecdotal evidence that people who go into the Armed Forces may be innately more inclined to take risks and therefore may be of a disposition that predisposes them to acquiring a gambling addition rather than to recreational gambling. We try to inform and educate by activity within the Armed Forces, giving advice and support within the chain of command and from other agencies. We certainly try to support our veterans both in the transition programme for them to re-enter civilian life and then through, for example, Veterans UK’s veterans welfare service and the Office for Veterans’ Affairs.
Lord Foster of Bath (LD)
My Lords, internationally the evidence is very clear that gambling problems are greater among military veterans than they are among the general population yet, as we have heard, the Minister is unclear whether that applies in the UK. While I welcome and look forward to the Swansea report, does she recognise that there would great merit in getting the King’s cohort study, which is already being funded by the Office for Veterans’ Affairs, to also look at this? Will she also consider whether some of the very welcome additional funds for the Veterans Mental Health and Wellbeing Service should be directed to help veterans with gambling problems?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
I agree with the noble Lord that it is important to know whether there is a problem and, if there is, its nature and where it is to be found before trying to deploy solutions and remedies to address it. He will be aware that every year the Armed Forces continuous attitude survey is conducted. It includes a question on debt management. There is a free text box at the end of the survey that personnel are encouraged to fill out with any issues they wish to raise outside the survey question set. Gambling has never been raised as an issue.
Lord Robathan (Con)
My Lords, I know the excellent work done by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans on gambling. I support him very much in what he has been trying to do about online gambling and advertisements for gambling. However, in this case, notwithstanding what the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said, I think it would be quite unfair to suggest that soldiers who are doing their duty by this nation should be subjected to special tests, and that is what the Question says. Of course we must look into mental health problems and indeed extra problems with gambling—if there are any—among veterans, but veterans are no longer subject to military discipline.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My noble friend echoes the point made by the noble Lords, Lord Foster and Lord Browne of Ladyton. As I indicated, we are anxious to ascertain what we can. Your Lordships will understand that there is always a problem with the collection and collation of data for a variety of reasons. We shall await with interest the report from the University of Swansea and look at that carefully. I have also indicated that the Armed Forces continuous attitude survey could certainly be a vehicle to explore further if we feel there are concerns about the activities and habits of serving personnel.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, the military has been gambling for hundreds of years but it is much easier now because it can all be done online. We now also know the dangers to an individual’s mental health. Are individuals encouraged to seek help within their units? This really should be from independent support staff and not from any organisations that sit within the military.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
I seek to reassure the noble Baroness by telling her that new recruits to the Armed Forces receive comprehensive briefings on the importance of financial security and the values and standards expected of them, during which the issue of gambling is raised. They are signposted to a full range of support and assistance. She may also be aware that we rely on experts in the field, including the Royal British Legion’s Money Force initiative, which aims to assist all service personnel, their partners, families and dependants to be better equipped to manage their money.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
Building on what my noble friend Lord Browne said, when he quoted an Armed Forces paper that said that gambling was a very serious problem for Armed Forces personnel. I think the House will want to hear from the Minister how the Government will collect evidence about the prevalence of gambling, when that evidence will be available and what they are going to do about it. Here is one suggestion. Perhaps the Minister could outline to us how the Ministry of Defence is working with DCMS on its gambling White Paper to ensure that the MoD and DCMS are working together on that serious issue.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
I have already outlined a variety of activities and range of support measures we deploy to help both serving Armed Forces personnel and veterans. The noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, referred to evidence from a previous University of Swansea study about the higher prevalence of gambling among veterans. We are conscious of that and, on the basis of the information we have, we do everything we can to signpost support.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, while we would certainly not want to curtail the recreational activities of our military personnel, gambling is extremely addictive. What conversations have the MoD had with its American counterparts about the effectiveness of the US military gambling screening and research programme, as required by the 2019 US National Defense Authorization Act?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
We in the MoD believe that we are already taking many of the measures that the United States has enacted and deployed. We are doing that in a variety of ways, as I have said. Part of it is done within the services themselves, but an important point was raised about servicepeople’s confidence in speaking through the chain of command: there might be an inhibition about doing that. They can then access the independent expertise of the Royal British Legion. We have a wide range of support measures to assist where a problem pattern of gambling emerges.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, all supplementary questions have been asked and we move to the next Question.
Transport: Hydrogen
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Rooker
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential of (1) hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and (2) internal combustion engines fuelled by hydrogen, as alternatives to battery-powered electric vehicles.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, the Government’s recently published hydrogen strategy and transport decarbonisation plan both make clear that hydrogen has a key role to play in decarbonising transport, particularly in areas where batteries cannot reach. Our support is therefore focused on the use of hydrogen in heavier road vehicles, such as trucks, buses and coaches, as well as in rail, ships and planes.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Answer, but are the Government looking at an alternative to the rush to battery-powered cars—in particular, to avoid range anxiety and electricity overload? Can the excellent government hydrogen strategy be used to avoid putting all our eggs in one technical basket, so that zero emissions need not, as Jeremy Clarkson pointed out recently, lead to the end of the internal combustion engine? Finally, will the HydroFLEX train developed by Birmingham University be used at COP 26, and how about a flight for the key leaders at COP 26 in the ZeroAvia commercial aircraft developed at Cheltenham airport?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The noble Lord is certainly making the most of his Question today. It is important to say that the Government are not putting all our eggs in a single zero-emission basket. We take a technologically neutral approach to meeting our ambitions —we are not outcome-neutral, of course: the end goal must be zero emissions from the tailpipe—and therefore many of our programmes invest in both electric and hydrogen systems. For example, the £23 million Hydrogen for Transport programme is funding the deployment of about 300 hydrogen vehicles and six new refuelling stations.
Turning to the noble Lord’s question on HydroFLEX, Network Rail has been working with Porterhouse, a British company, alongside the University of Birmingham, and the HydroFLEX train will be on show at COP 26; indeed, it will be running daily on a loop out of Glasgow Central.
Lord Bamford (Con)
My Lords, I refer the House to my entry in the register. Also, my son, Jo, is chairman of Ryze Hydrogen, a green hydrogen business. The UK Hydrogen Strategy recognises that the hydrogen combustion engine could play a key role in decarbonisation. This is most welcome. My noble friend will be aware of my company’s prototype JCB machines, which are powered, with zero emissions, by hydrogen combustion engines. However, unlike hydrogen-powered cars or diesel-powered machines, those hydrogen-powered machines are not licensed to travel to and from job sites on the public highway. Indeed, the same applies to hydrogen farm tractors. What steps are being taken by Her Majesty’s Government to rectify that situation?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I congratulate my noble friend and his company on their world-beating innovation, and I look forward to visiting his facility soon to see it in action. My department is working very quickly to update our regulations to create GB type approval schemes for all types of vehicles and engines following our exit from the European Union. The first step along that road will be a consultation to be published in the autumn. However, in some circumstances, it can be possible to grant a vehicle special order to provide some access to roads. I am happy to look into that further.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, the UK Hydrogen Strategy and transport decarbonisation plan both highlight the potential for hydrogen and electric aviation. Given that the UK is truly a leader in the world in this technology, can the Minister set out what steps the Government are taking to accelerate the R&D of that technology in the UK and what consideration she has given to airports acting as hydrogen hubs to generate and support more UK-manufactured hydrogen vehicles, planes and ships?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The noble Baroness is quite right: aviation is one of the modes that we think will have a great future in using hydrogen for propulsion. She mentioned airports, and I know that work is being done on whether some of the tenders used at airports can be switched to hydrogen. Obviously, a significant amount of torque is needed to drag planes across the tarmac. She will know that we consulted over the summer on jet zero as a whole. We anticipate that many of the responses will cover hydrogen. We will be collating those responses and looking at them in detail, but I reassure her that significant funding is going into R&D for many sources, be that for planes or the vehicles in airports.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
Britain has three major manufacturers producing zero-emission buses, including hydrogen fuel cell buses. If those manufacturers are to be able to compete in international markets, they need the stimulus of a large domestic market. The Scottish SNP-Green alliance has proposed a target to scrap half of Scotland’s diesel buses by 2023, to be replaced by zero-emission buses. Would Her Majesty’s Government consider pursuing a similar objective throughout the UK by mandating local authorities and bus companies to purchase zero-emission vehicles?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I could happily spend many hours answering that question, but I will not on this occasion. The Government have a target of supporting 4,000 zero-emission buses by the end of this Parliament, and we are about to start a further consultation on the phase-out date for new diesel buses. We are investing £120 million in the ZEBRA scheme—the Zero Emission Bus Regional Areas scheme—which does precisely what the noble Lord is asking: it encourages local authorities and the bus operators in their area to switch over from diesel buses to either battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell buses.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
It costs around £1 million to install a hydrogen delivery system, so at this stage, at least, the Government need to encourage companies that run fleets of vehicles—not necessarily just heavy vehicles—to utilise hydrogen. What are the Government doing to incentivise and encourage companies that run vehicle fleets to take up this option for zero emissions?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Actually, the focus at the moment is on making sure we have the right data and information from R&D to further develop and commercialise large-scale hydrogen refuelling systems. I mentioned previously the £23 million Hydrogen for Transport programme, which is looking at refuelling infrastructure alongside the vehicles themselves. We also have the zero-emission road freight trials, which are trialling hydrogen among a group of vehicles—it is not only about the infrastructure but about making sure that the range is appropriate for the vehicle in which it is going to be used.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
The Minister has made reference to rail and funding. Trains powered by hydrogen are already in traffic in Germany, and successful trials have been undertaken in at least four other mainland European countries. What are the Government’s objectives, and what are the timescales for that funding for the development and introduction of hydrogen trains in the UK?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The Government have invested £4 million through Innovate UK’s “first of a kind” competition for new traction technologies for hydrogen and rail. We have funded both hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen combustion-engine alternatives for rail. The timeline for introduction is unclear at the moment because it depends on wider considerations re electrification, but we know that the Network Rail-led transport decarbonisation network strategy estimated that possibly around 10% of non-electrified tracks might be better used with hydrogen for propulsion.
The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the APPG on Hydrogen. Does my noble friend agree that it is most encouraging to see that momentum is building across industry, both in the UK and overseas, to develop engine-based solutions using hydrogen? Will Her Majesty’s Government commit to supporting UK engine manufacturers to further explore the potential for this technology, thus creating considerable numbers of jobs to bolster our economy?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I absolutely agree with my noble friend, and that is precisely what we are doing with these many different pots of money, which are either modal focused or net-zero focused as a whole in terms of developing ways forward for all types of use of hydrogen. Another example is the £14.6 million that we have funded jointly with industry on a project to develop a combustion engine to cater for medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicles. This project is led by Cummins, and it is really good that we have the private sector involved. It is forecast to save 17.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister recognise that there will not be sufficient hydrogen to fuel heavy transport vehicles, let alone private cars, unless we accelerate the production of hydrogen through attracting more private capital into the sector? Will the Government incentivise such investment by revising the renewable transport fuel obligation to cover all green hydrogen, not just that connected directly to a renewable generator?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Yes, the Government will. The Department for Transport consulted earlier this year on measures to make the supply of renewable hydrogen into transport more cost-effective within the RTFO. We will publish a response on this consultation. I have to say to the noble Lord that I do not think that is going to be enough. We will be focused on the generation of both blue and green hydrogen. As he will know from the hydrogen strategy, the Government will be consulting on hydrogen business models and the net-zero hydrogen fund so we can figure out how we are going to unlock the greatest amount of private investment using the £240 million the Government will invest.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed.
Social Care: Family Carers
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Pitkeathley
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what consideration they have given to providing extra support for family carers given the delay to social care reforms.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
On behalf of my noble friend, and with her permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in her name on the Order Paper.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con)
My Lords, we recognise that family carers play a vital role. When we announced an additional £4.5 billion over three years for social care, it included a commitment to take steps to ensure unpaid carers have the support, advice and respite they need. We will publish a White Paper later this year with more detail. The Health and Care Bill also places a duty on integrated care boards to promote the involvement of unpaid carers.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister has acknowledged that our 1.6 million unpaid carers are reporting high levels of fatigue and stress and are worn out and exhausted by caring during Covid-19. On average, carers have lost 25 hours a month of crucial support over the past 18 months, and 81% are providing more care. Essential daily support services for them and their loved ones are still not up and running in many areas. Was it not therefore reasonable for carers to have expected immediate funding support from the Prime Minister’s health and social care funding announcements last week? The situation is desperate and needs addressing now, not just with more kind words and another “White Paper tomorrow” promise.
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I do acknowledge the pressures on unpaid carers and pay tribute to the incredible contribution they have made during these very difficult 18 months. We are continuing to work with local authorities, in collaboration with ADASS and MHCLG, to support local authorities in meeting their duties, particularly in the area of respite, which the noble Baroness rightly pointed out. We have also made contributions to Carers Trust, Carers UK and to “See, Hear, Respond” services to support unpaid carers. In the long term, our commitment is to social care reform and the financial proposition that we will bring forward in the White Paper.
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, would my noble friend confirm that he just said there would be only £1.5 billion a year going to social care from the large increase in national insurance? Can he confirm that nearly half of that will be absorbed by the need to pay for the extension of free social care to those with valuable homes? That means that nothing will be left to help domestic carers.
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, the maths that my noble friend has done is a little bit premature. The White Paper will come out later this year; it will spell out the precise financial arrangements, and I am looking forward to that.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, the Minister has already indicated an understanding that many carers sacrifice a huge part of their lives in trying to care for a loved one. Many of the community support services that used to be available are no longer available. When these arrangements break down and a crisis occurs, it is understandable that the only option left is to call an ambulance, which places increased pressure on the health service. Will the Minister champion a new approach, which is this: “Protect the NHS by supporting carers”?
Lord Bethell (Con)
Yes, I would endorse that sentiment. That has been one of the learnings of the pandemic. It is instinctively true in any case, and the evidence base during the pandemic was quite right. They are interlinked; that is one of the reasons we are bringing forward a Health and Social Care Bill that brings both services much closer together and brings a responsibility on the ICSs to combine health and social care at the same time. Our population-wide measures will try to bring those care responsibilities much closer together, as the noble Lord suggested.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)
My Lords, we will now have a virtual contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, the Disabled Children’s Partnership reports that parents of disabled children say that two-thirds were not able to access care at home during the pandemic. In the two years prior to the pandemic, large numbers of respite care beds for disabled children had already been shut down. Given that none of the new social care levy is targeted towards disabled children and young people, can the Minister say whether urgent funding will be provided for this vulnerable and too-often forgotten group, where unpaid carers are often on duty 24/7?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I do recognise the problem: 23% of carers—1.3 million—provide care for 50 hours or more a week. That is an absolutely astonishing figure, and I pay tribute to the contribution they make. The overall contribution by carers is around £56 billion a year. We cannot undervalue that contribution in either emotional, care or financial terms. The precise allocation of funding for this new financial package is not yet confirmed. When it is, I will make sure that the reasonable points the noble Baroness made are heard clearly in the department.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, in his first Answer, the Minister mentioned the Health and Care Bill and a more general duty to promote the interests of underpaid carers. Can he tell me why, at the same time, the Government are getting rid of the current provision in law of a carer’s right to an assessment when they take on a new caring role and the right to be consulted on whether they are willing and able to care? It is a crucial right of carers to have a proper assessment. Why is it being taken away?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I completely agree that the carer’s assessment is the building block of our system. It is incredibly important; we do a lot of work to encourage more carers to get it. I do not know specifically about the point that the noble Lord makes on this additional component, but I would be glad to enter into correspondence with him on it. The broad principle of the importance of the carer’s assessment is one with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
My Lords, research shows that, pre pandemic, 600 people a day had no choice but to leave work to manage their unpaid caring responsibilities and that, since Covid began, an additional 2.8 million workers now juggle work and unpaid care. Having access to carer’s leave would help millions of carers and support many of them to remain in work alongside their unpaid caring responsibilities. When will the Government publish their response to their consultation on carers’ leave, which closed on 3 August last year?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I recognise the challenge referred to by the noble Baroness. Some 2.9 million carers are employed; that is more than half of all carers. One can only imagine the pressure that they feel trying to juggle their roles as carers and employees. The consultation has been tied up by the pandemic, but we are keen to get a response out soon. Now that we have announced this package, it makes that all the easier. I very much look forward to bringing the response to the House.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bhatia, was not present in the Chamber so all supplementary Questions have been asked. We will now move on to the next Question.
Human Rights Priority Countries
Lord Collins of Highbury
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what recent representations the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has made to its counterparts in the human rights priority countries listed in its report Human Rights and Democracy Report 2020, published on 8 July; and what assessment they have made of the potential for inserting clauses on human rights into future trade agreements with human rights priority countries.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, we regularly raise human rights with our counterparts in human rights priority countries and multilateral fora. Trade will not come at the expense of human rights. Both are important parts of our relationships with other countries, including human rights priority countries. We continue to encourage all states to uphold international human rights obligations and hold those who violate human rights to account, including by using powers provided by the Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, a lot of promises were made on human rights during the passage of the then Trade Bill, committing the FCDO and the DIT to work together. From the evidence we have seen so far, that is not happening. Labour’s policy report, Putting Workers First, which was published at this week’s TUC, shows that the FCDO’s concerns over workers’ rights in Colombia were not taken into account during trade negotiations. When will we see the Government keep their word? What steps will the FCDO take to ensure that future trade agreements contain human rights protections?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, as I said in my initial Answer, we will not pursue trade to the exclusion of human rights. We regard both as an important part of deep, mature and wide-ranging relationships with all our trade partners, including those in human rights priority countries. In line with our international obligations, the Government will continue to ensure a high level of protection for labour standards in new trade agreements as well.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, the report is silent on how stabilisation clauses in foreign direct investment agreements reduce the capacity of many developing countries to protect human rights. Through such clauses, corporations demand compensation if host Governments change tax, environmental or workers’ rights laws and prevent local courts adjudicating on disputes. Can the Minister explain how the Government will ensure that the clauses imposed by UK companies do not violate human rights?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, we have put the protection of human rights around the world at the heart of what we do, including through the publication of the integrated review and our presidency of the G7. On labour standards, the Government share the public’s high regard for worker protections and have made it clear that we will not compromise them; in fact, we have embedded labour objectives in the UK’s approach to proposed new trade agreements with the US, Australia and New Zealand.
Lord Alderdice (LD)
My Lords, I appreciate that this is a difficult area, but I want to press the Minister a little further. In his Question, the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, asked about inserting clauses into trade agreements. The Minister did not really respond to that. Is this because the Government have, in principle or for some other reason, an objection to inserting those clauses? How can we hope to police and implement commitments if they cannot be written down in the agreements?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, the Government are clear that more trade does not have to come at the expense of human rights. Our annual report makes that clear. We will continue to show global leadership in encouraging all states to uphold international human rights obligations. Our international obligations and commitments, including on human rights, are always of paramount importance when we make decisions on our trading relations. The Government will continue to take a balanced and proportionate approach, delivering the best outcome for the UK, maximising the benefits of trade and ensuring that we stay true to our core values.
Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)
My Lords, I quote the report on South Sudan:
“Conflict-related … rape and abduction of women and girls for sexual slavery, continued to be prevalent.”
What representations has the FCDO made to its counterparts there since the laudable visit by Her Royal Highness the Countess of Wessex last year to champion the eradication of sexual and gender-based violence, and with what results?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, we continue to make representations on this important issue. Most recently, UK officials in Juba raised human rights concerns with the deputy Foreign Minister on Friday last week, as well as with the Minister for Presidential Affairs on 16 August. We also continue to press for human rights progress, supported by robust monitoring, at the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council, as well as through funding programmes to support victims and tackle the drivers of violence.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
My Lords, although I have huge sympathy with the motivation behind the Question, does the Minister agree that human rights clauses in trade deals work best where there is high interdependence and leverage on the part of the asking party—in other words, the UK—as opposed to the trading partner? In the example of China, which is also on the list, that simply is not the case. Can the Minister tell the House how the Government are working with the United States and the EU, which are the only two powers that would have any leverage with China?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, the UK has a strong history of promoting human rights and its values globally with countries of all sizes. By having strong economic relationships with countries, we are able to have more open discussions on a range of issues, including human rights. On China, I point to the action that we have taken in relation to human rights concerns in Xinjiang. Indeed, since their inception in July last year, we have used powers provided by our Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations to impose sanctions on 78 people involved in serious human rights violations or abuses around the world.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that the wonderful Belarusian musician, Maria Kalesnikava—a nominee for the Council of Europe’s Václav Havel Human Rights Prize—has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for being one of the three brave women who led the protest against the dictator Lukashenko? Will the Minister please ask the Foreign Secretary to make representations to the Belarusian authorities for her immediate release?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, we continue to raise our concerns directly with the Belarusian authorities via their embassy in London and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Minsk. We continue to speak out in international fora, including on individual cases. I will certainly pass on the noble Lord’s message and update him in writing on the individual case he mentions. We continue to follow the situation in Belarus closely and attend trials, and we have requested access to political prisoners too.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister recall that, when we left the European Union, it was said that there would be plenty of opportunities in the Commonwealth? Given that there are Commonwealth countries that do not recognise LGBT rights, and indeed prosecute and sometimes persecute gay men and women, what sort of attitude will the Government take towards a trade deal with Nigeria?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, sadly some EU member states also do not have an unblemished record when it comes to these important rights. LGBT rights are an important part of human rights, and they feature heavily in our Annual Report; they are exactly part of the concerns and values that we wish to uphold as we trade internationally.
Viscount Waverley (CB)
My Lords, respect for human rights exemplifies a civilised society, and I wonder whether the Minister might take the question of human rights one step further. Did the British Government receive any indication from our ambassador, or any other forms of intelligence, of a programme of torture and other atrocities being conducted at the Bagram base, in Afghanistan? Can he assure Parliament that no UK agency, official or military personnel was ever complicit in any such programme? Would he agree that such actions would be illegal, reprehensible, send messaging of double standards and could come to haunt the West, as retribution might be inevitable, possibly directed at those who remain in the country or increasing the likelihood of a terror campaign in the West?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The Afghan national detention facility in Parwan was an Afghan-managed and operated facility on the US military base at Bagram and was captured by the Taliban on 15 August. The Government unreservedly condemn the use of torture and remain committed to their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, including the UN convention against torture. All UK counterterrorism co-operation with the Afghan Government is suspended. All co-operation before August was in strict compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law and subject to the guidance on providing overseas security and justice assistance.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says that climate change threatens the effective enjoyment of a range of human rights, including those to life, water and sanitation, food, health, housing, self-determination, culture and development. There are widespread reports that appear to confirm that binding temperature commitments under the Paris Agreement have been cut from the Australian free trade deal. How can that be reconciled with any commitment to human rights?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, the main elements of the free trade agreement with Australia were signed by the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister of Australia at a meeting in Downing Street in June. A final agreement in principle was published on 17 June and is available on GOV.UK. The deal will help us better to address global challenges together, including combating climate change. Australia and the UK have committed to a chapter on trade and the environment, which will contain provisions affirming commitments under multilateral environment agreements, including the Paris Agreement, and also to maintain and effectively enforce domestic environmental laws and policies across a broad range of issues. We have also committed to undertaking co-operative activities, including those targeted at key technologies in the transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed.
Environment Bill
Monday 13th September 2021
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Environment Act 2021 View all Environment Act 2021 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 43-IV Fourth marshalled list for Report - (13 Sep 2021)
15:50 - Division on Amendment 40 - Ayes: 203 / Noes: 167 - Amendment 40 agreed.
18:17 - Division on Amendment 52 - Ayes: 52 / Noes: 174 - Amendment 52 disagreed.
18:32 - Division on Amendment 53 - Ayes: 189 / Noes: 177 - Amendment 53 agreed.
20:05 - Division on Amendment 60 - Ayes: 184 / Noes: 147 - Amendment 60 agreed.
“(b) are made of plastic or any other single use material, and”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would broaden the proposed power in Clause 55 to enable regulations to be made about charges on all single use items, including plastic. This would provide a tool for Ministers to address single use culture and prevent existing materials being replaced by alternatives which cause similar levels of environmental harm.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I am moving Amendment 40 in my name and that of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross. This amendment broadens out the powers in Schedule 9, which currently allow charges to be levied against sellers of single-use plastic items. Our amendment would make it clear that a new charging regime should be for all single-use materials, not just plastic. It would ensure that single-use plastics are not simply replaced with other single-use materials that also cause environmental damage.
This is a simple but important amendment. It goes to the heart of the throwaway culture. There is a real concern that an inability to charge for single-use alternatives to single-use plastic might see the market switch to those alternatives rather than driving down consumption. We have seen evidence that the switch from plastic to single-use alternatives made from wood, paper or compostable materials is already happening, even when reusable options are already available. Far from helping to save the planet, these materials risk adding to our carbon emissions and depleting precious materials and forests elsewhere. For example, the Green Alliance has already calculated that switching consumption of plastic packaging to other materials used for packaging could triple carbon emissions.
These concerns were echoed by the businesses involved in the Aldersgate Group, which have written to noble Lords to say that the risk of plastic substitution in the Bill, as written, could undermine the drive towards a more circular economy and ending the throwaway society. The Commons EFRA report of 2019 concluded that
“reduction is the most important way to reduce waste, and … A fundamental shift away from all single use food and drink packaging, plastic or otherwise, is vital”.
We believe that the current wording in Schedule 9 is flawed and will encourage behaviours which the Government have not intended. If the Government are serious about resource efficiency and the circular economy, they must address this anomaly.
In response to a debate in Committee, the Minister stressed that plastic was a particularly pernicious material which persists for hundreds of years, and that this is why particular measures were necessary to address its unnecessary use. Of course we recognise that, but these provisions, as they stand, address only one element of the problem and do not address the inevitable move towards substitution which is bound to occur when charges for single-use plastics are introduced.
The Minister has also said that the Government already have wider powers to tackle alternatives to plastic through other measures, such as the extended producer responsibility scheme. But as we debated in Committee, the introduction of the extended producer responsibility scheme is already delayed, with the first such scheme on packaging already two years behind. Would it not be easier and more straightforward to introduce this simple amendment, which is properly scoped and provides for a precise power?
It is also worth noting that the delegated powers memorandum says of Clause 54:
“While these powers would be new, the provisions are modelled on existing powers to make regulations about carrier bag charges”.
Nevertheless, it stresses that these are new powers. Our amendment would simply extend these powers to all single-use materials.
In a previous debate we highlighted the need for a holistic approach to tackling the throwaway society and encouraging reuse of materials. This is exactly what is needed here, and it is what our amendment would achieve. I therefore hope that the Minister will reflect seriously on our amendment and commit to bringing back a government amendment along these lines at Third Reading. But if he is not prepared to make a concession along these lines, I give notice that I am minded to press for a vote on Amendment 40.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on bringing forward the amendment, and also my noble friend the Minister for the work that the Government have done in this regard. May I take this opportunity to press my noble friend on one issue? The Government have been quite clear on single-use plastics and a potential returnable bottle scheme, as well as cotton buds. I am not clear what the position is on wet wipes, which I know cause huge problems for water companies and can block cisterns quite badly. Another growing problem, which may not be addressed by this amendment but appears elsewhere in the Bill, is fat balls from cooking that uses large amounts of fat. Where are we are on those issues?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise to offer support to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others, on this cross-party, broadly backed amendment and to encourage noble Lords to press it to a vote if we do not see progress.
We are in a situation rather like the “dieselgate” scandal, where we saw encouragement of a shift to diesel vehicles, with severe deleterious effects on human and environmental health. Those effects were multiplied by corruption and fraud in the car companies, but there was an underlying error in the decision being made. We need systems thinking to look holistically at the environmental impacts of laws, regulations and policies. The waste pyramid tells us that the first thing we should be doing is reducing the use of all materials—plastic is particularly pernicious, but all materials have an environmental cost—and then looking to reuse, with recycling a poor third choice.
It is important that the House offers strong support for this amendment in light of the article that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. We were told—indeed, we seemed to be pressured by the Government—that too many amendments might embarrass Alok Sharma as chair of the COP 26 talks. Well, it is terribly important that we acknowledge—I hope the Minister will—that just as a puppy is not just for Christmas, the Environment Bill is not just for COP. A strong Environment Bill to show the world at COP is a positive side-effect, but what we are actually doing is creating the framework for the next decade and beyond in the UK. The Government’s focus must be on getting the strongest possible Environment Bill, as has clearly been the focus of this House.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Colville has today had to go to a family funeral, so he asked me to deliver his speech. I am very happy to do so, and I absolutely support this amendment. It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and I completely agree with her about the shocking revelations in the press yesterday.
My noble friend Lord Colville says that many of our single-use items, particularly drinks containers, are made of aluminium. Not only does the manufacture of aluminium create 1% of global carbon emissions but the mining of bauxite, from which aluminium is refined, leaves behind a toxic waste called red mud. Its high alkalinity is extremely corrosive, damaging soil and destroying life forms. Aluminium smelters generate an additional 150 million tonnes of red mud each year. We must work to reduce such emissions; I believe this amendment would do that.
On the first day of Report, the Minister said:
“Globally, we extract three times the amount of resources from nature as we did in 1970, and that figure is set to double again within a generation”.—[Official Report, 6/9/21; col. 706.]
The Bill has so many laudable aspects, but it still does not bear down hard enough on the problem of our excessive and wasteful use of the planet’s resources and our careless discarding of single-use items. The attention the Bill gives to recycling is crucial and very welcome, but I urge the Minister to be more ambitious.
Like many noble Lords, I welcome the power in Schedule 9 to charge for single-use plastic items, but the Government already have plans to confront much of that problem, through the existing ban on plastic stirrers and cotton buds and the launch of a consultation this autumn on banning plastic cutlery and plates. If these are successful, the power in Schedule 9 to charge for single-use plastics will hardly be needed, but it does not deal with the threat of the substitution of single-use plastics with aluminium, wood or other precious materials.
The extended power put forward in the amendment for a charge to cover plastics or any other single-use material would deal with the problem quickly and reduce our resource use dramatically. When asked to support the amendment in Committee, the Minister responded that it was not necessary and said:
“Items that are not captured by Clause 54 could be captured by other measures, such as EPR or resource efficiency.”—[Official Report, 30/6/21; col. 914.]
Resource efficiency can do much to make producers responsible for the reduction in the use of raw materials, but to implement a scheme for each category of single-use item will take an amazing amount of work to design and a great deal of time and difficulty to implement. Look at the excellent ecodesign that introduces resource efficiency into energy-related products; it has taken four years of consultation and co-operation with stakeholders to get to a final scheme. That is a long time when we are threatened with the facts.
I am concerned that, as the Government progresses through resource efficiency schemes for big product areas such as textiles, they are never going to get round to the efficiency of wooden stirrers or paper plates. So will the Minister explain why he believes the amendment would not deal with this problem much more quickly and efficiently?
Wildlife and Countryside Link, representing a wide range of environmental organisations from CPRE to Keep Britain Tidy, said in its response to the consultation that there needs to be
“a clear focus on reduction and waste prevention to meet the UK’s ambitious climate change targets.”
The EPR policy could change its focus to emphasise further reduction of single-use items, or the Government could just accept this amendment, which would quickly and effectively mitigate many of these concerns. I ask noble Lords for their support on the amendment, because I do not want the good work of the Bill to be undermined by unintended consequences.
That is my noble friend Lord Colville’s excellent speech, which I was very pleased to deliver. Before I sit down, I would like to add a couple of points myself about the involvement of the fossil fuel industry in the world of plastics, which I think is often missed. The raw materials used to make fossil fuels and plastics are one and the same, but demand for fossil fuels is now on the decline in many parts of the world, so we see these two industries coming closer together. In fact, in the face of decreasing profit margins and the increasing demand for renewable energy, fossil fuels are finding new ways to keep themselves afloat—and, unfortunately, they have found plastic production.
Plastics are the fossil fuel industry’s new plan B. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels: we extract oil or gas from land and the seabed and transport it to something that is known as a cracker. Crackers are plants that use huge amounts of heat and pressure to break fossil fuels into the molecules that become the building blocks of polymers. For instance, propane gets cracked into propylene, which is turned into polypropylene, and then you have a plastic bottle. In the past, the industries were fairly separate, but now they are trying to integrate. Both face challenges.
According to UNEP, more than 127 countries have introduced regulation, but way more is needed. Every day it seems we can learn a new thing about what bad stuff plastics do. I did not know until recently that plastic aids the transmission of antibiotic-resistant genes, or that traces of plastic are found in human wombs—so babies can be swimming in microplastics. No country has fully banned it to my knowledge. There are so many kinds of single-use plastic that it is like cutting one of Medusa’s snakes just for three more heads to pop up. But we need something more systemic, and the Bill puts us on the right foot. We need to halt subsidies for petrochemicals, internalise the cost of plastics through taxes and extended producer responsibility, and consider the climate and biodiversity aspects of the plastics lifecycle before we grant permits for the construction and operation of these plants. We need to pass this amendment, and I am very happy to support it.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I have campaigned against plastic and support most of the Government’s plans because of the permanent damage that plastic can cause, especially to our seas and rivers. I support the wide powers that the Government are taking in this area. However, focusing on single use is not sensible. I remember that, when I was in retail, a single bag for life needed to be used 80 times to match the efficiency of the light single-use plastic bag. We also need to think about the consumer. I feel there will be similar nonsenses if we try to ban the single use of other items. What is wrong with a coloured paper straw or a paper spoon to eat an ice cream? It will rot afterwards. I am also happy to see cans of Coke, especially if they can be recycled, as they would be if we made it a great deal easier for people to recycle. So I may be in a minority of one, but I think this amendment goes too far.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, on single-use plastic and other single-use material. As I indicated last week, we have become a throwaway culture and seem unable to motivate ourselves out of this. We as a country, therefore, need additional help for this to happen.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, has introduced this amendment with her usual depth of knowledge and experience. On Monday, we had an extremely informative debate, with contributions on a number of aspects of the harm caused by different types of plastic to the environment. There are amendments for later days, when we will return to some of these aspects. Then, as now, we will refer to other single-use items that cause harm to us and our environment. Great care is needed in finding alternatives to single-use plastics so that we do not create a greater problem of carbon creation. The problem is with the throwaway culture, not with plastic alone.
According to a 2018 study by the Danish Ministry for Environment, environmental and social impacts associated with the paper supply chain are considerable, and include ozone depletion, human and ecosystem toxicity, and air and water pollution. The study found that a paper bag would have to be used 43 times to have an overall impact lower than that of the average plastic bag. Although its degeneration rate is far higher than that of plastic, it is the creation of the paper that has the carbon impact. It is important to be clear that we cannot move away from plastics to other non-sustainable, one-off alternatives, such as paper, without fully assessing the consequences.
The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, speaking on behalf of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and in her own right, made some very powerful points. The Government are currently consulting on banning further single-use plastic items, such as plates and cutlery. What are the Government intending to use in place of plastic? Will it be bamboo? What effect will using bamboo in this way have on the supply and growing of bamboo? This is just one example.
I support completely the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. We as a nation should have regard to the overall impact of single-use items, such as disposable nappies, which we will debate later. If we are to be a world leader on environmental issues, as the Government want us to be, reducing the use and impact of single-use items is key. We on these Benches fully support this vital amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, which will ensure that the overall impact of the Environment Bill has a chance at being successful.
The Minister of State, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. The Government are committed to promoting resource efficiency and moving towards a circular economy. Before I start addressing Amendment 40, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, I feel obliged to add my comments on the article that appeared yesterday in the Telegraph. I do not think any names were attached to the article, so it is very hard to know who to take this up with, but it certainly seemed to me to be almost entirely mischievous and not true. We do want to get this Bill done by COP 26—we do not have to, but we want to, for obvious reasons that we discussed in Committee—and we feel that it is in the national and international interest that we should pass the Bill in the strongest possible form before COP 26. No one involved in the passage of this Bill would put their name, privately or publicly, to the comments that appeared in the newspaper.
Turning to Amendment 40, the noble Baroness is absolutely right to highlight the impact of materials other than plastic on the environment. A number of other noble Lords have done the same. I will not go into all the reasons why that matters, as we have covered the issue well during the passage of the Bill, and it has been covered again today. We know that our reckless and wasteful use of resources is putting the natural world under intolerable pressure. However, there is a particular and acute need to reduce consumption of single-use plastic and the particular and enormous environmental harm that it causes. That is why we have included specific powers in the Bill to impose charges on single-use plastics. These will provide a powerful and targeted tool to specifically address the issue of single- use plastics by directly incentivising consumers to use fewer of them.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, since we have raised the subject of the Telegraph, I want to add my quick twopenneth to that. I thank the Minister for what he said. I think we are all pleased to hear that he disassociated himself from its comments, because it is fairly clear to everyone involved in the Bill that we have been dealing with it in good faith and that nobody is trying to score any political points. I would also say that we are working to a timetable that the Government themselves set, and there is indeed plenty of time if we work together to get the Bill through in time for COP 26. We all understand the advantages of that, but we want to go there with a Bill that we genuinely feel proud of. I think that that is what everyone here is attempting to do.
I thank all noble Lords for their comments. My amendment is very simple and is about substitution. Businesses themselves are beginning to flag up and identify their concerns about that. That is why they have written to noble Lords on this subject, because they are seeing that this is the likely conclusion if we focus just on plastics. As noble Lords have said, there is a real danger of unintended consequences if we are not careful, so let us make sure that we drive down the use of single use overall. That is the way to deliver a reduction in consumption. We will do that only if we have a consistent approach across the board.
Either the powers already exist to deliver the ban on not only single-use plastics but other materials, in which case I do not quite see why Schedule 9 has been put in the Bill in the first place, or new and more simplified powers are needed, as per Schedule 9, in which case that is what we are attempting to do: to add our amendment to that schedule to make sure that the powers apply equally to plastics and plastic substitution. We have rehearsed the arguments as to why that is very well. So if we are in favour of the circular economy and reducing consumption, one step towards doing that is by supporting our Amendment 40. I therefore would like to test the opinion of the House.
“(7) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament, and publish, the guidance.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires guidance under inserted section 45AZE of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 concerning the separation of waste to be laid before Parliament and published.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I am grateful for the efforts of my noble friend Lord Blencathra and other members of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. My Bill team and I were greatly reassured by the assessment that the committee made of the Environment Bill, and I agree that there is an opportunity for us to go further. That is why I have accepted all the DPRRC’s recommendations and am pleased to table these amendments.
These technical amendments will increase parliamentary scrutiny in areas such as littering enforcement, vehicle recall, land drainage and local nature recovery strategies. I have also tabled Amendment 43, which was requested by the Scottish Government so that they will be able to make provision under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 for the Scottish Environment Protection Agency to be able to impose civil sanctions relating to electronic waste tracking. This will bring the Scottish Ministers’ powers in line with those of the Secretary of State in England, Welsh Ministers and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland.
Finally, I have tabled Amendments 46, 47, 48 and 49. These are minor and technical amendments to measures on fly-tipping enforcement to clarify that authorised officers would be able to exercise their Schedule 10 powers relating to the search and seizure of evidence without a warrant in circumstances where consent has been given. This will enable enforcement officers to determine whether pollution control legislation is being complied with. This was always the intention; however, these amendments expressly set out that, where consent has been given, a warrant is not required.
I hope that noble Lords welcome these technical changes, which will increase parliamentary oversight and improve the Environment Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register. It would be churlish of me not to congratulate my noble friend and the Defra Bill team on making these technical amendments. They were the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which I am privileged to chair. On behalf of the committee, I thank the Minister and the Defra team for making them. One of the powers has moved from negative to affirmative—no big deal, but we are very grateful for it. The others are textbook examples of what departments can do to improve parliamentary scrutiny. We were not demanding that the SIs be affirmative or that they be negative; we were simply saying, “Please lay them before Parliament and publish them.” They have agreed to do so.
In the report that we publish today on the police and sentencing Bill, which the House will consider tomorrow, we will be scathing in our condemnation because the Home Office has failed to do those simple things in its legislation. Let this be a lesson to it on what can be done.
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I was going to prepare a 20-minute response to the Government’s amendments, but in the interest and spirit of getting to COP 26 faster, I will just say that we on these Benches welcome that the Government have listened to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and accepted its recommendations, which will be good for everybody involved and the wider stakeholders.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I thank noble Lords for their short contributions to the debate, and I hope that they welcome these technical changes. I beg them to accept these amendments, so that they can become part of the Bill.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment allows the Scottish Ministers to make provision under the new section 34CA(1) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 so as to empower the Scottish Environment Protection Agency to impose civil sanctions.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment enables the Environment Agency, the Natural Resources Body for Wales and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency to require payment of charges to recover the costs of their functions under regulations under Schedule 5 to the Bill.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment enables the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland to require payment of charges to recover the costs of its functions under regulations under Schedule 5 to the Bill.
“(a) the consent of a person entitled to grant access to material on or accessible from the premises, or(b) ”.Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment clarifies that the powers of search etc in inserted paragraph (ka) of section 108(4) of the Environment Act 1995 may be exercised with consent as well as with a warrant.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Schedule 10, page 193, line 23.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Schedule 10, page 193, line 23.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Schedule 10, page 193, line 23.
“(4A) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament and publish guidance, and any revised guidance, issued by the Secretary of State under this section.(4B) The Welsh Ministers must lay before Senedd Cymru and publish guidance, and any revised guidance, issued by the Welsh Ministers under this section.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires guidance under inserted section 88B of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 concerning littering enforcement to be laid before Parliament or Senedd Cymru as appropriate, and published.
Baroness Sheehan
“Air quality: speed limits
(1) The national speed limit for restricted roads in England is 20 miles per hour.(2) Nothing in this section affects the power of traffic authorities responsible for such roads to make exceptions to the national speed limit where appropriate.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to reduce the number of fine particulates released into the air from non-exhaust emissions (NEE), such as brake, tyre and road surface wear, by lowering the speed of traffic and promote driving behaviour that reduces braking and higher-speed cornering. Lowering speed limits is also intended to reduce the projected increase in electricity demand on the grid as EVs replace ICE vehicles.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak to this amendment in my name and the names of my noble friend Lady Walmsley, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. The amendment aims to implement 20 mph as the default speed limit on residential roads. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, is unable to be with us this afternoon but is keen to reiterate her support—
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
I am sorry; I was so pleased to have made it here on time that I forgot to check that the noble Baroness was here. I will leave her to reiterate her support on her own behalf.
I thank the Minister for meeting me and colleagues during the Summer Recess. While we had a good meeting and I thank the Minister for his courtesy throughout, can he say whether he has looked further at the evidence that reducing vehicle speeds will be a necessary remedy to reduce non-exhaust emissions? In addition, and crucially, a lower speed limit on our roads will help to relieve the additional electricity demand that electric vehicles will put on the national grid and will help our fight against climate change.
Does the Minister accept that, in looking for solutions to reducing air pollution from transport and facilitating the rollout of electric vehicles, speed is a factor that cannot be ignored? Given the importance of improving the air we breathe in our everyday environment, I feel strongly that any remedy to reduce air pollution has a place in a seminal Environment Bill. However, I accept that it is for the Department for Transport to set speed limits. In that vein, I remind the Minister of his kind offer to facilitate a meeting with the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, in her capacity as Transport Minister. Will he confirm that he will do this, if he has not done so already?
In conclusion, we are speaking here of a remedy that will reduce fine particulates in our ambient air, for which the WHO has said that there is no safe limit. The rate of implementation of 20 mph speed limits is gathering pace, not just in the UK but across Europe. We on these Benches will be pursuing the 20’s Plenty agenda in the future, but we may need to leave it until the transport Bill is before us.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, after that welcome from the noble Baroness in her introduction, I feel that I should go next in speaking in support of this amendment. I should declare that I live in Cardiff, which is one of the pilot areas of the 20 miles per hour speed limit, and we have already found that the air quality has improved, but the transit time from one place to another has not increased—contrary to rumours that that had happened. The difference is that the traffic is calmer; children walking to and from school are safer; and there is less bad behaviour generally on the roads with people being aggravated and pulling away fast at lights.
I have spoken at length about the problem of non-exhaust pollution and that is all on the record, so I will not go over the damage caused to human health by that. However, I remind everyone that, as well as decreasing fatal accidents, the lower speed limit also decreases accidents where there are life-changing injuries.
Given that we are trying to increase walking and cycling and that the Highway Code has been rewritten, moving to 20 miles per hour on our roads generally is very sensible. I have noticed that in London, where some areas are limited to 20 and others are not, drivers are confused but it is easier for cyclists and pedestrians, and it is easier as a driver to see them if they are going just a little slower.
I am afraid I cannot see any arguments at all against the Government accepting this amendment, other than the theory that some people think it might take them longer to get from A to B. However, I do not think that has been proven in practice.
Lord Tope (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 55 in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Randall, and to my Amendment 56 also in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and co-president of London Councils, the body that represents the 32 London boroughs and the City of London Corporation.
Amendment 55 is a development of the amendments that I moved in Committee. It would grant local authorities a discretionary power to control emissions from combustion plant where they choose to declare an area as an air quality improvement area. Amendment 56 would increase the penalty for the offence of stationary idling committed in an air quality improvement area.
As we are all only too aware, air pollution has a terrible impact on human health, contributing to some 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year. The Government have recognised the seriousness of the problem of poor air quality and that local authorities have an important role to play in delivering reductions in PM2.5. Indeed, local authorities have a statutory duty to reduce emissions in their area, but they do not have sufficient powers to take effective action to achieve such reductions. My amendments seek to give substance to remedying that.
Public attention has understandably been focused more on the need to cut emissions from vehicles, but very little has been said of non-road pollution and emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, dangerous carcinogens that penetrate deep into our lungs and bloodstream. Many emissions are from non-road sources, collectively referred to as combustion plant. As we make improvements in reducing emissions from vehicles, we must also shift our focus to include these other sources of pollution.
To illustrate the importance of tackling non-road emissions, I gave examples in Committee of the City of London. Under the Covid-19 lockdown last year—2020—the square mile saw a 40% decrease in levels of nitrogen oxide compared to 2019, before lockdown. However, levels of PM2.5, the pollutant most damaging to human health, remained at roughly the same level despite the significant reduction in transport activity.
Amendment 55 would insert a new clause granting unitary authorities and district councils in England, as well as the Court of Common Council of the City of London, the power under the proposed new clause to designate an area within its borders as an air quality improvement area if that area exceeds any air quality target for nitrogen dioxide, NO2; particulate matter, PM10; or fine particulate matter, PM2.5, as set out under Clause 1 or 2, or if the area exceeds the World Health Organization air quality guidance for those pollutants. This designation would in effect be a gateway to implementing a range of air quality measures provided for in regulations to be made by the Secretary of State.
The amendment would oblige the Secretary of State under subsection (5) to make regulations setting out the controls that may be applied by the local authority, providing local authorities with a menu of restrictions to choose from. That could include restrictions as to the type of plant by reference to the level of pollution emitted by that plant, or it could apply to plants such as boilers, generators, combined heat and power plant and non-road mobile machinery such as construction machinery.
The regulations could also contain restrictions on the operation of stationary generators in premises within the designated area except where the electricity supply to the premises was disrupted. Many office buildings have back-up diesel generators in the event of a power cut, but instead they are operated to lower the building’s electricity costs by selling electricity back to the grid. Providing for this restriction in the regulations would enable local authorities to set periods when the operation of these generators would be prohibited except in the case of a power cut.
Local authorities would be required by subsection (2) to specify in the designation which restrictions from the menu of restrictions set out in the regulations they wished to apply, in which area, to which types of plant, from which date and time and under which circumstances. The designating local authority would be required to publish details of any restrictions that it wished to implement at least two months before the designation took effect and to advertise the designation in newspapers circulating in the area and on the local authority’s website.
The regulatory framework established by the amendment would give the Secretary of State the flexibility to determine which restrictions should be made available to local authorities and would then leave local authorities the discretion to apply the restrictions that they knew would work best in their area. That would follow the example of the existing regulatory framework of smoke control areas, established by the Clean Air Act 1993, in ensuring that the cleanest applianceswere used in the most polluted areas.
At present, some local authorities attempt to use planning controls to regulate various types of polluting plant. Not surprisingly, that has proved ineffective because planning controls were never intended to be used in that manner. Similarly, attempts to use the environmental permitting framework to give local authorities a means of regulating polluting plants in their area do not really work. It is an unnecessarily cumbersome, expensive, bureaucratic and time-consuming way of dealing with smaller static plant, and does not work effectively for mobile plant. Neither does the existing framework of air quality management areas, set out in the Environment Act 1995, deliver the much-needed powers provided by Amendment 55.
Local authorities are keen to do more on air pollution and are in a good position to know the best way to do so in their area, but they find themselves unable to take the action required. The amendment would provide an easy mechanism for local authorities to act, providing a gateway to implementing any range of air quality measures provided for in regulations made by the Secretary of State.
Amendment 56 relates to the stationary idling of vehicles. More action needs to be taken to reduce this avoidable pollution. Stationary idling is already illegal but the penalty of £20 is derisory these days and hardly a deterrent. The amendment would insert a new clause that would increase the penalty for stationary idling within the designated area to £100, rising to £150 in certain circumstances, in order to deter those who are unwilling to change their behaviour and do not respond to awareness campaigns. Above all, it better recognises the seriousness of the issue.
The amendments are intended to give local authorities the power to bring about the reduction in emissions that all of us, not least the Minister, want. They would equip local authorities with the tools to deliver on their new obligations under the Bill. We have an opportunity in the Bill to empower local authorities across the country to tackle more effectively the problem of non-road emissions, with the potential to make a significant impact in combating poor air quality.
The Minister has recognised that local authorities have an important role to play in improving air quality. The amendments would enable them to do so, and I look forward to their acceptance.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I support Amendment 51, which is a no-brainer. This whole group talks about a public health disaster. We have not understood the impact of these emissions on public health—and not just their immediate impact but their long-term impact. There is huge damage to the NHS because of the problems forced on it by these emissions, and these amendments are extremely well designed to fix some of those problems. I should declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
I wholeheartedly support Amendment 55 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tope, and congratulate him on a very thorough exposition of the reasons for it. I have signed Amendments 55, 56 and 57 because they are all very clearly linked. Quite honestly, the Bill really has to say something on air pollution.
It is worth pointing out, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, did, that his amendment has been—I was going to say “concocted” but there must be a better word—written by some very distinct groups. They are the City of London Corporation, London Councils, Clean Air in London, a Lib Dem Peer and a Green Peer. These are people you might not think would naturally link together—but on this issue we are speaking with one voice. There is a problem and we have to fix it, and this is how you can fix it.
The Bill would quite rightly amend the Environment Act 1995 to give local authorities new functions and duties. For example, they must have regard to the national strategy and identify relevant sources of emissions. Another part of the 1995 Act would be amended to include things such as that they
“must, for the purpose of securing … air quality standards and objectives … prepare an action plan”.
Again and again, the Government give duties and responsibilities to local authorities, which is very smart. But, at the same time, you cannot keep giving such a workload if you do not give people the resources to do it. Those resources are partly powers and partly money, and these tough duties are not matched by either powers or finance. We therefore need legislation that would give local authorities the powers they need to decarbonise buildings. This is the next step; we are always talking about transport, but buildings are also a huge source of carbon emissions, as are other non-traffic emissions such as those from construction equipment and stationary generators.
We also have to give the Secretary of State powers in regulations to set common standards that could be tightened over time. Ideally, the Secretary of State would encourage the use of zero-emission or ultra-low-emission appliances to align air pollution and climate efforts. Amendment 55 would strike the right balance between duties and powers for local authorities.
Amendment 56 is very sensible. It would make the problem of stationary idling much easier to tackle; it is a plague at the moment. I make myself very unpopular by going up to people who have their engines idling outside schools and so on, and telling them to turn them off. That is one of the things I do for fun, obviously.
My Amendment 57 is a sort of super-amendment that pushes farther. As your Lordships would expect from a Green, it is more radical. It is based on the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, so in principle it has support from those other authorities—but not quite enough to put that into writing. I have to declare that I am a sinner; I installed a wood-burning stove in a flat that I used to own and I am really sorry about that. In fact, I burned incredibly dry wood—which makes it slightly better—because a scaffolding yard which was next door to my flat supplied me with bone-dry pine from their scaffolding. The people there actually drove the wrong way up a one-way street and up my drive to dump their dumpy bags outside my door. It was fantastic and the wood lasted quite a number of years.
To go back to the point, my amendment builds on the excellent Amendment 55 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, in three important ways. First, it would emphasise the need to include fine particles: these PM2.5s, which we have heard so much about and which are so nasty, because they not only go into the lungs but pass through them into the bloodstream and other organs. They are highly damaging and we probably have not yet caught up with all the damage that they do, particularly to children. They have to go into the national air quality target set under either Clause 1 or Clause 2. As we heard earlier, this is the most harmful form of air pollution, affecting us all at some stage in our lives.
Secondly, my amendment would give metro mayors, alongside local authorities, powers to designate any part of their area exceeding WHO air-quality guidelines as an air-quality improvement area. That is a very useful power and they could set restrictions based on regulations made by the Secretary of State. This seems only right and fair if we are to avoid a patchwork of emissions standards in our largest cities, all of which are polluted.
Last but not least, my amendment would end the sale and use of wood-burning stoves in urban areas over seven years, as the original Clean Air Act was meant to do in 1956. This is important because Defra’s latest statistical release on air pollution said that the use of wood in domestic combustion activities accounted for 38% of PM2.5 emissions in 2019, and these emissions doubled between 2003 and 2019. So we have a real problem and I very much hope that that the Government are listening on this—but perhaps they are not.
Not only are wood stoves and fireplaces a major source of the most harmful air pollution, but the Climate Change Committee is clear that wood-burning stoves should not be counted towards either low-carbon heat targets or renewable targets. So I really hope that the Government are listening.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I strongly support all the amendments in this group and have put my name to two of them. I just want to intervene briefly on the issue of idling. Last week, when I walked from my Pimlico flat to this House—which takes about 25 minutes, mainly down backstreets—I passed 15 vehicles which were stationary and idling: cars, vans, buses and trucks. I wish the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, had been with me, because I am far too diffident to bang on a roof and tell a driver to stop doing it—but next time I will invite her to join me.
Westminster City Council has a commendable campaign, public-relations wise, to stop idling—but it has no means of enforcing it. And even if the council did enforce it, the fine is so paltry that it is not a deterrent. This amendment would change that. It would make it easier to enforce and would make people take notice. It is a major contribution towards reducing air-quality problems in our cities and I hope that the House can support all these amendments.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, during our debate in Committee on a similar amendment to Amendment 51 the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist, said that
“local authorities already have the power to set 20 mph speed limits”—[Official Report, 5/7/21; col. 1081.]
on restricted roads, so my noble friend Lady Sheehan’s amendment was not necessary. Well, yes, it is true that they have the power, and many have used it to great effect—but it is a long-winded and expensive process. Local authorities have better things to do with their time and money, so making 20 miles an hour the default would not mean that all restricted roads would end up being limited to 20. Local authorities would still have the power to make them 30 miles an hour if they considered that would be safer and better for the local community. But surely it is right that these decisions are made locally, and in as expeditious a way as possible, particularly in areas of deprivation.
In her reply, the Minister referred to something in the Atkins report. Can she now provide the House with the evidence which she claimed suggested that 20 miles an hour limits could lead to higher casualty rates, and tell us who did that research? These allegations have been widely challenged, and the Minister needs to defend them as being robust if she wishes to rely on them.
My noble friend Lady Sheehan has outlined the benefits of 20 miles an hour limits, and I have seen them for myself in both Scotland and Wales. They are safer, quieter and healthier, they address some aspects of health inequality, they protect the national grid and they are more environmentally friendly—and that is how I would describe my noble friend’s proposal. If that is not enough, 20 miles an hour areas are also very popular with the public. They address non-exhaust emissions, as well as those produced by combustions—and we do not get rid of those by moving to electric cars; I have an electric car and I still produce small particulates from my car’s tyres and brakes. The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, did not give any good reasons, in her response in Committee, why this amendment should not be in the Bill; she was not convincing.
I turn to Amendment 55, from my noble friend Lord Tope. Again, the Minister was not convincing in Committee when we covered these issues. She claimed that current regulations are adequate to clean up the emissions from non-road combustion plant—or that at least they will be by 2030. That is nine years away, by which time more people will have died from the small particulates, NOx emissions, et cetera, that are emitted by dirty generators, boilers and so on.
The powers that my noble friend proposes do not currently exist; they are voluntary and additional to what local authorities already have, but they do not have to use them. If they think, with their local knowledge, that there is no need for them—because the air is already clean or because they are happy to rely on the measures outlined by the Minister in Committee—they do not have to declare an air quality improvement area. I emphasise that the powers are discretionary. Can the Minister say what harm would be done by giving local authorities these additional, discretionary powers?
The Minister hinted in Committee that she was afraid that decisions would be made that were, in the Government’s opinion, wrong. Well that is what can happen with devolution—and indeed Governments make wrong decisions too, especially this one—so that is no good reason for failing to accept this amendment.
Amendment 56 offers the Government a very simple way of reducing or stopping totally unnecessary emissions of CO2, NOx and small particulates. The idea that idling your engine outside a school brings a penalty of only £20 is pathetic. I have often seen parents sitting in their cars outside a school in the afternoon, waiting for their children, with their engines running as if in pole position at the start of a Grand Prix. If I had approached the driver to point out that he or she was in danger of attracting a fine of £20, I would have been laughed out of the village. Much more effective would be a fine of £100, rising to £150; I might even be persuaded to bang on the window and warn the driver, like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. If the Minister could tell me how many drivers have been deterred from doing this by this tiny fine I might reconsider my view, but, as things stand, I think that she should accept Amendment 56.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I have some sympathy with Amendment 56 on stationary idling. It is an existing offence, and all we are being asked is to put the fine up to a more realistic level. It is certainly a problem that particularly concerns—I do not know if I should name them specifically—Uber-type drivers sitting waiting for fares.
I do not support any of the other amendments. I think it would be difficult if the House put some of these things through without fuller consideration and costings.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, in my opinion this is quite an important set of amendments because they focus on some specific causes of air pollution. The noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, ably introduced her Amendment 51, on the impact of speed on air quality, as she did in Committee, and spoke passionately about why we need to reduce speed limits to reduce PM2.5. We have heard about research on the impact of road traffic, and the fact that it is responsible for up to 80% of particulate pollution in the UK, but it is also likely that this is an underestimate. The noble Baroness explained how particulates arise from the friction between tyre rubber and road surfaces and the impact of speed on climate change.
Amendment 51 in particular considers a 20 miles an hour speed limit. It is worth noting that the UK default speed limit of 30 miles an hour is 60% higher than that in most continental European towns, where 30 kilometres an hour, or 18.6 miles an hour, is the norm. Imperial College has reported that, at 20 miles an hour, brake and tyre wear is significantly reduced. When the 30 kilometres an hour zones were introduced in Germany, in the 1980s, car drivers changed gear less often, braked less often and required less fuel.
Congestion is also a factor in air pollution, as emissions from a standing vehicle are higher than those from a moving one; this was demonstrated during the debate we had on idling engines. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, also referred to the fact that lower speeds improve traffic flow through junctions and can actually help to reduce congestion.
I turn to Amendment 55, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Tope, and others, and Amendment 57, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I will talk to them together, because they both propose air quality improvement areas. In the introduction to his amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Tope, talked about why local authorities are an important part of tackling air pollution, and why they need the powers to make a genuine difference. He spoke particularly about the issue of combustion plants in this context.
Amendment 57 builds on Amendment 55, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, explained very clearly. The need to include PM2.5 when setting a national air quality target is critical. We have previously debated the importance of meeting the WHO targets for this, and we also know that, next week, there is likely to be an announcement that the guidelines will be tightened even further.
The noble Baroness then talked about how her amendment would give metro mayors powers to designate air quality improvement areas. This is important, because it helps to avoid a patchwork of different emissions standards in our larger cities, and the noble Baroness talked about how important that is.
The noble Baroness spoke next about the third part of her amendment, which seeks to end the sale and use of wood-burning stoves in urban areas. Again, we have heard in the debate how important this is in helping to reduce PM2.5 emissions in our cities. The Climate Change Committee has also made it clear that wood-burning stoves should not be counted towards either low-carbon heat targets or renewable targets.
Finally, on Amendment 56, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Tope, idling creates air pollution and is really unnecessary. An idling engine burns fuel less efficiently than when the vehicle is moving, and so it produces more emissions than when it is travelling. Additionally, the toxic gases produced by idling are emitted in the same place, which means that localised air pollution is higher. This is particularly important near schools, because research shows that exposing children to high levels of air pollution can stunt lung growth and cause behavioural and mental health problems. Those of us who are drivers have a personal responsibility here; whether we are parked outside a school, picking someone up from the station or waiting in a car park, we all must do our bit by switching off our engines to reduce our emissions.
As the noble Lord, Lord Tope, reminded us, idling is an offence in law, but there are clearly issues around enforcement and penalties. My noble friend Lord Whitty talked about the difficulties that Westminster Council is having, for example, and this was mentioned by other noble Lords. As I said at the beginning, this is an important group of amendments, focusing on things the Government can do to act quickly to reduce air pollution. I await the Minister’s response with interest.
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
I begin by thanking noble Lords for the quality of their contributions on the important issue of air quality throughout these proceedings, including in Committee. I agree that ambitious action is needed, which is why the Bill requires the Government to set two targets on air quality, including for fine particulate matter, the particulate most harmful to human health. These will be supported by a robust set of measures in the Bill which enable the action required to meet those targets. I can confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, that the department will organise a meeting for her and the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, with the Minister, if this has not been organised already. In light of her point about the impact on electricity demand from the speeds of electric vehicles, we will write to the Department for Transport for clarification on that issue.
Turning to Amendment 51 in the name of the noble Baroness, the Government support the use of 20 miles per hour speed limits or zones in the right places, depending on local circumstances. Local authorities have the power to set these limits, and I am confident that it is better for these decisions to be taken locally, taking a balanced account of the full range of impacts of changing speed limits, including economic and environmental effects. The Air Quality Expert Group report into non-exhaust emissions from road traffic concluded that the most effective traffic pollution mitigation strategies reduce the overall volume of traffic, lower the speed where traffic is free flowing—for example, on motorways—and promote driving behaviour that reduces braking and higher-speed cornering. We agree that we need to reduce PM2.5 emissions from tyre and brake wear. In towns and cities where traffic is not free flowing, the best way to do this is by encouraging fewer vehicle journeys rather than slower journeys. We do not want our recovery from this pandemic to be car-led. That is why the Government are continuing with our ambitious plans to increase active travel, with a long-term vision for half of all journeys in towns and cities to be walked or cycled by 2030, backed by £2 billion of investment over five years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, asked a number of questions. I believe she is mistaken about what I said in Committee. We have now checked Hansard, but I would like more time to go through it in detail. If what she said about casualty rates is relevant to that we will, in any event, write to clarify the point I made. She also asked some other questions, which I will come to later. We want to encourage more people to make sustainable, healthier travel choices that help improve air quality for local communities.
I turn to Amendments 55 and 57. Through the Bill, we are strengthening the local air quality management framework to bring in a broader range of partners to work with local authorities to improve air quality, and to make it easier for them to use their powers to tackle, for example, domestic solid fuel burning, a key source of PM2.5. I take the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about the cumbersome processes that local authorities have to go through and we are aware of the issues with procedures for making these orders. In 2020, we published a report, Traffic Regulation Orders, identifying improvements to the legislative process in England, and we plan to consult later this year on potential legislative reforms to make it easier and quicker to make orders. There are already controls in place for many of the sources of pollution of concern that noble Lords have cited, for example through environmental permitting.
I set out in detail in Committee the many levers that local authorities already have to improve air quality in their areas, so I do not propose to repeat them here, but for tackling non-road emissions, specifically non-road mobile machinery, there are already emissions standards that non-road mobile machinery must comply with before it is sold, and the Government recently agreed to increase the stringency of these standards. Our existing regulatory regime also already sets emissions controls targeting medium combustion plants. This regime requires all plants in scope, such as the plants referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, to be registered or permitted, and sets limits on the levels of pollutants that these plants can emit. Going forward, our clean air strategy committed to consider the case for tighter emissions standards for medium combustion plants to those already introduced and to consider how to tackle emissions from smaller plants which do not fall within the scope of these regulations or eco-design regulations. I believe it is better to continue to strengthen the existing approaches than to create a new framework which would add to an already complex regulatory picture. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Tope, is aware that Defra officials recently met representatives of the City of London, and other local authorities, to understand how to tackle the specific issues that this amendment intends to address, using our existing powers.
On the noble Baroness’s Amendment 57, which would introduce a ban on wood-burning appliances, we recognise that many people rely on wood-burning stoves and open fires, which use natural fuel. Because of this, our recent domestic fuels legislation does not introduce an outright and indiscriminate ban. Instead, we have taken action through the Air Quality (Domestic Solid Fuels Standards) (England) Regulations 2020, which came into force in May, to encourage people to move away from using more polluting fuels, such as wet wood, to less polluting fuels, such as dry wood. The proposals are therefore aimed at protecting health by phasing out the most polluting fuels used for domestic combustion in England and encouraging people to burn less. This work is supported by an information campaign to encourage people to burn better and to reduce harmful emissions.
The regulations require that wood sold in smaller units must have a moisture content of 20% or less, phase out the supply of traditional house coal for domestic burning, and require that all manufactured solid fuels meet sulphur and smoke emissions limits, to tackle the most harmful emissions from domestic burning. However, we need to be mindful of the contribution that wood burning makes in areas where particulate levels are already high, such as in city and town centres. That is why local authorities already have the power to declare smoke control areas. We continue to undertake regular monitoring of emission sources to inform our work to tackle human health risks robustly, and in setting and working towards the new air quality targets we will consider whether stricter measures are needed.
Turning to Amendment 56 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tope, while this amendment would increase penalties for drivers idling unnecessarily, the priority must be to change motorists’ behaviour. With or without the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, we must encourage them not to idle—which is, after all, wasting expensive fuel—and instead push motorists towards using the technological solutions now available, rather than penalise them. Vehicle technology has moved on significantly and can play a part in addressing idling, including stop-start technology and low or zero-emission vehicles. If needed, however, powers are already available to local authorities to tackle unnecessary idling. Local authorities, as the existing guidance makes clear, should utilise a range of methods to encourage motorists to change their behaviour, including public information campaigns.
Although it seems a very simple idea to increase fines, the Department for Transport undertook a study on fines and concluded that increasing the level was not the best way of addressing the issue. Higher fines of up to £1,000 on conviction may also be issued if the police carry out enforcement against idling where a driver refuses to stop running their engine. This, of course, is rather more than the noble Lord’s suggested penalty, although I acknowledge that this is on conviction, rather than an on-the-spot fine. So, although I agree with the intended outcome of the noble Lord’s amendment, the Government’s position is that higher penalties are not the best approach to address this issue, so I beg noble Lords not to press their amendments.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
I thank the Minister. I have one quick question for her. She said that the Government do not want slower traffic, they just want fewer cars on the road, but that flies in the face of what public opinion says on slower traffic. Wherever 20 miles per hour limits have been introduced, they have been very popular. Will she quickly address that? Is it in order for me to ask her to elucidate?
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
I am happy to elucidate. I do not believe I said I want just to reduce traffic; I said that both solutions will produce the desired outcome—both fewer vehicles and slower traffic.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
I thank the Minister and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
“Air quality and human health in rural areas: application of pesticides
(1) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision prohibiting the application of pesticides for the purposes of agriculture or horticulture near—(a) buildings used for human habitation, and(b) public or private buildings and associated open spaces where members of the public may be present, including but not limited to—(i) schools and childcare nurseries, and(ii) hospitals and health care facilities.(2) Regulations under subsection (1) must specify a minimum distance from any of the locations listed under subsection (1) to be maintained during the application of any pesticide.(3) In determining the distance in subsection (2) the Secretary of State must be guided by the optimum distance that would make a significant difference in air quality for people using the locations listed in subsection (1).(4) In this section “public building” includes any building used for the purpose of education. (5) Regulations under this section are subject to the affirmative procedure.”Member’s explanatory statement
In order to improve air quality and thereby protect human health and the environment in rural areas, this new Clause would require the Secretary of State to make regulations to prohibit the application of chemical pesticides near buildings and open spaces used by residents and members of the public.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, this amendment should be recognised as absolutely necessary and straightforward but it is one, unfortunately, that the Government have resisted. Like the air quality debate that we have just had, it concerns human health, but it also has wider environmental implications. The detrimental effect of chemical pesticide spraying on those who live, work and congregate close to where spraying is carried out is well established. The medical effects are now well known—although, as the Minister himself had to admit the other week, not the particular effects of specific combinations of chemicals included in the cocktail of chemicals that are often sprayed these days.
In earlier stages of this Bill and the Agriculture Bill, the detrimental effects of spraying on individuals and families over long periods have been spelled out in great detail; they are familiar to GPs and medics here and around the world. Some effects are acute and some short term, such as breathing difficulties; some are utterly chronic, and some are lethal. The most vulnerable are those right next to the spraying and, in particular, those who are subject to repeated doses because they live there.
Noble Lords will be aware of the views from most scientists, the royal commission and, broadly speaking, global medical opinion. Noble Lords will also have been made aware of particular concerns of individuals who have been affected and have suffered chronic ill health and eventual disability because of this exposure. I have met some of the victims and have heard of large numbers of others.
It is the essential human issue that we are attempting to address in this amendment, but there are, of course, wider arguments. In the terms of some of the responses during Committee and through the passage of the Agriculture Bill, the arguments got mixed up. It is true that many people, including myself, would wish to see the eventual phasing out of all chemical pesticides. The numbers of people wishing for that outcome apparently, according to the news last week, include President Macron. However, irrespective of my views on the longer term, this is a very specific issue, for now. It means that we would protect from current pesticides the health and well-being of literally thousands, or potentially hundreds of thousands, of rural residents in this country. This amendment is not about the bigger picture; it is very specifically about the protection of our rural residents in their homes, gardens, schools and public places. It is an in principle amendment, leaving details subject to the regulatory process. Protection for our rural population is essential, but the regulatory process will obviously allow opinions on the detail. If we adopt this amendment tonight, that process will start now.
Unfortunately, the Government have found all sorts of reasons for resisting this amendment, or a similar amendment, starting with the early stages of the Agriculture Bill. Ministers have adduced a whole range of metamorphosing reasons for opposing the amendment. At first, they said that it was unnecessary because Ministers already had the power to make regulations on distancing of spraying of pesticides and, at that time, they sort of did—but it was under EU law, which left it discretionary on the member state to implement it. We never used that discretion and, with the end of the transition period, that power disappeared; it was not transposed into UK law. The reality is that that power had been there for over a decade and successive Governments had never used it; that is why we need a specific amendment requiring the Government to introduce regulations to implement that principle and not leave permissive powers mouldering on the statue book for another two decades.
The Government then argued that this country’s licensing system for pesticides was world beating—to use that phrase—and did not need any improvements, and that the danger of residents spraying pesticides in their houses and gardens was negligible these days. Yet the Minister was unable to tell the House what tests were made on cocktails of pesticides and, also, on medical evidence, which in particular my noble friend—or, I should say, my noble co-signatory—Lady Finlay adduced during the passage of the Agriculture Bill and this Bill.
There are multiple incidents of acute harm, burns and breathing problems but, far more disturbingly, there are large numbers of cases where long-term effects are seen on neurological and immune systems, lung function and foetal health. These are dangerous. Of course, we are protecting other people; those who use the pesticides are protected by very strict health and safety regulations, wear protective clothing and are usually within a cab. Consumers are protected by very strict rules about pesticide residues being left on vegetables and fruit that reach our shops and markets. The people who are not protected are those who live in our countryside, right next to where this spraying is carried out. I find that omission appalling, and I do not understand why the Government are so reluctant to do something about it. I hope that I have the wholehearted support of this House in instructing the Government to do something about it. As I say, the details of that can be sorted out in regulation, but let us at least make the principle clear tonight.
In Committee, I refrained from quoting anybody, but a couple of examples caught my eye when I was going through this the other night. One woman said:
“My family have always lived next to fields sprayed with chemicals. My husband and my son died from neurological diseases. Our neighbouring farmer and his wife both have MS”—
and, she says, it is all down to those chemicals. Another said:
“I am sprayed with cocktails of pesticides by my neighbour, a fruit farmer, around 20 times per year. As a toxicologist I know that these agents are not meant to be used anywhere near residences and yet my home is covered with these chemicals every time he sprays”.
The Government themselves recognise this issue. In the codes of practice, they require farmers and others to notify nearby premises, but that is not enforced, and, in most cases, it does not happen. There is no such notification and, even when it does happen, there is no notification of what precisely is being sprayed because, by and large, by that stage, the particular application is not clear. However, it is clear everywhere else; it is clear to the medics and to the manufacturers, who put very strong warnings against inhalation or skin contact on the containers for these pesticides—and rightly so, because they are being responsible. I am asking the Government to take their responsibilities at least as seriously and today adopt an amendment that will give some hope to those families who historically have seriously suffered debilitation and sometimes worse, and to ensure that it does not affect families in the next generation.
I hope that the Minister will change course on this issue, accepting the need to look at it again and to take action to introduce regulation. Unfortunately, successive Governments have not done that, which is why I require the amendment to instruct the Government to take action. I hope that the House fully supports me on because too many people’s lives have been blighted to ignore this problem. I hope that the House can support this amendment today.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I have put my name to the amendment, and I support it very strongly. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, will test the opinion of the House.
We have major problems with these chemicals. First, our testing regime tests single pesticides, but does not look at combinations or mixtures of pesticides. Secondly, people are required to notify local premises prior to spraying, but there are two difficulties with this: as downwind is not necessarily a short distance, these chemicals can travel very long distances, and you cannot predict the direction the wind is blowing. Another difficulty is that they sit on the land on crops, and when the sun comes out, they vaporise. Even though people might have been warned about spraying, the vaporisation means that the amount in the air goes up again and it is spread still further towards people living in the vicinity.
I have a list of references from different parts of the scientific literature which I will not go through in detail now, as it is not the time. But I point out that pesticides can cause deformities in unborn offspring, cancers, and mutations that poison the nervous system and block the natural defences of the immune system. The irreversible effects are permanent and cannot be changed once they have occurred. I have looked after an awful lot of cancer patients, many coming from farming communities in Wales. When they are young and ask me about exposure to chemicals, it is very difficult to have that conversation, because by then they, or maybe their child, is already so seriously ill or dying, that everything is irreversible. We cannot carry on doing this and polluting the environment without thinking again. Article 3(14) of EU Regulation 1107/2009 defines rural residents living in the locality of pesticide-sprayed crops as “vulnerable groups,” and they are recognised as having high pesticide exposure over the long term.
The side effects of the individual chemical agents are quite scary. When one looks at the cumulative effects long term, we cannot continue to ignore them. The effect on rural residents will go on and on, even for those living at sizeable distances. I hope that the House will reflect on the debate we had on the Agriculture Bill, when the Minister at the time, the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, told the Committee that we need a population in good health to cope with the threat of infection during the pandemic. We cannot carry on having a rural community that is being poisoned by its own actions in an attempt to supply us with food which is cheap and probably underpriced for the value which should go to farmers for responsible farming. I hope that this House will support this amendment.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)
My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 52 to which I have added my name, and the very important contributions, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I am of course passionate because this is a matter of great importance. As I have said previously, on both the Agriculture Bill and in Committee for this Bill, we have a history of underplaying certain risks to human health, which we only find out about later. I am thinking of tobacco, asbestos, air quality—which we have just been discussing —and various things which cause harm. It must be obvious that these chemical pesticides—because of the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff—are nothing but harmful.
I am particularly concerned about cocktails of chemicals. I am not a chemist and did not do much science at school, but I know that if one mixes certain chemicals, they have a completely different effect and can be even more toxic. Do these chemicals accumulate in the soil, and not simply vaporise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said? That is something we should be looking at.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 123 is in my name and those of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch, the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, who has already indicated his support, and the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury; I am extremely grateful for their support. It is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Whitty, and I make a passing reference to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. There are compelling cases for both their amendments too, but I do not intend to speak to them.
The debate in Committee revealed strong support from all parts of the House for this amendment—indeed, I cannot recall anyone who spoke against it. Even the Minister himself spoke for the amendment in part, when he was persuaded by a phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that the amendment was a no-brainer. To that extent, he accepted it, but we will come to the Government’s resistance in a moment.
This amendment proposes a new clause which provides an effective regulation to protect wildlife, the environment and human health by replacing toxic lead ammunition, principally for shooting game, with alternatives. It is intended to provide regulatory protection for wildlife and the environment and to improve human health and protect humans by replacing toxic lead gunshot with much safer alternatives. It also intends to ensure a supply of healthy game for the market and meet the requirements of shooting, food retail and conservation stakeholders.
This amendment is not precisely the one that was before your Lordships’ House in Committee. The date of its provisions coming into effect has changed slightly to 31 July 2023—a move of a few months in 2023—to respond to arguments and advice that I received directly and indirectly from ammunition manufacturers that it would be more appropriate not to seek to ban the use of lead ammunition in the middle of a game season, when people had already stocked up, as it were, for the purpose of shooting. It seemed to be a compelling argument. They were on board. They also said, quite understandably, that if we are to make this change, there needs to be compulsion that has effect and is logical so that they can ramp up the manufacturing. So, there is a change in that respect.
I do not intend to go into all the 30 years of evidence there is that we should not be doing this, but we know that lead is a poison. We ban it in many other areas of life. It seems crazy that we allow it to be used in this way when it gets directly into the food chain. In his response in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, confirmed that the Government want action to ban the use of lead in a way which harms the environment and human or animal health. He is a lifelong—certainly adult life-long—proponent of that and makes no bones about it. He rejected an amendment of this nature because it was not comprehensive and did not deal with the issue of lead in target shooting and other parts of that element of the sport.
The Minister supported the Government’s preferred approach, which is to use the GB REACH process—I say the “GB REACH process” because the EU REACH process applies to Northern Ireland and, indeed, may be being debated in your Lordships’ Grand Committee—which, in my view and in the view of many other noble Lords, will take an unconscionable length of time and will unnecessarily expose tens, if not thousands, of children to potential harm. I remind your Lordships’ House that the Minister, Rebecca Pow, said in launching the REACH process:
“A large volume of lead ammunition is discharged every year over the countryside, causing harm to the environment, wildlife and people”,
and that
“Addressing the impacts of lead ammunition will mark a significant step forward in helping to protect wildlife, people, and the environment.”
In concluding, the Minister offered the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, a meeting. It took place on 5 August with the Minister, officials and the noble Lord, Lord Randall, present. I got an indirect invitation to the meeting, which I also attended. Since then, I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Randall, has had further communication with the Bill team, as has the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury. I shall leave both noble Lords to share with your Lordships’ House what was discussed, if it can be shared. I thank the Minister and his team for their engagement with this process, and I thank the noble Lords for ensuring that I was included.
But I understand that the Bill team’s position on lead shot is that the time it will take for the GB REACH restriction dossier to be prepared is required to build a comprehensive case for the restriction. I think that is one of their arguments. They also argue that this requires up-to-date GB-wide specific evidence and that the Government need to make sure that the final decision on this is watertight from an evidential and legal perspective. I have not practised law for a long time, but I respect this position and understand it. But I do not accept without evidence that this is necessarily a block to dealing with what we can deal with today, which is harm to people, animals and the environment. I will come back to that.
So where do we stand today? First, lead is a poison and should be banned, except where it is a necessity to use it and there is no alternative, where it should be closely regulated. That is what we do in every other aspect of our lives. We have known that lead shot has been poisoning animals, humans and the environment for decades. We have reached the stage where, in the face of the comprehensive knowledge that we now have of the value of the environment and its biodiversity to every single aspect of our life, something has to be done about this. The obvious thing is for its use in a way that creates a poisonous effect to be banned.
There already exists a comprehensive case for this amendment—supported by specific GB evidence over decades—to protect human health, wildlife health and the environment. There exists support for the need for the change from all major stakeholders: shooters, game dealers, distributors, retailers, scientists, conservationists, and even the Houses of Parliament. Both Houses, through their committees, unanimously agreed to ban the sale of lead-shot game in our restaurants so that we do not poison ourselves. It has support from Parliament already. I have to say I find it difficult to explain to people outside why we cannot ban for their consumption what we have banned for our own. This does not seem a tenable position to be in.
There already exists acknowledgement that alternatives exist and are effective. They have existed for 25 years in Denmark. Not only do they have a burgeoning shooting business—in fact, my country, Scotland, has lots of Danes shooting there in all the shooting seasons who tell me that they do it in Denmark very successfully, and they win medals from sports shooting targets with steel ammunition. There already exists an acknowledgement of the need for change to support a market for healthy game meat, which we should encourage people to eat. So there are strong socioeconomic arguments too.
Any further unnecessary delay will result in the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands more birds, the risk of irreversibly reducing the IQs of thousands—possibly tens of thousands—more children, and the deposit of thousands of tonnes more lead shot into the environment, adding to the existing toxic legacy, all of which are unnecessary and fully avoidable.
The case for this amendment is made and is clear cut. Dealing with this now will not only save time and taxpayers’ money by avoiding another unnecessary review but give GB REACH more valuable time to research and debate the issues of lead bullets and target shooting, for which there is certainly a case but where we appreciate that more work with stakeholders may well be required.
Finally, my understanding is that it has been suggested from “sources” that the GB REACH process can achieve the objective of a comprehensive ban with effect from 31 July 2023, the date on which this amendment is due to come into force. If the Minister is inclined to offer that in his response, it will have to be considered, and I am certainly willing to do so. I know that those who support the amendment and have put their name to it are also willing to consider that as a solution to this problem.
However, I am confident that if I test the opinion of this House, a majority will support this amendment. There are two possibilities for avoiding that, as I see them. The first alternative is that, beyond the assertion that GB REACH is the only way forward, the Minister can point me and my noble friends who support this amendment to the legal provisions that support this conclusion and not just keep asserting it without doing so. I have not yet seen a reasoned argument of this nature. It has been absent from all the discussions I have been involved in thus far with the Bill team, either directly or secondarily. I have it on good authority from lawyers working on it at the moment that it is not necessary to do it down that route and that this route, which the Danes use, could be used, too, with effect and without challenge.
Secondly, if the Minister gives a strong enough commitment to persuade the House that there is a strong probability that there will be a comprehensive ban on the use of lead ammunition by a date around the one which we propose in this amendment, or by a date certain, I will consider not having to further embarrass the Government by dividing the House on this issue.
The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)
My Lords, I am very pleased to support Amendment 123, from the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton. I declare an interest, as on the record from previous debates on this Bill. I will not cover again all the points I made both at Second Reading and in Committee.
It is a fact that lead is a poison. I have an enthusiasm in supporting this amendment that comes entirely from my love of the shooting sports, in particular game shooting. Noble Lords will recall that I have probably been supporting all the shooting sports in this House since I came here 40 years ago, very often as a lone voice. Shooting is not exactly something that many of your Lordships are fondly in love with. I want everything I shoot to go into the food chain for human consumption. It is good, wholesome, low-calorie, low-cholesterol food that is both nutritious and delicious.
I am a realist and a very small minority of my shooting colleagues—I do not call them friends because they are not—could not give a fig whether they sell their game into the marketplace for human consumption. So far as they are concerned, they can dispose of it by other means. I find that absolutely despicable and disgusting. There is absolutely no place in my shooting world for people like that, who taint the vast majority of the game shooting enthusiasts of this country, who behave very responsibly indeed and desire, like me, to be able to ensure a growing market of consumers for the game that we produce. That is why I am standing here, pleading with your Lordships about lead.
This amendment will not affect target and clay pigeon shooters. We do not eat targets and clay pigeons. Clay pigeon shooters and target shooters shoot 60% of all the lead shot-cartridges produced in this country. Game shooters shoot 40%. Nine shooting bodies or bodies supporting the shooting sports, including what used to be the Game Conservancy Trust—the GWCT, which my noble friend Lord Caithness and I have a lot to do with—stated some while ago that they intended voluntarily to cease shooting with lead shot. That was done about a couple of years ago, in my memory. I believe that they are now backtracking, and this is another reason why I support this amendment very strongly. The amendment provides certainty for the shooters. It gives certainty to the supermarkets, which are going to stop producing food that has lead shot in it. The stated intention of these nine bodies was to give up lead in a five-year timeframe. There is your timeframe. There is nothing wrong in giving a timeframe. It gives support to the shooters. It gives support to everybody involved with the game-producing industry. We all know then what we are doing and by when we have to do it.
My shooting friends—and I had an invitation from one very nicely this morning in the post—are all saying now, “Will you kindly stop using lead on our estates? We would like you to go and use non-toxic shot, because we cannot sell the birds at the end of this coming season to the Game Dealers Association, because it has already stated that it will not take toxic-shot birds and there goes our market entirely.”
The supermarket chains, especially Waitrose, have for quite a while now had a strategy and process whereby they are stopping accepting lead-shot and toxic-shot game. They believe that the market is going to go much better for non-toxic-shot game. Waitrose mentioned to me that it can sell 1 million more units of game a year to the consumer. That is good for shooting, and that is why I am standing here saying this.
I believe that there is no earthly, legal or operational reason why Her Majesty’s Government cannot agree to this amendment, which covers only game shooting. It does not include clay pigeons shooting, which, as I mentioned, uses by far the largest amount of lead shot in the country. The Government can take on clay pigeon shooters on a different day and take them through a consultation. It will take them years to do it, but I would like to see game shooting legislated for now.
I urge my noble friend the Minister to accept these amendments or to accept Amendment 123, because it is sensible and easy.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I will speak first to Amendment 52, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to which I was pleased to attach my name. It also has the cross-party and non-party support of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I will also briefly address the other two amendments here.
Your Lordships’ House might not be surprised to know that my arguments around Amendment 123 might be slightly differently expressed, and I might have drafted the amendment slightly differently. None the less, the fact that we are still pumping lead out into our environment is disgraceful. We hear the phrase “world-leading” a great deal. As we have heard, Denmark banned lead shot for hunting 25 years ago. California did it last year. If you look around the world, it has taken an unconscionably long time but we have just seen Algeria become the last country in the world to stop selling leaded petrol. We have known for a long time the damage lead does. We cannot justify continuing to use it in this way. This might have been an amendment for which the term “no-brainer” was invented, when you think about the fact that this is damaging the brains of children in particular. As the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said, we have banned lead-shot game here in this House but have not acted outside the House. That really cannot be defended. It is untenable.
Amendment 53 looks at protecting nature from the toxic, disastrous chemicals that are pesticides, but I really want to focus on Amendment 52. We have been debating for some time and I want to come back to briefly highlight the powerful points made particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. Many Members of your Lordships’ House, particularly those sitting opposite, will be able to picture the scene: an air-conditioned cab with air filtration; an operator equipped with a whole range of complex, high-tech protective equipment; and a child playing in a garden right beside where the person in all that protective equipment is applying chemicals.
The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said she sees the other side of this in her professional practice. People—sometimes young people, sometimes very young people—with cancers, with neurodegenerative diseases. Once the noble Baroness sees them, it is essentially too late. We cannot allow this to continue. This House has many times expressed its strong support for this amendment. I stress that these three amendments are not an either/or, pick-and-match lot. All these amendments should be in the Bill.
I very much hope that, given the direction of travel and where push pressure is coming from, the noble Lord will concede on Amendment 123. We have to vote. I urge the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to put this to the vote. We have to get both Amendments 52 and 53 through. This is not an either/or option.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I just want to say a few words about these chemicals and to talk about it from the point of view of the industry and cheap food.
In 1947, the manufacturers of DDT ran an advert in Time magazine showing smiling cartoon farm animals and a rosy-cheeked housewife who sang “DDT is good for me-e-e!”, along with the claim that DDT was the “benefactor of all humanity”. That same year, they had a British colonialist sprinkling DDT over a bowl of porridge and then eating it in a bid to persuade local people in east Africa that this chemical was harmless.
We can see, if we cut forward to today, that Silent Spring was written in 1962 and DDT became recognised as something that was harmful to animals, nature, biodiversity and, indeed, humans. Yet, today, we see a very different story. In 1990, we treated 45 million hectares with pesticides. By 2016, this had risen to 73 million hectares, although the actual area of crops had remained the same. However, we were putting many times more pesticides on to those same crops, on to a weakening soil, in our attempt to keep producing ever more cheap food to feed our population.
There are very familiar names in the industry—Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta—and it is reckoned that they make about 35% of their total global revenue by selling these sorts of pesticides around the world. Farmers get trapped into that same cycle. It is something that we have to break.
This amendment is very important to me, because I feel a great distrust of the Government at the moment, for instance over the ban of neonicotinoids. They are now banned in America and across the whole of Europe; indeed, when we were still within the European Union, we banned them as well. However, we have now let them back in and they are allowed to be used on sugar beet. This feels to me like a small open door that could get bigger. I quote Dave Goulson, from the University of Sussex, who wrote a fantastic book about the decline of insects. Mentioning neonicotinoids, he says:
“The toxicity takes your breath away—just five maize seeds treated with neonicotinoids are enough to kill a grey partridge.”
No one can spray 17,000 tonnes of poison across a landscape without doing massive damage as it spreads. As the noble Lord, Lord Randall, so wisely said, we now know about DDT—and, actually, we know about this stuff too. It is no accident that it kills animals, insects and every single small thing around.
These amendments are absolutely imperative, right across so many parts of this Bill: biodiversity, habitats and human health. Also, there are other ways of doing it; there are intelligent, responsible uses of gene editing and many natural solutions to keep crops safe and ensure that we have good, healthy food that does not destroy either our planet or ourselves.
The Earl of Caithness (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness; she has made a very powerful speech and covered a lot of the points that I wanted to raise. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, also made a powerful and passionate speech. We all know that some pesticides are lethal when applied badly or in the wrong conditions. A lot of farmers do it absolutely correctly but, sadly, a minority do not necessarily adhere to the rules or the conditions. As the food section of the United Nations has reminded us, we also need to bear in mind that crop yields currently drop by 26% to 40% if one does not have the right chemicals.
The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, was absolutely right that there are alternatives coming through in gene editing; that must be the future. It would be an ideal situation if we could get rid of most harmful pesticides through gene editing, to keep food production up. The noble Baroness also reminded us what a complete mess we have made in our farming over past years, which has affected biodiversity, the soil and nature. A serious revolution is taking place now to correct that.
I turn to Amendment 123 and support what the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, has said. Yes, there is an informal agreement to phase out lead shot within five years, but that is too long a timescale. It is perfectly possible to do it to an earlier timescale. It would be inconvenient for some industries, I agree, but my mind goes back to when I was a Minister and we started to phase out CFCs. Industries came to my door in their droves, saying, “You cannot do this”, “We will have to rejig our plant”, “We can’t possibly do it in the timescale you are proposing.” In fact, they did it in a quicker timescale than I wanted at the time. If one gives industries a set date, they can do it; they will meet it. It is a pity that most of the steel now has to come from China, but that is another story. I support the thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, has said, and I so agree with my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury: it is for the good of shooting that this amendment is necessary.
Lord Carrington (CB)
My Lords, I am afraid that I will add a little un-unanimity to this debate, which seems to have been completely one-sided so far. I declare my farming interests as set out in the register and note that there is a thriving apiary on my farm, to which the greatest threats are from weather and woodpeckers—if noble Lords want to know why woodpeckers, it is because they break into the hives during the winter and eat the queen bee.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 53 in my name and shall speak to Amendments 52 and 123. All the amendments deal with different poisons that should be banned, or at least controlled. I thank the Bill team for its time and useful briefing on Friday. We have debated at length the impact of pesticides on both the population and pollinating insects during the Agriculture Bill and in Committee on this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, spoke passionately, as always—as did others—about the impact of pesticides on humans unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of spraying. That is a serious matter, and I hope that the Minister will have concessions to offer the noble Lord and other signatories to that amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, gave the excellent example of the promotion of DDT. There should not be another example similar to that witnessed with the use of organophosphate sheep dips, when it took a huge campaign on the part of those affected before the substance was banned. Pesticides have detrimental effects on humans, and the Government should acknowledge that.
I now turn to Amendment 53, relating to the effect of pesticide use on pollinators, particularly bees. I am grateful to Buglife for its briefings. I am sure the Minister will refer the House to the integrated pest management strategy, which covers some of the ground. However, this does not provide the safeguards needed. The widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides resulted in a reduction in the overwintering success of honey bee hives, significant declines of 40% in wild bee species studied and was implicated in butterfly population decline. This resulted in reduced pollination services and crop yields. However, despite the acknowledgement by the then Minister in 2010 that the pre-approval tests for pesticides were inadequate to protect pollinators, and the production in 2013 of a testing guide document by the European Food Safety Authority, the UK has yet to introduce any new tests to help ensure that future pesticides are pollinator-safe. In order to comply, an independent, competent authority is needed, as detailed in proposed new subsections (1) to (4) of Amendment 53.
I acknowledge the national action plan on pesticides and its aim to reduce the need for chemical pesticides, but it does not mean that they will be phased out. The Future Farming scheme will help with transition to a non-pesticide control, but this is yet to have effect.
The public are passionate about bees. One needs only to see the many products on sale with the symbol of bees and their honeycombs to acknowledge just how popular they are. Those can range from miracle face creams through to cushions and scarves, from socks through to high-fashion items, kitchen utensils and even furniture. There is also the huge popularity of honey—a truly natural product. The bee is popular, and the public wish it to be protected and wish to be consulted on anything which might have an impact on pollinators. This amendment ensures that that could happen.
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, has referred to a 30% to 40% reduction in crop yield if PPPs are not used, but if crops are not pollinated because of the decline in pollinators, there is likely to be a similar loss in yield.
With reference to proposed new subsection (9), the devolved Administrations have a significant role here, and the Minister should consult them. Authorisation of use includes derogation. As a nation, we must strive to avoid a similar circumstance to where a Minister, overriding the advice of his officials, authorises the use of glyphosate-based herbicides, which can cause high levels of mortality in bumblebees. This came to public attention only due to an FoI. The public need to have confidence that the Government will do the right thing.
Different groups of pollinators are affected by pesticides in different ways, so it is important that a range of pollinators is included in the pre-approval testing process. This amendment would ensure that tests are undertaken on acute and chronic effects on honey bees, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies and hover-flies, but also that independent science relevant to any pollinator is considered.
I regret to say that, despite the assurance of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, that everything is tested, on Friday, officials said that it was impossible to test everything. The various mixtures of chemicals—the so-called cocktails—are unlikely all to be tested. There may be a shift to less toxic mixtures, but insufficient research on their effect has so far been done, and it is important to protect honey bees and wild pollinators.
Turning briefly to Amendment 123, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, who spoke passionately about it, phasing out the use of lead ammunition has been slow. In Committee, we heard powerful evidence of the effect of lead poisoning on the health of both children and adults. No matter how careful you are in the preparation of game for the table, lead shot often escapes notice and is unwittingly eaten. I was very interested in the example given by the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, of lead shot in millet. The noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, spoke from vast experience of shooting. Alternatives to lead shot are available. I fully support the transition away from lead to safer alternatives. This amendment, if added to the Bill, would ensure that that would happen sooner rather than later. I look forward to the Minister’s response to those three very important amendments.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest through my involvement at Rothamsted Research. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in a clearly very important debate. Amendments 52 and 53 tackle the pernicious effects that pesticides are having on our environment and on human and insect health. The amendment of my noble friend Lord Whitty once again raises the important human health implications of spraying noxious chemicals in fields next to residential and workplace areas. He asks that regulations should set out minimum distances from homes, schools and public places. We do not think this is an unreasonable request. As he said, at least farm workers have protective clothing and some sort of choice about their work environment, whereas local people have no choice and no information about what is being sprayed on particular days. As we have discovered in the past, the health implications of exposure to such chemicals can sometimes take years to be revealed, as the example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, of DDT, clearly demonstrated.
Of course we welcome the Government’s overarching commitment to reducing pesticide use. We see that there are considerable advantages to precision applications and integrated pest management for the future, but the very fact that the Government are taking those steps is an acknowledgement of the dangers of widespread pesticide use. In the meantime, until those techniques become commonplace, we should at least be taking steps to protect public health, and my noble friend’s amendment is one step towards doing this.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I start by assuring your Lordships’ House that, in line with this amendment, the Government’s objective is to reduce the use of and risks and impacts associated with pesticides. Logically, that has to be the objective, given everything we know about the effects of pouring so many chemicals into our natural environment over so many decades.
The national action plan on the sustainable use of pesticides sets out the ambition to improve indicators of pesticide usage, risk and impacts. This was the subject of a recent public consultation. The summary of responses will be published shortly and a final revised national action plan will be published later this year. As we set out in the draft plan, the Government are committed to producing targets for the reduction of the risks associated with pesticide use. We are developing new metrics to better understand the pressures that pesticides put on the environment and will use these tools to target the most toxic pesticides.
Central to the strategy is integrated pest management. Through future schemes, we will support farmers, land managers and so on to maximise nature-based solutions and switch to lower-toxicity, higher-precision methods of pest control. The aim is to drive down dependency on pesticides and to allow our farmers to produce high-quality food with less risk to people and the environment.
On Amendment 53, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, the Government agree that pesticides should not be used where they may harm human health. Pesticides should be authorised only where a scientific assessment shows that they are not supposed to have any harmful effects on human health. In addition, pesticide users are supposed to take all reasonable precautions to protect human health and the environment, and must ensure that the pesticide is confined to the area intended to be treated. They must minimise their use around public buildings and vulnerable groups. That includes the situations noted in the noble Lord’s amendment, such as around schools, hospitals, children, and rural residents, who could be exposed more regularly. It is an offence to use pesticides in contravention of these requirements, and one that comes with an unlimited fine.
I share concerns raised by a number of noble Lord, including in particular my noble friend Lord Randall, about the potential impact of mixtures of pesticides. Clearly it is not possible to assess directly the human health and environmental impacts of the millions of potential combinations of chemicals in the natural environment. According to the toxicologist Professor Vyvyan Howard, if you were to test just the 1,000 commonest toxic chemicals in unique combinations of three, that would require at least 166 million different experiments. That would not even take into account the need to study varying doses. So we have over the years created an enormous problem for ourselves.
However, the risks from products are increasingly tested, as well as individual active substances. This means that mixtures of active substances are assessed where they are included in the same product and where they therefore will interact with other chemicals. There are regulatory controls, and associated conditions of authorisation, which could include no-spray zones, buffer zones and so on. That should ensure that people are protected. Applied properly, these controls should permit pesticide use only where they are safe, but where the application of these existing controls has not been sufficiently robust in the past—a point again made by my noble friend Lord Randall—that will be identified in the revised national action plan.
On Amendment 53, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, protecting pollinators is a priority for all the reasons we discussed in Committee, which I will not repeat. We are restoring and creating habitats for pollinators to thrive and redressing pressures by supporting a shift towards greater use of integrated pest management techniques. That includes increasing the use of nature-based, low-toxicity solutions and precision technologies to manage pests, all of which will benefit pollinators. Current legislation requires that pesticide products and their active substances have
“no unacceptable effects on the environment, having particular regard to … its impact on non-target species”,
which includes impacts on bees and other important pollinators.
Risk assessments made for active substances are subject to public consultation. These assessments establish the key risks posed by pesticide substances in representative conditions of use.
On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, let me say briefly that we have not changed our rules on neonicotinoids; the rules now are exactly the same as the ones we inherited when we left the European Union. The Government remain of the view that the scientific advice on neonicotinoids, particularly in relation to their impact on pollinators, is correct. This year, an emergency authorisation was granted for the use of a neonicotinoid seed treatment to address a particular problem in relation to the sugar beet crop. Controls were set but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, pointed out, the conditions of the authorisation were not met and the exemption was therefore not used.
We know that there has been a dramatic decline in pollinators both here and across much of the world. We recognise the need to work harder and faster to identify and reduce the causes. The revised national action plan will address this, alongside our wider action for nature, including through the national pollinator strategy and the powerful package of new policies and tools introduced through this Bill, including our 2030 target that we discussed on Wednesday last week.
Turning to Amendment 123 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, the Government recognise the need to address the issue of lead shot. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Randall, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury. Incidentally, I strongly endorse my noble friend’s views on the different approaches to shooting and enjoyed the vigour with which he delivered them.
As I highlighted in Committee, the Government are committed to addressing the impacts of lead in ammunition. In March, we asked the Health and Safety Executive to produce a UK REACH draft restriction dossier considering the risks posed by lead shot in all civilian ammunition. That process has now started, and the HSE published its call for evidence last month. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Browne, my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury, the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and John Batley for our meeting last month, which was more positive than the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, implied a few moments ago. They will recognise from that meeting—at least I hope they do—that the Government share their ambition, although they highlighted concerns, principally around the timeframes associated with the REACH process. I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Browne, that I share that frustration.
However, since then, Defra has engaged at length with the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency, and I am pleased to confirm that the Health and Safety Executive is due to provide its final recommendations by April 2023. The Secretary of State then has until July of that year to decide how to proceed and to propose a draft restriction, if that is what the Secretary of State decides and what the science determines. As I understand it, that timeframe does not compare unfavourably with the proposed amendment, which would take effect from 31 July 2023; it is certainly in the same ballpark.
In addition, the UK REACH process has a far more extensive coverage of lead ammunition, as the restriction dossier will consider all civilian uses of lead ammunition in all environments. The proposed amendment seeks only to limit the use of lead shot in shotguns for the purpose of killing an animal and excludes, for example, the use of lead shot for clay pigeon shooting. Most critically, any restriction would apply across Great Britain, whereas the proposed amendment would apply only to England.
We know that there are difficulties in the detection and enforcement of the existing ban on shooting over wetlands. However, we believe that there is a strong risk that the proposed amendment will also be difficult to enforce. In contrast, we are confident that the robustness of the UK REACH process will ensure that any restriction can be enforced effectively.
For these reasons, we believe that the UK REACH process is a more effective way to address the complexity of the issue. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Browne, not to press his amendment and hope that I have sufficiently assured the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I have to tell the Minister that I am deeply disappointed by that reply. He started out well by indicating that there is an historical problem that we need to tackle, but he then defended the current system as being adequate. He took almost the same line as the noble Lord, Lord Carrington. I ask both of them: if the present system is pretty much adequate, how come a number of cases of serious inducement of disease are still turning up in our GPs’ surgeries and our hospitals—and, in relation to pollinators, why are whole populations of bees and other pollinators in serious decline? If the present system worked, at least broadly speaking, we would not see these phenomena.
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, says that we will wipe out large parts of food production if we do this, but that is not the case. We are saying that we should protect the areas where people live and are vulnerable, and we propose that regulations should be introduced to do that. We were fobbed off during the passage of the then Agriculture Bill in a number of different ways, such as being told to put things in the Environment Bill instead or that it would be in the national action programme. There is hardly a word in that programme, as currently drafted, about the vulnerability of residents and other populations.
I feel sorry for the Minister in many respects, because I happen to know that, in a previous life, he strongly supported strengthening regulations regarding the exposure of rural populations, and indeed the effect on pollinators. I find it odd that, having recognised the problem and doing so again now, he is not prepared to respond to the appeals from the Front Benches of the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party to say something new or give a bigger commitment. At the beginning of his response, I sort of expected that we would at least get something. We got nothing. I regret that.
The Minister is in an impossible position, but he must accept that he needs to do something immediately to consider new regulations in this area, because it is palpably obvious that the present regulations are not working. To go back to the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, who suggested that the spraying of pesticides does not occur during the day or close to where children are, we recently saw a film about pesticides being produced perhaps 10 yards away from where children were playing. The system is not working; the Minister has to recognise that. He can look at what the precise details of the regulations should be, but he should accept the principle in my amendment now.
With regret, I am going to test the opinion of the House.
“Protection of pollinators from pesticides
(1) A competent authority must not authorise for use any pesticide product, active ingredient, safener or synergist unless it is satisfied that there will be no significant short-term negative effect, and no long-term negative effect, on the health of honeybees or wild pollinator populations.(2) A pollinator risk assessment report relating to the relevant substance must be published by an expert body.(3) The expert body must consist of individuals free from vested interests in pesticide use, who shall have been independently appointed.(4) The pollinator risk assessment report must include—(a) data examining acute and chronic effects of the relevant substance on honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies and hoverflies,(b) all relevant available scientific evidence relating to any pollinators,(c) conclusions relating to the likely acute and chronic effects of the relevant substance on honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies, hoverflies and other pollinators,(d) an assessment of the likelihood of synergistic effects, and(e) the identification of any risks to pollinators where the available evidence is insufficient to reach a conclusion.(5) The expert body must consult the public on the draft content of the pollinator risk assessment report.(6) When making any authorisation decision the competent authority must—(a) aim to achieve a high level of protection for pollinators,(b) be satisfied that the requirements of subsections (2) to (5) have been met,(c) consult all relevant authorities with environmental responsibilities, (d) consult such other persons as the competent authority considers appropriate,(e) lay before Parliament, and publish, a statement explaining why the competent authority is satisfied that the requirements of subsection (1) have been met,(f) ensure the public has been informed by public notice early in the decision-making procedure, and in an adequate, timely and effective manner, that a decision will be made, and(g) ensure the public has been consulted on the decision that the competent authority intends to make, including on any mitigation or restriction measures that are proposed.(7) The consultation period for the purposes of subsection (6)(g) must be of at least three months, except for emergency derogations where the period will be at least four weeks.(8) This section comes into force on 1 February 2023.(9) In this section—“authorisation of use” includes authorisation by derogation;“competent authority” means—(a) in relation to England, the Secretary of State;(b) in relation to Wales, the Welsh Ministers;(c) in relation to Scotland, the Scottish Ministers;(d) the Secretary of State when acting with the consent of either or both the Welsh Ministers in relation to Wales and the Scottish Ministers in relation to Scotland.”Member’s explanatory statement
The aim of this new Clause is to fix a gap in the pesticide authorisation process which currently omits any assessment on the long-term effects of pesticides on honey bees and omits any assessment of the effects on wild pollinators.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for this response and acknowledge the work that Defra is undertaking to restore pollinator habitats. However, the national action plan and the revised integrated pest management strategy are not sufficient protection for pollinators that have delicate systems. Food production is important and pollinators are key to this.
Given the time constraints, I will not continue. I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for regulations under Clause 74 to be subject to affirmative procedure.
The Duke of Wellington
“(2A) A drainage and sewerage management plan must require the undertaker to implement, in conjunction with local authorities, the progressive separation of the foul water and surface water systems where possible.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to secure the separation, where possible, of drainage systems from the sewerage systems through a legal obligation placed on the water companies and local authorities in order to reduce harm from untreated discharges.
The Duke of Wellington (CB)
My Lords, I rise to move Amendments 59 and 60, in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Altmann and Lady Quin, and the noble Lord, Lord Oates, to whom I am very grateful for their support.
These are not glamorous or intellectually stimulating amendments, such as others we debated last week, but their purpose is both high-minded and supported by the public. I cannot resist referring to a petition circulating in recent days, which already has more than 90,000 signatures, calling on the Government to place a duty on water companies not to emit sewage. I had nothing to do with the petition.
The amendments simply seek to write into an Act of Parliament a legal commitment to clean up rivers. It is surprising, shocking and indeed revolting that, in the 21st century, in a civilised and developed country, there were, according to the Environment Agency, in 2020, 400,000 discharges of sewage in England and another 100,000 in Wales; that is more than half a million discharges of sewage into rivers in England and Wales.
Since the Bill left the other place earlier this year, the Government have moved a long way, and I recognise that. First, they took over some elements of a Private Member’s Bill tabled by the right honourable Philip Dunne, Member of Parliament for Ludlow, who is also chair of the Environmental Audit Committee in the House of Commons. Clause 80 of the Bill comes from Philip Dunne’s Bill. It requires the Secretary of State to prepare a plan to reduce untreated discharges.
Since Committee, the Government have tabled further amendments: Amendments 61, 62 and 63. I thank the Minister for two meetings which the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and I had with him during the Summer Recess. I am also very grateful to the Minister in the other place, Rebecca Pow, who asked me to meet her on Teams two weeks ago, with her officials, to inform me that these amendments were to be tabled the following day. I very much welcome the amendments, particularly Amendment 63, where, for the first time, the Government are using the word “elimination” rather than just “reduction”. Amendments 61 and 62 concern very welcome increases in reporting and monitoring.
I will now explain the need for Amendment 59 to Clause 79. This seeks to separate foul water from surface water. It is surface water from heavy rainfall that often overwhelms a sewage plant, which of course is designed mainly to deal with sewage. In his letter to Peers of 27 August, the Minister announced that the Government will review Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act. If the Minister can confirm from the Dispatch Box that this would have the same effect as my Amendment 59, we will have no need to press that amendment. However, I hope he will accept that the purpose of Amendment 59 is essential, as it is surface water that can so often cause storm overflows.
I turn to Amendment 60 to Clause 80. The clause and the further amendments are still missing perhaps the most important part of Philip Dunne’s Bill, which was the duty to be placed on water companies to take all reasonable steps to ensure that untreated sewage is not discharged into inland waters. My Amendment 60 seeks to put that legal duty into the Bill. In addition, the amendment would require water companies to demonstrate continuous improvement and progressive reductions in the harm caused by the discharges.
Proposed subsection (2) in Amendment 60 addresses another problem. There is considerable evidence that the Environment Agency and others are not prosecuting most of the discharges, even though many are apparently illegal. It is therefore important to write into the Bill a requirement on the various bodies to exercise their powers of enforcement.
I understand that one of the reasons why the Government are reluctant to place a legal duty on the water companies to take all reasonable steps to prevent discharges is that they have been advised that this might affect the investment decisions of the water companies and put sewage treatment ahead of other possible investments. I do not find that argument at all persuasive—in fact I think it demonstrates the absolute need for the amendment and the necessity of placing a legal duty on the companies to bring to an end these damaging discharges.
That necessity is no better demonstrated than by a press release from Ofwat, the water industry regulator. It announced, on the very day when we were debating the environment in the Queen’s Speech, a new water sector investment of £2.8 billion into the green recovery. But if we read the press release further, we see that only £157 million—just over 5% of the investment—was to help to eliminate the harm caused by storm overflows. Only a legal duty would move these investments higher up the list of priorities.
I do not underestimate the cost of modernising the sewerage network, and I understand that the Government will have reservations about imposing a required investment on the water companies. However, as I said at Second Reading, it should be possible to find a formula that involves some modest grants, some long-term borrowing, reduced dividends and above-inflation increases in wastewater or sewerage charges to residential and commercial users.
I turn to subsection (2) of proposed new section 141E, to be inserted in Clause 80. In Committee I tabled an amendment on this. As the Bill is currently drafted, a discharge is not considered to be a discharge if it has been caused by electrical or mechanical failure! That strikes me as an enormous loophole, and it can only have been included at the request of the water companies. In our meeting with the Minister, we were assured that, despite the wording of that subsection, discharges as a result of electrical or mechanical failure will still need to be disclosed. I ask the Minister to repeat that assurance from the Dispatch Box. However, I then wonder why subsection (2) is necessary at all. Will the Minister not consider deleting the subsection entirely at Third Reading? It appears totally unnecessary and possibly undermines part of the purpose of Chapter 4, and Clause 80 in particular.
While the country drives towards carbon net zero and improving air and soil quality, we surely cannot allow water quality to be compromised by regular discharges of untreated sewage into the aquatic environment. The Bill aims, and government policy is, to leave the environment for future generations in a better state. I cannot believe that any Defra Minister does not want to clean up our rivers, and the only way to ensure that is to include in the Bill a legal duty to prevent discharges. Not including such a duty will inevitably lead to delays, more plans, excuses and further delays.
On my way to the House today I received, very kindly, another email from Rebecca Pow. In it she describes everything that the Government are doing, but then in the paper produced by the department there is a section of frequently asked questions. It reads:
“Why are you not placing a duty on water companies to reduce storm overflows?”,
to which the reply is this:
“The Environment Bill places a new duty on water companies to produce Drainage and Wastewater Management Plans setting out how”,
and so on. That is my point—there is yet another plan. I am sorry to say this, and I am grateful to the Minister for alerting me to everything that the department has done.
I hope not to divide the House on Amendment 59 —that of course depends on the Minister’s response—but I intend to do so on Amendment 60. I beg to move.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and with his permission, I shall speak to Amendment 82. I thank the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, for moving his amendment so eloquently. I have known the noble Duke since 1982, when I was a humble adviser to the Conservatives in the European Parliament, and I am delighted to follow him today.
Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, has been unavoidably detained in Norfolk, but he is in a very privileged position and knowledgeable in this regard: following the devastating floods in East Anglia in 2020, he took up the position of independent chair of the Norfolk Strategic Flooding Alliance. I will set out his remarks at the outset and then add a few of my own.
Lord Chidgey (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her support of the amendment I wish to speak to; Amendment 83, in my name, dealing with the chalk stream restoration strategy. I also place on record my thanks to the Bill team for discussions that we were able to have in connection with the extent and impact of the strategy that we are proposing. I also thank the Angling Trust for its technical support in preparing the amendment.
Throughout the passage of this Environment Bill through your Lordships’ House, noble Lords have regularly raised their concerns over the deterioration of our chalk streams through appalling neglect, to the extent that many see streams’ diverse ecosystems under severe threat to their very survival. Your Lordships are not alone. Environmental charities, not-for-profit trusts, specialist scientific bodies and even the privatised water companies have joined the call for a national strategy to restore our chalk streams. The naturalist Chris Packham for one, movingly described the deterioration of the River Itchen over time, as he walked beside the river from Eastleigh to Winchester, recalling his childhood days.
One Saturday morning this August, I was able to greet some 25 members of organisations from across the south-east of England, from Hertfordshire to the north, Kent in the east, and Dorset in the west. They were setting out on a river walk beside the Itchen, not unlike that of Chris Packham. They represented literally thousands of people, all deeply concerned about the threats to our unique chalk streams, and keenly following our proceedings in Parliament, whether it be about the River Arle, the Itchen, the Loddon in Hampshire or the Chess in Buckinghamshire, or winterbourne streams, which traditionally disappear in the summer to reappear through the chalk springs as autumn approaches—only now some of them do not.
Giving evidence to the Environmental Audit Select Committee, Mr Feargal Sharkey said, in terms, that the River Avon catchment comprises five chalk streams, with some of the rarest habitats in the country. It is designated as a special area of conservation, with some of the highest legal protection we have, and yet Wessex Water has spent close to 27,000 hours dumping sewage into five of our rarest ecosystems, home to an endangered species of salmon that finds refuge only in the Hampshire Avon.
Baroness Quin (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to support very briefly the amendments moved by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I was glad to be able to co-sign these amendments in a way that, I hope, will stress the cross-party nature of the support for them.
Public concern about sewage discharge is increasing daily, particularly among the public in those areas that are badly affected. Indeed, many people are astonished, because they did not imagine that raw sewage could be discharged into our rivers and seas, and certainly not on the scale that it is happening.
There are considerable problems around the country. Speaking to another amendment that I support, the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, talked about the situation affecting chalk streams. He mentioned, among others, the River Chess in Buckinghamshire. I would mention the River Lark, near Bury St Edmunds, which also has problems arising from abstraction. There are many other rivers around the country that are very precious natural resources, including my own home river, the River Coquet in Northumberland.
I know that the Minister has had meetings with the noble Duke and with many others, and I recognise the amendments that have been put forward, particularly on real-time reporting, which is extremely important. However, action is needed on a significant scale and, in dealing with this problem, costly though it is, we cannot just do a little in a lot of rivers: that would just be a sticking-plaster. We need a much more ambitious programme.
I hope, therefore, that the Government will accept the amendments, and if they do not and they are pushed to a vote, I will be very happy to support them.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, as this is the first time that I have addressed the Chamber in person since March of last year, I put on record my appreciation of the Zoom facility that made it possible for me to participate from home and thank all the staff who made it possible. It enabled me to play a small part in Committee on this Bill, but it was a limited contribution: while Zoom worked well for general debates, it was not ideal for committee work.
I am glad, therefore, in supporting Amendment 59, moved by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington—and indeed Amendment 60—to build on the comments made in Committee on the important issue of water pollution and quality. I thank the dozens of people who have written to us expressing their concern about this matter—it clearly touches a raw nerve.
The factors causing us in Wales to fail to meet the “good” status designation within the water framework directive are, first, agriculture-related and diffuse pollution; secondly, metal and coal mine pollution; and, thirdly, waste water, which is a water company responsibility and the subject of Amendments 59 and 60. It is worth noting, to put it in context, that in Wales the figure for pollution arising from waste water is 14%, compared with, I believe, some 50% in England.
It is only fair to note, therefore, that Dŵr Cymru—Welsh Water—has put in considerable investment in regard to this matter. For example, no less than £100 million has been spent in Llanelli alone over a five-year period. That accounts for about 50% of the streets that are potentially impacted by this problem. It has spent £100 million on addressing this very issue—and that is only one of many old industrial areas that need such investment. Welsh Water estimates that it needs between £9 billion and £14 billion over three decades to fully resolve the problem. So the scale of the challenge—to resolve these issues—requires a central government capital programme in both Wales and England.
One of the sources of difficulty in Wales in not meeting the “good” status designation within the water framework arises from phosphates, emanating from animal manures and chicken farms. That of course is addressed elsewhere in our discussion.
One matter of concern to me—I would be grateful to the Minister for his observations on this—is that within England there seems to be a target of reducing spill numbers rather than emphasising water quality as a focus. Clearly, a reduction in spill numbers will help, but it is the overall impact on water quality that really matters. Despite the valid concerns expressed in Committee and today about the situation in Wales, which can impact on England when rivers cross the border, it is worth noting that the proportion of rivers which reach “good” status in Wales is twice as high as that in England.
From the viewpoint of Dŵr Cymru—Welsh Water—two other priorities are, first, banning wet wipes which contain plastic, as mentioned in an earlier debate, and which are a major factor in blocking pipes, leading to severe pollution problems; and, secondly, reversing the trend of the continual increase in impermeable areas, which worsens the impact of CSO spills as there is nowhere else for the water to run. Incidentally, one challenge for Welsh Water is the fact that there are currently over 68,000 unregistered septic tanks in Wales. That gives your Lordships an idea of the problem. The avoidance of pollution from those tanks must also be one of the challenges to be addressed.
Some of the matters which I have highlighted are purely for Wales and must be addressed by the Welsh Government and Welsh Water. Others have a cross-border dimension relating to rivers which flow from Wales to England, and yet others are general issues which need to be addressed on a UK basis. Government amendment 128 extends to England and Wales; I would be glad if the Minister can confirm that he has the agreement of the Welsh Government on that amendment’s provisions.
I commend Amendments 59 and 60 as ones which focus on these issues and give the Government a chance to show that they are serious about them. I shall certainly support the amendment of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, if he presses it to a vote.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, the aim of the noble Duke’s amendments will be something that we all appreciate. I just wonder exactly how all this difficulty arises. Rainwater and groundwater are separate from sewage and will surely be very different in quality. While they may have some very small pollutants in them, generally speaking they are pretty wholesome.
It seems very strange to require that a water system should receive the sewerage system. Long ago, when I was at the Scottish Bar, I was instructed by a company that was then a water company in Scotland. The director of that company made it very clear to me that water and sewage were different things, and the last thing he would wish to agree to was to combine the two. Apart from anything else, the likelihood was that the groundwater and surface water would be greater in volume than the sewage. It therefore seems that the amendment that is proposed to change the system is very good, except that it would seem to require that it be done by the undertaker—which I take to be the water company. At the moment, the water company is under an obligation to accept the sewage. That must surely stop. It must be a ridiculous system that puts together two such completely different elements.
I very much support the amendment proposed in detail by the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, a little while ago. We need to come out of the idea of putting these together and separate them, because the floodwater difficulties are great enough. To add sewerage responsibilities to those of flooding seems an extraordinary example of what one should not do.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 59 and 60, so ably spoken to by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, whom I hope I can call my noble friend. I am grateful to the Minister and his officials for the engagement and time they have given us in discussing these important amendments. I welcome the Government’s own Amendments 61, 62 and 63. Nevertheless, I hope that the Government might go further. I also commend the work of my right honourable friend Philip Dunne, in the other place, who has done so much important work on this issue.
As we have heard, there were 400,000 sewage discharges in 2020. This is not a rare occurrence. Water companies have underinvested in sewerage infrastructure. I hope that the Government can overcome their reluctance to impose a duty on them in this Bill to act and invest urgently, as is required. Without such a statutory requirement as specified in these amendments, water companies will continue to be able to put profits and dividends above public health and protection of our precious waterways. I recognise and welcome that the Government have strengthened the duties on these companies, and the expectations to address storm overflows in the drainage and wastewater management plans that will be statutorily required by Clause 79(3)(g). But these plans will not even be consulted on until next summer, let alone be introduced or acted upon. So far, according to a very helpful briefing produced by Defra, water companies have committed just £1.1 billion to investigate and improve storm overflows. This is insufficient for the scale of the problem to be tackled.
I welcome the Storm Overflows Taskforce announced last August, which
“has agreed to set a long term goal to eliminate harm from storm overflows.”
This, too, is most welcome but, so far, this involves improving monitoring and transparency rather than meaningful action to reduce sewage overflows into rivers and waterways. So far, the Environment Agency has clearly struggled to assess compliance with discharge rules and impose enforcement action or fines to galvanise noticeable action and stop or reduce these overflows.
Research on sewerage from Professor Peter Hammond and Professor Jamie Woodward of Manchester University has found clear evidence that untreated sewage or wastewater are being routinely discharged outside the conditions allowed by the Environment Agency permits. It is vital that regulation of discharges of untreated sewage and wastewater are tightened, and these amendments would assist in this regard. The Government’s plan is to set targets on reducing pollution from wastewater, agriculture and so on, but setting targets is not an active reduction of this pollutant.
I find it difficult to understand why the Minister and his department are so reluctant to put a duty now on the water companies directly to ensure they reduce and ultimately eliminate discharges of raw and partially treated sewerage into our rivers and waterways. The companies, represented by Water UK in an interesting briefing, have urged us to move focus away from end-of-pipe to look instead at the way surface water is managed, as my noble friend Lady McIntosh was commenting upon. It is true that developers are too often connecting to sewage systems that cannot cope, but this is only part of the problem, and it needs to be resolved by implementing Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. Of course, sustainable drainage systems are important, and connection to a public sewer should not be automatic and needs to be conditional on official approval.
I hope the Minister can provide the reassurances sought by my noble friend the Duke of Wellington so that he will not press Amendment 59. Amendment 60 places a duty
“on sewerage undertakers to take all reasonable steps to ensure untreated sewage is not discharged”
and
“demonstrate improvements in the sewerage systems and progressive reductions in the harm caused.”
In this ground-breaking Bill, how can we not impose that type of duty? Of course, the amendment also requires the Secretary of State and director of the Environment Agency to “secure compliance.” Too often, companies have been allowed to self-report. But, so far, the Government are saying they are fully committed to producing a report on actions required to achieve total elimination so they can fully understand the costs and impacts of doing so. But Amendment 60 would accelerate action on the ground. I hope that, ultimately, the Minister might be persuaded about the merits of supporting this amendment.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, this is an interesting issue. The question, of course, is: where does the blame lie? Sewage spills happen and they are intensely damaging for humans and for ecosystems, yet we have heard some explanations that almost seem conflicting. We can argue that it is we who cause the problem because of the way that we dispose of our own waste, or that it is the fault of the water companies, which are clearly incompetent at times—I shall be supporting the noble Duke’s amendment. As I argued in the debate on the office for environmental protection, we have to penalise them for these spillages. In many cases it might be the developers’ fault for building on land they should not have built on, or it might the local authority’s fault for allowing developers to build on, for example, flood plains where they should not be building. At the moment, however, it is the water companies, and we really have to take this seriously.
I am supporting all the amendments as they all seem perfectly acceptable. The Green Party’s view is that all new developments should have a proper, sustainable drainage system so that the sorts of spillages that we are hearing about simply do not happen. However, this has clearly not been achieved and it is a big problem. I have signed the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, on chalk streams. I was going to eulogise about them, but I think I was given the same briefing, as other people have covered more or less the same territory.
I thank Feargal Sharkey, who was the lead singer in a punk band, the Undertones—I am afraid I have never heard of it. He is apparently a lifelong fly-fisherman, but is now dedicating his life to chalk streams and he sent an excellent briefing. Chalk streams are very precious and special, and we do not treat them very well. If not one of our chalk streams currently achieves a good overall environmental health status, that is quite shocking; we really need to do something about it.
I was incredibly impressed by the PR machine of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I have had dozens of emails supporting his amendment. I admire that; perhaps he could share with me exactly how he got it to work.
This is, again, clearly an issue that the Government should have put in the original Environment Bill. This is an old Bill in the sense that it was originally written in 2019. It was pathetic then and it is pathetic still. Can the Government please do a little rethinking and include this issue in the Bill?
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
The arguments have been very well and fulsomely made, building a consensus. Will noble Lords who still wish to speak make their speeches as short as possible and introduce some new arguments?
The Earl of Caithness (Con)
Indeed, I have a new point to add, which has not been made—there is no point in frowning, I say to my noble friend.
I thank the Minister for bringing forward the government amendments and for his commitment to reviewing Schedule 3. That was something that I asked for in Committee and I am delighted that he is going to do it. Has he been briefed on the latest research from the University of Manchester, which has demonstrated a direct link between poor wastewater management and high levels of microplastic pollution in the United Kingdom? When we have these overflows, the microplastics go out into the water system—not only the rivers, but the sea, thus negating a whole lot of good that the Government have been trying to do in reducing microplastics. If this were not enough of a bad situation before, it is now really bad.
My noble friend’s Amendment 63 proposes including a report
“on elimination of discharges from storm overflows”.
I merely ask, what next after subsection (3)? It is good to have a report and lay it before Parliament, but what action will be taken? That is the only thing that matters now. I support these amendments, and support very strongly what my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern said: we should be aiming to separate the sewage from the wastewater. No new developments should be allowed to discharge automatically into the current sewerage system unless agreed by the water authority; there must be other alternatives.
I have one final comment for my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering. If she expects a developer to make a commitment towards future expenditure on one of these systems, I am afraid she is whistling in the wind. The developers will not do so; if necessary, they would go into bankruptcy and set up a new company to avoid any liability.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, in view of the time and the Minister’s admonition, I shall be brief. I am very pleased to support the amendments in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and thank him for working so collaboratively on them. The arguments for them have been compellingly made so I will not add to them. I am also pleased to support the amendment from my noble friend Lord Chidgey on the important issue of chalk streams, and in principle support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh.
I hope the Government will listen carefully to the arguments but if the noble Duke chooses to put Amendment 60 to the vote, he will have the support of these Benches.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 59 and 60 in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and offer our firm support should he decide to test the opinion of the House. I will also briefly talk to Amendment 82 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and to Amendment 83 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, to which I have added my name.
We had lengthy debates on water issues in Committee so I start by thanking the Government, as other noble Lords have done, for subsequently tabling amendments to address many of the concerns that were raised. I also thank the Defra officials for their time in meeting me and my noble friend Lady Jones to go through the amendments in detail. The Minister has clearly introduced these changes but while we welcome them, we believe that in some areas they do not go far enough to address the genuine concerns raised by noble Lords. Government Amendment 61 regarding near real-time reporting states that the duration and volume of storm overflow discharges will be reported, yet the proposed amendment does not mention volume. Will the Government consider adding volume reporting into this amendment to ensure that that is a requirement?
I commend the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, for his diligence and persistence in pressing his concerns in his Amendments 59 and 60. Amendment 59 covers drainage and sewerage management systems. While we welcome the new requirement that Clause 79 inserts into the Water Industry Act 1991 that enables companies to take a strategic approach to wastewater management that is clearly needed, we still believe that it should be strengthened. Amendment 59 would do this by bringing in an overarching purpose for the plans, requiring companies to deliver continuous improvement of sewage treatment plants and the separation of surface water from foul water.
I know from discussions with Defra officials that there are concerns about the huge cost of this, but I hope to hear from the Minister a commitment from the Government that this is being taken very seriously and that it will be set as a top priority for water companies and Ofwat. I also hope he will provide the noble Duke with the assurances that he has requested on this amendment.
Water UK has raised concerns about the way in which we manage surface and groundwaters as the default remains to push through these foul water systems which overloads their capacity. As this is currently out of the water sector’s remit to control, I would like to hear from the Minister whether there are any plans to review this. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, also drew attention to this.
I turn now to Amendment 60. We know that Clause 80 is designed to amend the Water Industry Act 1991. As my noble friend Lady Quin said, people are horrified to hear that sewage is still discharged into our waterways. We are disappointed that this clause is weaker and less ambitious than the original Private Member’s Bill proposed by Philip Dunne MP, who was here earlier but seems to have left. We know that existing laws are completely inadequate. The Environment Agency has also conceded that with significant pressures on its funding in recent years it has had to reduce overall monitoring and enforcement activity
“below the level we would wish”.
The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, drew attention to the lack of enforcement.
I remind your Lordships’ House that the Environment Agency has seen its funding cut by 60% and, according to official Environment Agency data analysed by National World, prosecutions of companies and organisations for environmental crime in England plummeted by 86% between 2000 and 2019. The number of charges also fell by 84% in that period. Does the Minister recognise that if the Government truly are serious about tackling pollution, they must fund the Environment Agency properly so that it can do the job that it was set up to do? Water companies must be made to undertake the improvements to the system needed if we are to address the current crisis in sewerage pollution. We commend the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, for his informed and persuasive arguments, and support him.
Turning briefly to Amendment 82, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for her introduction. We believe that a sustainable drainage hierarchy is extremely important. The noble Baroness mentioned Cumbria; I emphasise, as someone who lives in a high flood-risk area, that the importance of this for local flood risk cannot be underestimated.
Turning finally to Amendment 83 on chalk streams, I honestly am astounded that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, has not heard of the Undertones. That is quite extraordinary and possibly what I have been most shocked about during these debates. Moving to chalk streams, according to Wikipedia, which I know is not always 100% accurate, there are 210 chalk streams in the world, 160 of them in England. However, listening to the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, in his excellent introduction, it seems that this is probably a bit of an underestimate.
Today and in Committee we heard eloquently from the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, and others, about how urgent it is to act to save our chalk streams. I hope that the Minister has listened to his concerns on this and the other areas of real concern that we have been debating today.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
Tackling storm overflows in England is a government priority, and the Government are acting decisively through this Bill. I am grateful to the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, my noble friend Lady Altmann and many others for the pressure that they have exerted on the issue of storm overflows. These new government amendments, which the Rivers Trust has welcomed as a
“significant victory for river health and ... river users”
are a credit to their work.
I am pleased to bring forward government Amendments, 61, 62 and 63, to add further duties on water companies and the Government. This strengthens the package of government amendments brought forward on this issue in Committee. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, we have secured the agreement of the Welsh Government to these amendments.
Amendments 61 and 62 are designed to increase the accountability on water companies and to provide greater transparency for the public on the frequency and impact of storm overflows. Companies will be required to report on storm overflows in near real time, meaning within an hour of them occurring, in a way that is easy for the public to access and understand. They will be required to monitor continuously the water quality upstream and downstream of both storm overflows and sewage treatment works. This will give regulators and the public crucial indicators of the health of our waters, including dissolved oxygen, ammonia, temperature and pH values, and turbidity. The information obtained from these two duties, along with the annual reporting required by the amendment that I introduced in Committee, will finally require full transparency from water companies about their impact on our waters. We have made this expectation clear in our draft strategic policy statement to Ofwat. For the first time, the Government will be telling the industry’s economic regulator that we expect water companies to take steps to “significantly reduce storm overflows”. Therefore, with respect to the noble Duke, the Duke of Westminster—
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I am so sorry—Westminster, Wellington. I meant the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. My apologies; it has been a long session.
With respect to the noble Duke, it is not right to say that the Government are reluctant to influence investment decisions of the water companies. That is exactly what we are doing. We will also make it clear in the guidance that we will shortly be giving to water companies regarding the preparation of their drainage and sewerage management plans. These are a statutory requirement under the Bill and we expect them to include considered actions for reducing storm overflows and their harm. I am confident that this action, driven by the Bill, is the right approach. However, as I said in Committee, if those plans are not sufficiently ambitious, the Government will not hesitate to use our direction-making power under Clause 79 to require them to take more action. This is a direct power over the water companies and, as I said, we will not hesitate to use it.
Very briefly, in response to the comments from the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, he is right in what he says, but the operation of overflows during emergencies is covered separately through permits for emergency overflows or through defences under the environmental permitting regulations—so, for example, to avoid damage to human health or even human life. It is extremely rare and covers events such as asset failure.
None the less, I know that the noble Lord and many others are keen to see a road map towards the complete elimination of storm overflows, as am I and my colleagues in Defra. I want to be clear that in the government plan, we will absolutely commit to pushing as far as it is possible to go. The reality is that, as our actions to considerably reduce overflows are successful, the remaining overflows are likely to be much more challenging to resolve and may therefore involve greater costs, with marginal, slight benefits. That is why the initial assessments suggest that elimination could cost more than £150 billion, which we foresee would likely mean increased customer bills and trade-offs against other water industry priorities.
We need better evidence to be certain of that—a point made by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. To this end, Amendment 63 requires the Government to investigate and map out the actions needed to eliminate storm overflows and to report to Parliament, before 1 September next year, on how elimination could be achieved and the corresponding benefits and costs. The point about the report is that it will provide the public, Parliament and the water industry with up-front, clear and comprehensive information on the feasibility and cost of elimination. It will tell us what we can do. Between that government plan on storm overflows and the new elimination report, we will set out transparently and precisely how far we can then go. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, that this issue is taken extremely seriously by all my colleagues in Defra. Whatever the outcome of that report, it will inform our next steps and the commitments we make.
In the meantime, in addition to the action I have already set out, I am pleased to confirm today that the Government will undertake a review of the case for implementing Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 in England. This schedule would set mandatory build standards for sustainable drainage schemes—or SUDS—on new developments. We agree with noble Lords and others about the importance of using SUDS to reduce rainwater going into sewers, which in turn reduces the frequency of storm overflows, as well as providing multifunctional benefits for reducing flood risk and enhancing nature. Schedule 3 would allow us to do this, but we need first to ensure that it is still fit for purpose.
Commencing in October this year, Defra officials will work closely with MHCLG, local planning authorities, developers and SUDS experts as we assess the current situation with regard to the construction of SUDS and the potential for the schedule to improve this, as well as implementation options and the benefits and costs of those options. This information will also feed into the development of the Government’s plan on storm overflows, on which we will also consult in spring next year. The Government believe that this is the appropriate and best approach towards reducing the volume of rainwater entering combined sewerage systems, which is rightly a concern of both Amendment 59 in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and Amendment 82 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt.
Regarding Amendment 82 specifically, I am grateful to the noble Lord and to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, for conveying his message to us and for taking the time to meet me recently on this issue. The importance of sustainable drainage for managing surface water on new developments is made clear in planning policy. A hierarchy for the management of surface water on new developments is also included in the building regulations of 2010, and Schedule 3, once we have reviewed the case for its implementation, would make the connection of surface water to foul sewer conditional on local planning approval of the developer’s proposed SUDS. The noble Baroness asked why we need another review. I simply say that the Government have to understand the possible options, benefits and costs for implementing any policy and legislation. While there is a wide range of evidence on the issue of Schedule 3, since 2010 there have been a lot of changes in the planning systems and advancements in SUDS technology. The review will enable us to understand the current landscape and the issues properly and to make an up-to-date and informed decision on implementation.
In response to the noble Baroness’s questions on SUDS maintenance, Schedule 3 sets out that the maintenance body is a SUDS approval body as part of a local planning authority. The review will consider whether this continues to be the most appropriate and the right approach, as well as looking at other options.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
Just before my noble friend sits down, I did ask one question: what has changed since the regulations, which were to impose exactly what he intends to do, were rejected in 2012 for being too expensive? When we met, my noble friend said that the aim of the Government’s policy now was to end the automatic right to connect and make it conditional—but conditional upon what?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
What has changed is the technology and the SUDS—for example, rain gardens and swales et cetera. The planning system has changed in any number of ways, as my noble friend knows from her time in the coalition Government and since. That has given rise to a need to re-evaluate and work out what the appropriate policy should be.
The Duke of Wellington (CB)
My Lords, I know that we are all anxious to move on. However, I must first point out quickly to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, that I certainly do not have a PR machine: I was as surprised as anyone that so many emails were sent to Members of this House.
I thank all noble Lords who took part in this debate. I particularly want to thank the Minister here and the Minister in the other place for everything they have done in recent weeks to improve the Bill; they have certainly strengthened it, and many of their amendments are very welcome to many of us.
I am grateful to the Minister for his assurances on Amendment 59. I personally am happy to accept those and will seek permission to withdraw the amendment. However, on Amendment 60, I am sorry to say, despite all the Minister’s efforts, I do not believe that more plans, reporting and monitoring will do the business, and so I intend to divide the House on that amendment.
The Duke of Wellington
“141ZA Duty on sewerage undertakers to take all reasonable steps to ensure untreated sewage is not discharged from storm overflows(1) A sewerage undertaker must demonstrate improvements in the sewerage systems and progressive reductions in the harm caused by untreated sewage discharges.(2) The Secretary of State, the Director and the Environment Agency must exercise their respective functions under this and any other Act to secure compliance with this duty.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of the amendment is to try to eliminate, not simply reduce, the harm caused to the environment and individual and public health by the discharge of untreated sewage into rivers, and to ensure that the various agencies use their powers of enforcement.
“Reporting on discharges from storm overflows
In Chapter 4 of Part 4 of the Water Industry Act 1991 (as inserted by section 80 above), after section 141D insert—“141DA Reporting on discharges from storm overflows(1) Where there is a discharge from a storm overflow of a sewerage undertaker whose area is wholly or mainly in England, the undertaker must publish the following information—(a) that there has been a discharge from the storm overflow;(b) the location of the storm overflow;(c) when the discharge began;(d) when the discharge ended.(2) The information referred to in subsection (1)(a) to (c) must be published within an hour of the discharge beginning; and that referred to in subsection (1)(d) within an hour of it ending.(3) The information must—(a) be in a form which allows the public readily to understand it, and(b) be published in a way which makes it readily accessible to the public.(4) The duty of a sewerage undertaker under this section is enforceable under section 18 by—(a) the Secretary of State, or(b) the Authority, with the consent of or in accordance with a general authorisation given by the Secretary of State.(5) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for exceptions from the duty in subsection (1) or (2) (for example, by reference to descriptions of storm overflows, frequency of discharge or the level of risk to water quality).(6) Before making regulations under this section the Secretary of State must consult such persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.(7) The Secretary of State may not make regulations under this section unless a draft of the statutory instrument containing the regulations has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires sewerage undertakers in England to report in near-real time on the duration of storm overflow discharges.
“Monitoring quality of water potentially affected by discharges
(1) In Chapter 4 of Part 4 of the Water Industry Act 1991, after section 141DA insert—“141DB Monitoring quality of water potentially affected by discharges from storm overflows and sewage disposal works(1) A sewerage undertaker whose area is wholly or mainly in England must continuously monitor the quality of water upstream and downstream of an asset within subsection (2) for the purpose of obtaining the information referred to in subsection (3).(2) The assets referred to in subsection (1) are—(a) a storm overflow of the sewerage undertaker, and(b) sewage disposal works comprised in the sewerage system of the sewerage undertaker,where the storm overflow or works discharge into a watercourse.(3) The information referred to in subsection (1) is information as to the quality of the water by reference to—(a) levels of dissolved oxygen,(b) temperature and pH values,(c) turbidity,(d) levels of ammonia, and(e) anything else specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State.(4) The duty of a sewerage undertaker under this section is enforceable under section 18 by—(a) the Secretary of State, or(b) the Authority, with the consent of or in accordance with a general authorisation given by the Secretary of State.(5) The Secretary of State may by regulations make —(a) provision as how the duty under subsection (1) is to be carried out (for example, provision as to the type of monitor to be used and where monitors must be placed);(b) provision for exceptions from the duty in subsection (1) (for example, by reference to descriptions of asset, frequency of discharge from an asset or the level of risk to water quality);(c) provision for the publication by sewerage undertakers of information obtained pursuant to subsection (1).(6) Before making regulations under this section the Secretary of State must consult such persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.(7) The Secretary of State may not make regulations under this section unless a draft of the statutory instrument containing the regulations has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament.”(2) In section 213 of the Water Industry Act 1991 (power to make regulations) in subsection (1), for “or 105A” substitute “105A, 141DA or 141DB”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires sewerage undertakers to monitor and report on the quality of water in watercourses potentially impacted by discharges from storm overflows and sewage disposal works.
“Report on elimination of discharges from storm overflows
(1) The Secretary of State must prepare a report on— (a) the actions that would be needed to eliminate discharges from the storm overflows of sewerage undertakers whose areas are wholly or mainly in England, and(b) the costs and benefits of those actions.(2) The Secretary of State must publish the report before 1 September 2022.(3) The report must be laid before Parliament once it is published.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to produce a report on the actions that would be needed to eliminate discharges from storm overflows in England, and their costs and benefits, before 1 September 2022.
HGV Driver Shortages
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat in the form of a Statement the Answer to an Urgent Question asked in the other place on HGV drivers. The Statement is as follows:
“Mr Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to update the House on the actions that my department and others have been taking to address the shortage in HGV drivers. This is, of course, a global issue, with our supply chains adjusting to the impact of the pandemic and working incredibly hard to make sure that consumers get whatever they need. We have been working with the industry for many months, unlocking testing capacity so that UK workers can join the driving sector.
My department has already increased the number of vocational driving tests from 2,000 a week pre-pandemic to 3,000 a week—that is a 50% increase—and last Friday I announced to Parliament additional measures that will significantly increase the number of HGV driving tests, by up to 50,000 per year. First, we will eliminate the need for some car drivers who want to tow a trailer to take an additional test. Some 16 million drivers who took their test before 1997 already have that right, so we are going to allow everybody to enjoy the same privilege of the licence, allowing around 30,000 more HGV tests every single year.
Secondly, tests will be made more efficient by the removal of the reversing exercise element and, for vehicles with trailers, the uncoupling and recoupling exercise. That test will be carried out separately by a third party, so it will still be done.
Thirdly, we are making it quicker to get a licence to drive an articulated vehicle without first having to get a licence for a smaller vehicle. That will make around 20,000 more HGV driving tests available every year and mean that drivers can gain their licence and enter the industry more quickly, without removing any testing. I have instructed the DVLA to prioritise the processing of licence applications, and we are supporting the industry to get UK workers into training.
This is not the only action that we have taken. Over recent months, we have made apprenticeships in the sector much more generous; offered incentive payments to employers to take on apprenticeships in the sector; worked with Jobcentre Plus with my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to direct more people towards this brilliant career; and provided funding of £1 million for the Roads to Logistics scheme, encouraging ex-military leavers, ex-offenders and the long-term unemployed to move into jobs in this sector. This is not just a transport problem or effort, but ultimately many of the solutions to this will come from standing challenges, which the industry itself will want to take on.
The Government welcome the prospect of better remunerated drivers, with better conditions and a more diverse HGV workforce.”
Lord Rosser (Lab)
I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. The Government have known for months and months that driver shortage issues would be exacerbated by the terms of the Brexit deal and their handling of Covid. Government Ministers are just now telling the industry to increase pay and improve conditions to recruit and retain more drivers, a much-needed step. However, how will that, or shortening the test process, or changing safety-driven driving regulations now address the immediate threat of worsening and widespread supply chain shortages this autumn? Or are the Government still sticking to what appears to have been their stance until now—which would explain the lack of timely government action—that the industry has been crying wolf over the impact of driver shortages this autumn?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, there is so much to respond to in that question. I am sure the noble Lord knows it is the case that this issue has been around for a very long time. I was talking to a colleague in the other place only recently and he said that one of the first things he did when he was elected in 2010 was go to an RHA reception at which they complained about the driver shortage. So the reality is that this has been a long time in coming. We absolutely will work with the industry to put in place all the things that they need to do.
The other thing to recall is that there are hundreds of thousands of qualified HGV drivers in this country who do not currently work in the sector. The industry must focus on getting those people back. By doing so, we have to focus on improving pay—there is anecdotal evidence that is coming through—and terms and conditions: my goodness, how simple is it to provide a clean loo, a vending machine and a comfy place to wait? Distribution centres need to absolutely step up and make sure that HGV drivers have at least those very simple things to make their day slightly easier.
There are lots of things that can be done. I do not take the point that the Government have been slacking. We have done an enormous amount and will continue to work with the industry to make sure that we keep goods flowing.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, rather than making the roads safer—Britain has always prided itself on its road safety record—these proposals seem to be some sort of cowboys’ charter. What does the Minister think about the response of Logistics UK and other representatives of the sector who believe that the longer working hours they suggest and have introduced will make the roads riskier and deter people from joining the industry? What assessment have the Government made of the safety impact of making the driving test effectively easier? This is not what people wanted when they voted for Brexit. Brexit is at the basis of this; Covid has made a bad situation much worse.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, Brexit is not the basis of this. At the current time, Germany has a 45,000 to 60,000 HGV driver shortage, France 43,000, Spain 15,000, Italy 15,000, and Poland 124,000. This is a problem that is impacting developed countries all across the EU and in the US, which has a 61,000 shortage right at this moment in time.
The noble Baroness refers to cowboys. I do not know who the cowboys are that she is referring to; I hope it is not the haulage sector, which I know is doing everything it can to make all the interventions we are putting in place work. For example, as the noble Baroness well knows, hauliers have to notify the department that they are going to use the extension of the hours and we obviously monitor the safety that comes out of that.
The noble Baroness seems to think that somehow the HGV test is getting easier. I am sorry to disabuse her: it is not. There will be no change to the standard of driving required for HGVs. The simple fact is that a certain element of the test will be delegated to trainers, who already train the HGV drivers in things such as manoeuvres. I would go on on the safety issue, but it is clear that we have some of the safest roads in the world and we want to keep it that way.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, is it not clear that, with just about 100 days till Christmas, there is an urgent short-term problem? Against that, why cannot Her Majesty’s Government produce a six-month visa for former HGV drivers who are somewhere else in Europe and recognise that they need be for only six months? I have had a six-month visa in my life as a commercial man and everybody obeys the six months. That surely will help in the short term.
In the longer term, it costs a young person of a non-academic interest over £7,000 to train. Why can we not have the equivalent of the student loans scheme for young people who want to learn to be HGV drivers, which could be repaid in the same way, so that when they have a job they can pay the loan back to Her Majesty’s Government?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I recognise that my noble friend wants to open the floodgates to EU drivers, but I sense that he may be waiting quite a while for the flood to arrive, because as I have outlined there is a shortage of drivers across the EU. What we must do is focus very hard on recruiting and training domestic drivers, and getting some of them to return. That is where the heart of this lies.
I note what my noble friend says on training. I do not know where the £7,000 figure comes from, because I actually phoned up an HGV trainer the other day—not for myself, of course—to ask and they said that it was around £3,000. By removing the staging requirement to get a C licence and a C+E, we will have combined the two training elements together. We would also expect training to reduce to get a C+E articulated licence. As my noble friend may know, there are private sector loans available and many of the training schools will make those available to the trainees, but of course it would be better if industry paid for the training in the first place.
Viscount Thurso (LD)
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the recent research which shows that HGV drivers dislike their conditions and having to stay away overnight? With that in mind, will the Government look again at the plans for rail freight villages and palletisation of freight? That would put a lot of freight on to the railways and allow the drivers to do the last-mile deliveries, which would keep them nearer home and be more eco-friendly. I commend it to the Government.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I thank the noble Viscount for his suggestion. We in the Department for Transport are great supporters of rail freight. We have made significant investments in rail freight. It is not suitable for many of the goods moved by road, but where it is suitable we have various grants available to slightly subsidise the cost of rail freight and get that freight off the roads.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as I have a C+E HGV licence. I am also an out-of-date HGV driving instructor.
The chickens are coming home to roost. For years we have treated HGV drivers like dirt. Why would anyone want to become an HGV driver? We literally expect them to urinate and defecate away from fixed facilities. Go and look at the A34 trunk road, see how many lorries are parked up with the driver inside and think about what he is going to do in the morning.
We persecute HGV drivers with regulation. I do, however, have one suggestion for the Minister. I have an HGV licence, but I cannot use it commercially because I do not have a Driver CPC—a certificate of professional competence. If the Minister relaxed that requirement, she would have access to a large number of HGV drivers very quickly.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Gosh, do I have some jobs for my noble friend. He is, however, absolutely right: it may well be that some of these hundreds of thousands of people with HGV licences do not want to return to the sector because, historically, it has been seen as a sector that does not treat its employees very well. The only way to fix that is to get the haulier sector working with the customers and the supply chain in the distribution centres. The Government have already produced an internal report on lorry parking. We will look very carefully at what we can do to go beyond the changes to the planning system that we have already put in place.
I take my noble friend’s point on the Driver CPC. The House may remember that we were able to extend it last year, but that was using EU legislation. I will do what I can on the Driver CPC. It is a good safety mechanism, but we might be able to do something, although significant changes would require primary legislation at this time.
Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)
My Lords, has my noble friend heard the stories about considerable delays in renewing HGV licences for drivers? There seems to be a problem with the DVLA’s processing of renewal applications. Will my noble friend look at the problems in the DVLA and try to speed up the process? That would have a big impact on the number of drivers available.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
That is an excellent point. I spoke to the DVLA only this afternoon, and indeed the Secretary of State and I asked it to prioritise provisional vocational licences quite some time ago. One thing that people must realise, if they are waiting for renewal of a vocational licence, is that under Section 88 it is highly likely that they would still be able to drive even though their licence has not been renewed. If your application has been done—if it is in and it is correct—under Section 88 you can still drive. We need to get that out there. I completely take my noble friend’s point, though, and we are in very frequent discussions with the DVLA to see how we can get as many licences through the system as possible.
Ajax Armoured Cavalry Programme
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, Ajax is now a programme on an end-of-life watch. Clearly things have gone from bad to worse, with the Public Accounts Committee pursuing an inquiry, the National Audit Office accepting the need for an urgent investigation, and the Government’s own Major Projects Authority saying that delivery appears to be unachievable. Now the Government themselves in their own Statement say that it is not possible to determine a realistic timetable for the introduction of Ajax vehicles into operational service. Some £3.5 billion of money has been spent so far, for the delivery of just 14 Ajax vehicles.
My first question to the Minister is: what is actually going on? Can the Minister now guarantee that the problems of noise, instability, inability to fire if moving—among others—will be fixed, and tell us what the timescale is, or is it just trials, trials, and more trials followed by evaluation with no end? If all of this goes wrong, who picks up the bill—the taxpayer or General Dynamics? With noise and vibration issues still not resolved, despite the Government being warned in 2018, the number of personnel needing assessment has doubled to 310. Can the Minister tell us how many of the 248 Army personnel tested so far needed medical treatment, and for what? Will the Minister commit to the health and safety director’s report being published this year?
With the chair of the Defence Select Committee himself recently describing in the other place the Ajax procurement plan as a “dog’s dinner,” can the Minister tell us what alternatives to Ajax are being looked at, since Warrior is being scrapped and replaced with Boxer, which has no turret? Is it the CV-90, or an upgraded Warrior, or a Boxer with a turret? It must have a gun, as the Minister will know, to protect dismounted troops on the battlefield. What is it going to be?
The reality is stark, with jobs at risk in South Wales as the Government will know, troop numbers being cut—the decision partly based on the delivery of all Ajax vehicles—but 575 out of the 589 have yet to be delivered. And yet the £5.5 billion ceiling, which the Government tell us is an absolute maximum, is fast approaching. The £3.5 billion was spent for 14, with 575 outstanding, but not a significant amount of the budget is left.
In closing, I ask the Minister: the Government’s plan A for our armoured fighting vehicles looks like failing, so where is the plan B, and when will we get it?
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, the Minister in the other place said
“I have previously described Ajax as a troubled programme.” —[Official Report, Commons, 9/9/21; col. 487.]
I could not have put that better myself.
One of the changes since Covid is that Ministers are no longer required to read out Statements from the other place, which might be a great relief to the Minister concerned, but perhaps means that noble Lords do not always hear the detail which is enshrined in the Statements we are debating.
The devil very much is in the detail here. As the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has pointed out, a few details need to be explored in some depth. So far, £3.5 billion has been spent, and the Minister has said that the upper limit is still £5.5 billion. Defence procurement has long been a troubled area, with projects going overtime and overbudget. The Minister in the other place has said very clearly that this project will not go overbudget; it is very clearly going to go overtime. Can the Minister tell us whether she believes that the project is actually achievable at all?
The Minister in the other place said that the problems are not “irresolvable”, but how do we know? The problems are apparently electrical and mechanical. Do we know if there is a solution to them and, if so, what that solution might be? Has General Dynamics been given any timeline for resolving these problems, or is it just being left for it to come back at some vague date in the future to tell us there are going to be yet more trials? What assessment have the Government made of the gaps in our own capabilities if the Ajax programme is not delivered in a timely fashion—indeed, if it will not be delivered at all?
Beyond that, we have already heard that 310 people are deemed to be in need of urgent assessment. Is that the total number of people who have been involved in the trials, or are there more people? Do we have any sense of the duty of care we should be thinking about when we consider who we are asking to be part of these trials, particularly given that some of the concerns about noise appear to have arisen before the trials started? If the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, were here, he would probably jump up later to explain that, actually, during trials you have teething problems. That is fine, but in this case we knew there were problems before the trials started. Can the Minister give us some indication of when the Government knew of the problems? What action are the Government planning to take to ensure that the 310, or however many people have so far been involved in trials, are not put further at risk? This procurement project seems at the moment to be a failing project, and that is clearly to the great detriment of this country.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Goldie) (Con)
My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for their questions. To put this in context, the Chamber will understand that Ajax is a complex, fully digitised land vehicle project delivering transformational change to the Army’s armoured vehicle fleet. It is providing a step change in capability to the British Army and is a core part of our future soldier vision. But, yes, the noble Lord and the noble Baroness are absolutely correct: this has not been straightforward. I am not going to stand at this Dispatch Box and pretend otherwise, but I shall try to deal with the points that have been raised.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, alluded to the problems and asked, effectively: where are we going and what are we doing? As he is aware, a safety panel has been appointed. It was established to oversee Ajax and, following its approval, trials have now restarted at the independent Millbrook Proving Ground. To reassure the Chamber, the panel consists of expert representatives drawn from the Defence Equipment & Support organisation, General Dynamics itself, Millbrook Proving Ground, an independent safety and environmental auditor and the MoD’s director for health and safety. I have to make clear that the panel must be left to do its work. I know that the noble Lord and the noble Baroness were anxious to draw me on a time but, quite simply, whatever the panel needs to do at the proving ground with Millbrook to test what is causing the noise and vibration, it must be left to do. I cannot be drawn further on that.
The noble Lord and the noble Baroness also asked about personnel. Three hundred and ten personnel have been identified as requiring hearing assessments. Of these, 304 have been contacted successfully and the remaining six are UK service personnel who recently left service. I may be able to provide an update on the figure, and I undertake to write to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness about that. So far, 248 people have been assessed and, naturally, the noble Lord and the noble Baroness wanted to ascertain what is happening to them. I wish to reassure them both that we will update the House on the number of personnel affected by noise and vibration in due course, including if any trends become apparent once the data has been analysed, but we are absolutely clear about our support for those who have been affected, and that support will provide whatever is necessary to address any issues which they are experiencing.
I think it was the noble Lord who asked about the review publication date. I am unable to give him a precise date for that, for reasons that he will understand, but I can reassure him that the review is very extensive. He is probably aware of what it is looking at: the whole history of this difficult period for the MoD. It wants to do that objectively and analytically, so that it can come back with a meaningful report, and it is looking at a number of issues.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, asked me about the timeline and when we knew that there was a problem. I would ask her to be patient about all these issues because I do not want to pre-empt the health and safety review. It is doing excellent work and is well ahead with that. We have undertaken to publish the reports of the health and safety department within the MoD when we have that information, and we shall do that.
The noble Baroness and the noble Lord asked about the contract itself. As I think they will both be aware, it is what we call a firm price contract. That means that the price of £5.2 billion is to buy and support 589 Ajax vehicles in six variants. As of June 2021, we have spent £3,167,000. I reiterate that the focus of the MoD and General Dynamics is on resolving the problems. That is what we are focused on doing; no one is denying that issues arose with noise and vibration, but excellent engineering minds are now being directed to these matters. We await the outcome of the safety panel’s tests and trials to inform further on what is happening.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, asked whether we can achieve progress. We are certainly all focused on doing that; we want to resolve these issues. I said earlier that Ajax is a complex but very important part of our future capability. It will be an asset for the military and make a singular difference to our capability. We want that to succeed and to be able to take delivery of these vehicles. But again, to reassure the Chamber, I wish to make it crystal clear that we will not take delivery of anything not fit for purpose.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, asked about capability gaps. Again, I wish to reassure her that we do not anticipate any compromise on capability. A range of capabilities can be flexed to meet the required operational scenario as we know it now, and there will be a range of choices available to meet defence needs. I think the final thing that she asked was: when did problems emerge, and when were matters referred to the health and safety review? That is all within the broad umbrella of everything that the health and safety review is looking at. As I say, in due course we will publish the outcome of its inquiry. We hope that will better inform the Chamber and provide fuller information on exactly what the history of this matter is.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, asked whether we have a plan for the future. It is rather a reprise to say to him that because the focus is on sorting this and getting it fixed, that is a plan for the future and we know that there is a sense of urgency and purpose. All those deployed to address this challenge are working hard to resolve the difficulties.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, is it not the case that the UK used to have an excellent establishment for designing and developing armoured fighting vehicles, namely the fighting vehicles research and development establishment at Chertsey? It designed vehicles such as the Centurion, Chieftain and Challenger; it probably had a hand in the Warrior. Is it not the case that the party opposite closed down the FVRDE, which would never have made such a mess of a procurement project?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
I know that my noble friend has presented me with a large ball and a very big tennis racket, but I am perhaps going to be slightly cautious on how I return the serve. We all understand that the part of the department to which he refers has an admirable record of design. At the same time, we are in an age where technical complexity, technical challenge and innovation are all fast-moving and swift. I was describing earlier just what a sophisticated vehicle this is, and just to underpin that, we are in an age when we are looking at a variety of capabilities across the spectrum, and one of the questions posed has been: should we retain heavy armour? The Government are in no doubt that we should, because, for example, UAVs cannot take or hold ground, and neither can they dislodge or defeat an adversary that has occupied terrain and is prepared to defend it. That is the role of armoured forces, and that is the role of the armoured cavalry. We constantly have to be vigilant about how best to innovate, and I guess that no one has a monopoly of wisdom when it comes to that.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, I am speaking as a former military man. Why is this vehicle so important to our defence capability?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
We are facing the approaching era of robotics. That is the age in which we are living. It is a complicated age, as I was just describing. This vehicle is not only relevant: it is absolutely necessary because it is modular; it includes growth potential to be future-proofed by design; it offers a superb opportunity to exploit emerging robotics, autonomous vehicles and other such human-machine teaming innovation. It is therefore very relevant and will make a very important addition to our capability.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, such a vehicle forms part of a necessary spectrum of deterrence. We cannot leave it all to drones. The question I have, however, is why did it take the Government so long to identify the problems with this project? It reminds me of the Nimrod programme which finally was resolved by breaking up the aircraft, which probably—almost certainly—would not have achieved a certificate of airworthiness. The Government—all Governments; perhaps it is unfair to single this one out—seem to have quite an extraordinary difficulty with projects of this kind. It is time that we put that right. Might I offer a classical allusion to the Minister? Ajax was a hero in the Trojan War, but he eventually fell on his own sword and killed himself. Is it not time for the Ajax project to undergo the same fate?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
The noble Lord makes a characteristically interesting and amusing allusion. I would not agree with his assessment. As I have been illustrating, Ajax, as part of our armed cavalry programme, has a very important role to play.
I have been asked to correct something. I was reading from my briefing when I responded to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and I said that as of June 2021, £3.167 million had been paid. I was reading from the briefing. I am informed that that figure should be £3.167 billion, so I apologise for that and I am happy to take this opportunity to correct the record.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, perhaps I may have another bite of the cherry. My noble friend said that there was growth potential in Ajax, but is it not the case that Ajax was developed from the ASCOD programme, and the Ajax vehicle is far heavier than the ASCOD vehicle, which replaced a vehicle that weighed only 10 tonnes.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
I am slightly out of my depth in trying to talk about the relative size of the vehicles. I know that concern has been expressed that this is too large a vehicle for what we call a recce vehicle and how we expect to be stealthy in a vehicle of that size. Ajax offers a step change in reconnaissance capability. Its sensors allow the crew to see and hear from much greater distance. That is why it has an important and significant role to play.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, in the absence of any further questions, I beg to move that the House do now adjourn during pleasure until 9.19 pm.
Environment Bill
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Carrington
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to remove the proposals for increased powers to vary or revoke abstraction rights without offering compensation to licence holders.
Lord Carrington (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as a farmer, as set out in the register, and that water abstraction is used on my land to grow crops such as potatoes. I am also a member of the National Farmers’ Union, which has supported me in the tabling of my amendments. While moving Amendment 64, I shall speak also to Amendments 65 to 69 in my name, and to Clause 84 regarding the revocation of water abstraction rights without the payment of compensation, and the need to raise and clarify the evidential bar before revocation or variation. I shall then speak on Amendments 70 to 74, on the refinement of circumstances in which excess headroom can be removed.
By way of background, I think it important to focus your Lordships’ attention on the use and users of water abstraction licences, and to emphasise that farmers are not advocating the over-abstraction of water; they thoroughly understand that this damages the environment and are happy to work with the Environment Agency to ensure that this does not happen. Water abstraction is used by farmers to grow food crops; it is not something done for fun. The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist, said in Committee that farmers hold more abstraction licences than any other sector, so a higher number of farmers are affected than other sectors. However, this is because of the number of individual licence holders; it has nothing to do with the volume of water abstracted. In fact, farmers account for just 2% of all water abstracted.
We should remember again that this is used for the production of our food, not for a car wash or a water slide. On the whole, water abstraction is used to produce high-value crops such as potatoes and vegetables, as well as fruit and certain horticultural products, on some of our most productive land. It involves very expensive investment in irrigation equipment, specialist storage and processing equipment. Investment decisions are carefully made on the basis of long-term planning, which includes availability of water and other inputs, together with market demand. Investment decisions of this sort are not taken lightly, as in most cases there is need for recourse to bank or other finance, requiring repayment at points in the future.
I do not wish to repeat what I said in Committee but would like to answer and clarify certain statements that were made. One noble Lord opposed the amendment on the basis that water is a resource that we must all share and that farmers’ historic water abstraction rights are historic happenstance and can be inequitable in their impact on the environment and other water users. This may well be historic, but so is the production of the food to which they relate, and I hope we are not talking about the revoking of food production.
Let us be clear: farmers are not advocating over-abstraction, only that those licences should not be revoked or varied as a result of arbitrary and undefined definition of damage by the Environment Agency. We do not oppose changes to licences, but we do oppose the ability to remove a licence without compensation. Payment of compensation is a hugely important point, and not just a legal one. It represents not only a long-standing property right but is a valuable business asset. It provides a degree of certainty for food production and manufacturing, together with the confidence to make important investment decisions. The overriding purpose of compensation is to enable farmers to make the necessary adjustment to their business if that licence is varied or revoked. In Committee, noble Lords encouraged the greater use of reservoirs. Surely this measure, together with any move to precision irrigation systems, is the perfect reason why compensation is necessary to enable farmers to reorder their business.
The Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield —informed us that only 10% of permanent extraction licence holders would be affected. But those holders were given legal rights when their applications were considered, determined and approved by the regulatory authorities. The goalposts have moved through no fault of the farmer. Surely all farmers deserve a clear definition of what the damage that has caused the revocation or variation is, in order to ensure that provisions are transparent and applied consistently going forward. Such information would also allow them to plan better for the future if a breach was likely. This is the purpose of Amendment 67, which tightens the ground for the revocation of licences.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, also told us that the Government wanted
“the Environment Agency to continue to work closely with abstractors to explore all voluntary solutions to unsustainable”
water abstraction. She said:
“I do not agree that this is a blunt regulatory process; rather, it is the last resort in a collaborative process.”—[Official Report, 7/7/21; col. 1324.]
This is excellent news. In a letter to the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, and me, the Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith—wrote that the Government would set out in guidance that they would expect the Environment Agency to seek collaborative non-licence change, such as habitat restoration and mutually agreeable voluntary solutions where possible. He continued:
“Responsibility for demonstrating that a licence is damaging or risks damaging the environment will lie with”
the Environment Agency. The Minister wrote that guidance to the Environment Agency would be issued and helpfully set out the expectations of the agency, which cover many of the farmers’ concerns, including, I hope, how long farmers will have between being notified that their licence is under threat and enforcement.
I thank most warmly the Minister for his further letter to the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, and me, which we received this morning. His letter confirms a lot of what has already been said, in particular, the expectation of a collaborative process with the Environment Agency and that new powers should be used as a last resort. He also promised discussions with all stakeholders before the publication of the guidance. The confirmation of this today by the Minister would be much appreciated, together with an idea as to the timing of the publication.
The purpose of Amendments 70 to 74 is to make the removal of excess headroom from abstraction licences without compensation more appropriate to the real world of farming and consequences of the British weather. It is a question of maths—I am sorry, it is quite late for maths. But if you can grow potatoes on the same field only every seventh year, yet you lose headroom if you fail to use it in a 12-year cycle, it only needs a very wet year when you are growing those potatoes and therefore do not need to abstract for you to lose that right. Therefore, you have no ability to abstract when you next grow spuds. This makes business planning and investment in this crop a major gamble that farmers are unlikely to accept.
Turning back to the importance of compensation, I have referred to compensation being a source of funding to alter the business model to, say, replace river extraction with building and using a reservoir or more precision irrigation equipment and other mitigation measures. However, we also need to acknowledge that revocation could lead to a loss of profit and loss of land value and other asset value, such as equipment loss. For most farming businesses these are no small matters and could result in significant loss and danger to the farm’s viability.
Although the building of reservoirs is an obvious solution for some, it is not as easy as it sounds. Some can be built under permitted development rights, but they are not cheap or easy to build. The planning process is often lengthy and costly, so a proper transition period from river abstraction is required. The lovely idea of a shared reservoir presents even more challenges, with the need for complicated legal agreements governing not only whose land the reservoir is on but what rights need to be granted to allow access on land not owned, how much can be abstracted, remedies for breaches, responsibility and cost of maintenance.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, for the introduction to his various amendments. As he said, Clause 84 removes the need, from 2028, to pay compensation to the holders of environmentally damaging abstraction licences when those damaging licences are amended or revoked. Although we have listened carefully to the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, we believe that we should put the needs of the environment first.
The requirement to pay compensation has been a barrier to action to protect waterways, including vulnerable chalk streams, which we considered earlier today and which in some cases have dried up completely, from the impacts of unsustainable abstraction. Over the years, a number of schemes have been introduced to identify and amend the most damaging and unsustainable licences, but the need to pay compensation to licence holders when those damaging licences are amended or revoked has been a significant barrier to progress.
The Water Act 2003 removed the requirement to pay compensation to the holders of licences causing “serious damage”, but this is an extremely high bar and is therefore rarely invoked, so in practice has provided little protection to our vulnerable waterways. The Water Act 2014 recognised this and removed the requirement to pay compensation for water company licence changes altogether. This has set a clear precedent for the removal of damaging licences without compensation. It is also important to recognise that 5% of surface water bodies and 15% of groundwater bodies are at future risk, where existing licence holders not currently using their licences in full could legitimately increase abstraction, thereby causing further damage to the environment.
The timescales proposed by the Government for this change provide ample time for catchment solutions to be identified and implemented wherever possible, with licence changes considered as a last resort. We must not curtail the ability of the Environment Agency to take action to protect and improve our rivers and wetlands, but instead should increase its ability to do so effectively.
In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, hit the nail on the head when he said,
“the days when you can be compensated for not causing environmental degradation have, in my view, long since gone”.—[Official Report, 7/7/21; col. 1313.]
We on these Benches could not agree more; we cannot support the noble Lord’s amendments, but instead believe that the Government have got it right in Clause 84.
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
I am grateful for both contributions and for the support of the noble Baroness opposite. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, for his amendments, and for not only meeting with my noble friend Lord Goldsmith and officials over the summer to discuss his concerns but for this constructive engagement.
The measures which we are introducing in Clause 84 are absolutely necessary to protect the environment from further damage and from over-abstraction. Members of this House have spoken of the necessity of protecting our water environment, including the fish and invertebrates which live within it, as well as of the need to protect our internationally important chalk streams, on which we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, and others. Ending unsustainable abstraction is essential if we are to achieve this. But as I said in Committee, we also know that abstraction is vital for food production.
The Government recognise the impacts that these changes will have on permanent abstraction licence holders and are taking all steps possible to implement the changes fairly. The changes will not take effect until 1 January 2028. This will allow time for the full implementation of our 2017 water abstraction plan and for the Environment Agency’s catchment-based approach to become embedded, working with stakeholders, including permanent licence-holders potentially affected by these new powers, to voluntarily solve issues of access to water and unsustainable abstraction.
I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, that, by contrast, water companies can already have their extraction licences varied or revoked without the payment of compensation. I hope I can also reassure him when I say that this is not, as he termed it, an arbitrary or undefined process. Excess headroom will be assessed over each year of a 12-year period, to allow for weather variations and crop rotations, and to align with the abstraction licensing strategy timeframe. The Environment Agency will assess licences within scope on a case-by-case basis, considering all relevant factors including business needs and existing and future water resource needs, as the noble Lord mentions in his Amendment 73, before deciding what action is proportionate, as the noble Lord raises in Amendment 65.
We expect the Environment Agency to use this power as a last resort, once all other options have been exhausted. But if those options have been exhausted, it is simply not right that unsustainable abstraction and environmental damage should be allowed to continue. That is why this power is necessary. Should that decision be taken, the licence holder will have a right of appeal to the Secretary of State, as is currently the case. They can put forward expert evidence should they wish to do so, which was also a concern raised in Amendment 64.
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, asked about timing. We are working with partners, including the National Farmers’ Union, on the guidance and will publish this guidance as soon as possible. The Government have worked, and will continue to work, extremely hard to ensure that these new powers are reasonable, proportionate and just. We will continue to work closely with a wide range of stakeholders to ensure that their implementation is a smooth and fair process.
I hope that the noble Lord recognises that the Government have endeavoured to put in place necessary safeguards. We can go no further without undermining the very purpose of this clause, which is to protect the environment. I acknowledge his comments about the long-term planning for the necessity of new reservoirs. I am afraid that I have no further details and can only acknowledge that this is a long-term solution. I hope that he agrees with the necessity of that purpose and will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Carrington (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister very much indeed for the very considered response. Although I do not totally agree on the compensation issue—but I was never going to—I accept all the assurances and the work that has been done by Defra to help ease our concerns. I have no hesitation in withdrawing my amendment, although I will continue on the compensation issue in future discussions. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Berkeley
“Isles of Scilly: disapplication of water quality legislation
(1) Article 3 of the Isles of Scilly (Application of Water Legislation) Order 2020 (S.I. 2020/214) has effect as if—(a) at the end of paragraph (1) there were inserted “and to paragraph (3)”, and(b) after paragraph (2) there were inserted—“(3) Part 3 of the Water Resources Act 1991 does not apply to the following islands—(a) Bryher;(b) St Martins;(c) St Agnes.”(2) Accordingly, no charges may be levied under the Environment Agency (Environmental Permitting) (England) Charging Scheme in relation to the application of the Order on those islands.(3) Subsections (1) and (2) are repealed if a nominated water or sewerage undertaker has demonstrated to the Water Services Regulation Authority and the Environment Agency that it has invested in infrastructure so as to comply with the requirements of the Order.”Member’s explanatory statement
The water and sewerage regulations came into force on the Isles of Scilly in March 2020 but, on some islands, there is a statutory undertaker appointed for water supply but none for sewerage and no ability to comply with the sewerage regulations. This amendment would disapply the related Environment Agency charges until the necessary infrastructure is built and a statutory undertaker appointed.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 75 is part of the relevant activities in this section but it is very specific to the Isles of Scilly, which, as the Minister will know, is where I live. In fact I was late this morning because the transport there did not work, but there we are.
The amendment relates to the drainage and water supply of the island. As noble Lords will know, there is one big island, St Mary’s, and four inhabited islands. A couple of years ago, after the Isles of Scilly (Application of Water Legislation) Order came into force, the water supply was taken over by South West Water as the nominated undertaker, and that has all been working fine. The sewage on most of Saint Mary’s and Tresco has also been taken over by South West Water, but on the other three islands it has not.
I am raising this issue today because this is very opportune. I heard about this only a couple of weeks ago, when the farmer next door to where I live, in Bryher, who in his spare time empties septic tanks and soakaways if they overflow, received a letter from the Environment Agency saying that, from 1 October, some very high charges would be imposed, plus fines, if he did not comply with the Water Resources Act 1991 as it is now applied to Scilly. That came into effect about 18 months ago, but, frankly, no one seems to have done much about it. Worse still, what do you do about it? You cannot suddenly put in a main drainage system or deal with septic tanks just like that, as we all know. At present, the system seems to work all right in the off-islands; if your tank needs emptying, the farmer empties it and deals with it in a reasonably environmentally friendly way. It does not get into the water supply or the sea, but it gets dumped somewhere nobody knows. But of course this is not what the Water Resources Act wants and, reasonably, needs.
The real problem is that the Environment Agency says that everything should be screened, and anything caught in the screen should then get incinerated. That is fine, but the first job is to build an incinerator. On a small island, that is not particularly easy, even if you have the money—and I do not yet know where the money is going to come from. St. Mary’s is going to have one, and maybe that will mean transporting 10 tonnes of solids every week on the inter-island ferry —in watertight containers, presumably—to be incinerated there. Again, that is a perfectly good solution, except they have not started building an incinerator yet, so they cannot do that anyway.
With the amendment, I have tried to produce a way to persuade the Minister that these charges and potential fines should not be applied to those who are not connected to a statutory undertaker for sewage until or unless something is built that enables their sewage to be treated in a proper way. Whether much happened between March 2020 and recently, I do not know, but I have talked to the Environment Agency locally, and I am also grateful for the help that officials at Defra gave me last week when we had some very useful conversations. What I think will come out of this, if the Minister is prepared to give me some assurances, is that these new charges and/or fines will not come into effect until it is possible and, shall we say, cost-effective to implement and operate them. I hope the Minister can give me assurances such as that tonight.
In the last two or three weeks, there have been several meetings between the Duchy, the Council of the Isles of Scilly, the Environment Agency and South West Water, and I hope that that indicates some progress. I think we all want progress, including the Ministers and the Environment Agency, and it occurs to me that it might help that progress if it were possible for a Minister to go there and, shall we say, encourage the working group to get on and do it. First of all, you have to design a sewage system, but some islands are solid granite and, fairly obviously, it is not that easy to build septic tanks in granite. There are an awful lot of things going on and it would be easy for this issue to fall to the bottom of the list.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has brought this amendment forward. I had the privilege of representing the Isles of Scilly in the European Parliament many years ago. They are often forgotten in legislation, as well as in terms of policy implementation and how that happens. The most obvious example was in 1651 when we declared war on the Netherlands—absolutely justifiably —and, in the peace treaty that followed, forgot to include the Isles of Scilly. This was discovered, and only in 1986 was peace agreed between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly. Never mind President Biden, that equals the longest war in history: some 355 years. I am pleased to say that it was a bloodless war that has now been resolved.
On a serious note, this is real, and what I like about the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is that it does not say that these islands should be exempted for ever—not at all—but that we have to fix this problem and then make the regulations apply equally there as in the rest of the nation. Also, having spoken to the Isles of Scilly authorities over the past week, I know that there have been serious discussions about this with senior officials in Defra and the Environment Agency. I very much hope that the Minister can give the assurances asked for by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, because this is something that we do not want to last for 355 years; we would like it to be solved a lot more quickly than that.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Well—follow that. I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for moving this amendment. He has identified a situation that clearly needs rectifying. We should thank him for drawing the Government’s attention to this. I hope that the Minister has understood the concerns raised and the potential way forward outlined so clearly by my noble friend today.
It was interesting to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I have learned an awful lot about the Isles of Scilly that I never expected to today. Clearly, as someone who has never been there, I need to arrange to go as soon as possible and enjoy the islands’ pleasures.
I am sure that the residents of the Isles of Scilly will be very pleased to get this properly sorted out. So, as I said, I am grateful to my noble friend for his work on this, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I too thank noble Lords for this debate on Amendment 75 from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I was going to start with some background, but the noble Lord provided the background very well. I admit that, if this only arrived on his desk two weeks ago, it arrived on mine probably even more recently than that.
As he said, water, wastewater and corresponding environmental management legislation were applied to the Isles of Scilly for the first time in April 2020. This was the culmination of a project lasting more than 10 years. It addresses water-quality risks to public health, risks to the environment from over-abstraction of water resources, sewage treatment and resulting pollution on the Isles of Scilly. The Environment Agency is now working with the Council of the Isles of Scilly, the Duchy of Cornwall, Tresco Estates, residents, and other local partners to ensure that environmental legislation is complied with, and practices modernised over time. I urge all parties to continue their valuable work toward this endeavour.
I know that everyone involved shares the aim of helping isles such as Bryher to avoid long-term environmental damage and risk to human health. It is therefore crucial that the legislation that so many people worked so hard to apply to the Isles stays in effect. The Environment Agency recently consulted on a charges scheme regarding environmental permits to help support the work. Currently a risk-based transition plan for the management of septic tank waste and sludges on the Isles is being developed as a priority, ensuring that the fragile environment and groundwater resources are as well supported as possible into the future.
Very briefly, in response to comments from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, I can tell him that septic tank wastes are currently disposed of outside the above permits under other legislation, but we will need an evolution and transition to a better system, hopefully aligned with the development of water company assets in the future. Again, we are working very closely with partners on the Isles of Scilly to achieve that future.
The Government recognise that this will involve change for residents, and the Environment Agency is managing that change sensitively and through partnership. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for taking the time to discuss this issue with my officials and for bringing this to my attention, and I reassure him that we will continue to monitor progress on this issue. I will ensure that my colleague Rebecca Pow, in whose portfolio this sits, is kept fully abreast of the issues. I beg that the noble Lord withdraws his amendment.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister for that response, to my noble friend, and to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his intervention. Perhaps I might press the Minister just a little bit further and ask him to make it quite clear that this charge sheet that came in a couple of weeks ago, and will start to come into effect on 1 October, will not be applied until the relevant work has been done. My next door neighbour, if he does not like it, will feel threatened. There is a good solution: stop emptying septic tanks. That is not something that any of us want to see. So a little bit of comfort from the Minister on the charges would be very helpful, before I withdraw my amendment.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I assure the noble Lord that I absolutely commit to continuing to work with the residents to implement the changes in as sensitive and sensible a way as possible, but I do not think I am able to commit to specifics or comment on specific cases at this time. I hope that is enough for the noble Lord.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister, and on that basis I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, together with Lord Goldsmith’s other amendments to Clause 90, changes a consequential amendment power being inserted into the Land Drainage Act 1991 from a power to amend any Act, to a power to amend the Land Drainage Act 1991.
Member’s explanatory statement
See Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Clause 90, page 90, line 17.
Member’s explanatory statement
See Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Clause 90, page 90, line 17.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, together with Lord Goldsmith’s other amendments to Clause 92, changes a consequential amendment power being inserted into the Land Drainage Act 1991 from a power to amend any Act, to a power to amend the Land Drainage Act 1991.
Member’s explanatory statement
See Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Clause 92, page 93, line 19.
Member’s explanatory statement
See Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Clause 92, page 93, line 19.
“(6) The Secretary of State must lay the biodiversity metric, and any revised biodiversity metric, before Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to lay the biodiversity metric and any revised biodiversity metric before Parliament.
Lord Krebs
“(6) Within the period of six months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must produce or revise the biodiversity metric, having particular regard to the ecological importance of—(a) diversity of habitat types and management approaches, including open mosaic habitat, scrubland, and habitats that mature slowly, (b) the potential of individual sites to support rare, endangered and vulnerable species, and(c) habitat connectivity across a landscape.(7) The Secretary of State must review the biodiversity metric at least annually and revise it to take into account—(a) any significant developments in scientific evidence, and(b) any assessment of progress toward meeting targets set under Part 1 of the Environment Act 2021.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that the Biodiversity Metric includes the ecological requirements of rare and endangered species, that it recognises the importance of habitat heterogeneity and connectedness, and that it is updated regularly in light of scientific evidence.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, in moving my Amendment 84A, I will also speak to support Amendments 85 and 87 in this group in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to which I have added my name along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I thank the Minister for his time in discussion with me, and officials at Defra and Natural England for going into considerable detail in subsequent meetings.
I will be very brief, in view of the late hour. To cut to the quick, the biodiversity metric, which is what this amendment is about, is the measure by which developers and planning authorities calculate whether biodiversity off-setting produces a net-positive outcome for nature. Of course, if we think back to Clause 3, which we debated last week, this net gain concept will be crucial if the Government are to succeed in delivering their target of halting species decline by 2030.
However, as I said briefly in Committee, the metric as currently proposed by Natural England and Defra is, in the view of at least some leading academic experts, practitioners and end-users, deeply flawed for the following reasons. First, it does not adequately consider the requirements of key species. Secondly, it uses an oversimplified classification of habitat type and quality as a surrogate for species abundance. Thirdly, it does not adequately incorporate the so-called Lawton principles of bigger, better, more connected habitat, which are the accepted gold standard for protecting biodiversity.
I will illustrate these flaws with an example. A few hundred metres from my home in Oxford, there is a city council nature reserve called Burgess Field, known locally for its rich biodiversity. Many species of birds, butterflies and other insects, as well as wildflowers, thrive there. Yet, as my colleague Professor Katherine Willis of Oxford University points out, this nature reserve would count as “poor” habitat if it were assessed by the metric. This simply cannot be right.
Defra officials and Natural England acknowledge that the metric is a work in progress, but they argue that a great deal of work has gone into its development —of course, the fact that a great deal of work has gone in in the past does not mean to say that more work cannot easily be done in the future—and that it has to be kept simple to make life easier for developers. I think it should be made more difficult and life made easier for nature. My amendment simply asks the Government to reconsider the metric and to revise it yet again. My ask is a modest one—to review the deficiencies and continue to improve the metric. I very much hope that the Minister will confirm his commitment to doing this.
I will leave it to others to speak in more detail to Amendments 85 and 87, which ask the Government to extend the lifespan of net gain from 30 to 125 years, but I will make two very brief points. Having spoken to Defra officials, as I understand it—I hope I am wrong and that the Minister will correct me—there are two lines of argument for defending the 30-year, rather than a 125-year, limit. First, if the requirement for the duration of net gain were too onerous it would be an obstacle to development because no one would want to commit their land for a long time for preserving biodiversity. It is said that the experience from other countries demonstrates this, although I have not been able to find the evidence. The second argument is that if at the end of 30 years valuable habitat has been created, that habitat will be protected by other regulations, such as a designation as an SSSI. These two arguments seem self-contradictory. On the one hand it is important to tell developers that they can have their land back after 30 years, but on the other if they do a good job of creating new habitat for net gain they cannot have it back. I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I beg to move.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, bearing in mind the hour, I shall speak briefly to Amendments 85 and 87. It is a pity that it is late, because these are terribly important amendments. I have been sitting and thinking: how long does it take to create a habitat? The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, just said that at the end of 30 years we may have rip-roaring habitat, but the likelihood is that we will not have rip-roaring habitat for many habitat types.
There are some instant habitats: wetlands, for example—just add water and you get birds. It is instant habitat creation. There are some middling habitats, such as meadows, where you can grow grass and wildflowers, but it will not be a complex meadow ecosystem, certainly not SSSI quality, by 30 years’ time. As for woods, a wood will not really get into its stride in 30 years. You will have canopy formation by then, but it will be a fairly limited wood. Of course, many habitats are very long-term: ancient woodlands take 400 years. Long-standing woods, which the Government have said they are now interested in protecting, are complex assemblages of habitat and we do not yet know how long standing “long standing” will be, but it is certainly more than 30 years. Peatlands take 1,000 years, so 30 years for newly created habitats for biodiversity gain, planning gain or conservation covenants is a bit pathetic; in fact, it is pretty useless. Destruction of these biodiversity gains and climate change carbon sequestration at 30 years will be unacceptable to the public and it makes no sense to create and then destroy.
Longer periods do not discourage landowners and farmers. I draw attention to my interest as chairman of the Woodland Trust. We regularly deal with farmers on woodland creation schemes. What farmers and landowners want is clarity for the future, so that they can make decisions. The current woodland carbon code requires woodland sites for carbon storage to be in place for at least 100 years and we have no shortage of people banging on our doors wanting to create at least 100 year-old woods, so I ask the Minister to accept this amendment.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, I draw attention to my interest as a Church Commissioner, as set out in the register, and I wish to support what the noble Baroness just said: 30 years is rather a short period of time. I am grateful for the way the Minister, in proposing Amendments 86 and 88, is showing us the possibility of some flexibility in the future, but may I just tempt him a little further? What he is proposing would allow a future Government, by regulation, to change that period of 30 years—one would hope that it might go up to 50, 60 or perhaps even 125—but if they did, there would be nothing to prevent a subsequent Government reducing it back to 30 again. If we are to have a direction of travel in how long a site needs to be protected for, it should be one-way, without the possibility of going back down again. That could create a sort of planning blight, whereby somebody, particularly towards the end of a government cycle, might feel that, rather than making some land available for development, they can wait and hope that the period will be knocked back down to 30 years by the incoming Administration. Would the Minister be willing to think again so that, whatever period we set, any future changes would have to increase it rather than potentially allowing it to decrease?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I shall speak in favour of all the amendments in this group—even, in a very soft way, the government amendments. They address issues that I spoke on at considerable length in Committee, so I will, given the hour, be brief. It is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and all the speakers on this group. I think the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, really hit the nail on the head. If 30 years is all we can tie things up for, if it works, you are tying it up, one would assume, indefinitely, which 125 years serves as a figure for.
In Committee, I talked about 30 years being a blink of an eye in nature, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, set out a very nice template for us thinking about different kinds of habitats and ecosystems. I will add to this my—perhaps now inevitable—point about soil, which is about the biodiversity of the soil and producing what you might describe as a mature soil, whether it is under any of those habitats. A meadow might look quite nice on the top, but the soil is not going to be anything like a long-term developed meadow for many years. These are ecosystems that take a long time to develop to get the real richness you would need for a proper, healthy soil.
I will just note that we are strongly behind Amendments 85 and 87, which my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb signed, but I would also particularly compliment the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on Amendment 84A. I would have signed it had I actually spotted it, but I am afraid I missed it. There has been much discussion in the media, in the public and in the environmental community about the utter inadequacy of the biodiversity metric. In this amendment, the noble Lord is going some way to finding a way forward to fix that, and I really do hope the Minister will take it on board.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as on the register. I want to comment briefly on two amendments. First, I welcome my noble friend’s Amendment 89; it is important to keep under review the amount of land available for the net gain register.
Secondly, I want to comment on Amendment 84A from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I say this to him: I do not think it is necessary. As he said, this is evolving. The metric as published by Natural England is not set in stone. It will be an evolving measure, and as further and better particulars come along, it will be changed and amended. An annual review by the Government is not needed for that to happen.
The other point I want to make is this: yes, of course, the metric could be made more complicated. Some on the Climate Change Committee condemn it, because it is just a biodiversity net gain metric. They want an environmental net gain metric, which would be an all-singing, all-dancing super one, but incredibly complicated to produce. No one is capable of doing it properly at the moment.
If we bring in lots of other factors, which would no doubt make this much better in biodiversity terms, we would be faced with an industry and builders that have not a clue how it would work. Net gain is terribly, terribly important. It will be one of the greatest improvements to planning and the environment we have ever seen in this country. But it is a completely new concept; it is innovative. For it to happen, we have to get developers on side, working with it. At the moment, they have not a clue how it works. They have a couple of years, I think, to get that right.
I am concerned that we keep this initially simple. The current metric, which is still doing a good job and can evolve and can change, will not be detrimental to biodiversity; it will be a big improvement to biodiversity. But I am certain that in a couple of years’ time or a year’s time, it may be tweaked again to improve it. As developers and Government and Natural England bed this down, I am certain it will become more sophisticated and more perfect from a purist environmental point of view.
So I say to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who is incredibly able and thoroughly knowledgeable in this matter—he is 10 times more knowledgeable than I am, though I am practical—that we have to start somewhere. There used to be an army acronym KISS: “Keep it simple, stupid.” We have to keep it simple to begin with, and we can make it a lot more complicated as we get used to it.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, says, but I still think the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, raised some real concerns that this House deserves answers to, and I hope the Minister, in his summing up, can give the reassurances the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has asked for. I wanted to briefly add my voice to the others in support of Amendment 87, which deals with the issue of perpetuity versus the 30 years for the biodiversity net gain.
I will not add to the other arguments people have made, but I just wanted to remind noble Lords that in Committee, in response to a question from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, the Minister said that the Government wish to introduce biodiversity net gain
“in a way that requires developers … to bear as little cost as possible.”—[Official Report, 7/7/21; col. 1377.]
It seems to me that overriding constraint is as much relevant in terms of this debate, because this is not about worrying that there will not be enough landowners coming forward to provide the amount of nature conservation that we need. It is really about limiting the liability of developers. That is at the heart of this, and that is why I support the amendment.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I am speaking in support of Amendment 84A of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I will then speak to my Amendments 85 and 87. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for adding their names to my amendments.
First, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has raised important points about the quality of the metric currently being developed to implement biodiversity net gain. Over the summer he was kind enough to share the paper to which he referred by his colleague Professor Katherine Willis. I have to say that it shocked me, as it shows that we are in danger of drifting into a new system which, far from being a positive asset, could be highly detrimental to the environment. This is why I am not reassured by the use of words such as “progressing”, “virtuous” and “improving” by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. We could be going backwards if we do not get this right.
We therefore support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that would set up a process of review of the metrics within six months, taking into account the broad range of factors that determine the ecological importance of sites. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has been in dialogue with the Minister about these concerns, and I hope that, in his response, the Minister will provide sufficient reassurance that this matter is being addressed.
My Amendments 85 and 87 address the length of time that any habitat enhancement agreed through the planning process should be protected. As it stands, Schedule 14 to the Bill defines this period as 30 years. After that, the habitats could be destroyed, losing any ecological gains or carbon storage benefits. This goes against the grain of ecological best practice, which emphasises the need to let nature recover for the long term.
In recent advice, Natural England has said:
“Mitigation measures will need to be secured for the duration over which the development is causing the effects—generally 80-125 years.”
The building developments on the land where the displacement takes place will clearly be expected to last more than 30 years. For example, MHCLG has issued advice on property that makes it clear that a long lease is usually 125 years. So it is right that the creation of any new habitat, in compensation, should also last a lifetime. Our view was echoed in the recent Environmental Audit Committee report, Biodiversity in the UK: Bloom or Bust?, which stated:
“Nature recovery does not happen overnight and must be maintained and built upon for generations. The proposed 30 year minimum to maintain biodiversity net gains will achieve little in terms of delivering long-lasting nature recovery.”
In Committee, we tabled an amendment that would have protected habitats in perpetuity. There was considerable support for our position, but there were also questions about how perpetuity could be measured. So in our new amendment, we have now defined this period as 125 years, which was the only legal definition of the concept, as set out in the Perpetuities and Accumulations Act 2009. We believe that this is the right length of time to create and maintain long-term species-rich habitats to compensate for the destruction of existing established habitats elsewhere.
In Committee, the Minister made it clear that the provision of 30 years was a minimum requirement. He has now tabled further amendments in this group that would give the Secretary of State a power to increase the 30-year period and keep that duration under review. However, we do not believe that this gives the guarantees of long-term habitat protection that we need. There is no indication in the Government’s amendment of the criteria that would be used to vary the duration. I am also grateful to the Bill team for their recent advice that this variation, if introduced, would apply at a policy-wide level and not on an individual project basis. However I do not see where in the Bill this would be assured, since the Government’s amendment just gives a general power to vary the time period and could therefore, in my reading, apply to particular building developments.
The Minister has also raised concerns about whether sufficient landowners would make their land available for a longer term period, but surely landowners who contract to create these new habitats would have to be there for the longer term, otherwise our very fear that the habitat would be destroyed after 30 years becomes a reality. We believe that the long-term timescale of 125 years, as set out in Amendment 85, gives landowners certainty and would ensure that habitats which are destroyed could be recreated for the long term on a like-for-like basis.
This is an important principle which is necessary to legitimise the process of biodiversity net gain. Otherwise, the truth is that it would just be delayed damage. On that basis, I hope the Minister is able to give further reassurances, and I look forward to his response.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this important debate, in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for their detailed conversations on this over the summer.
I am pleased to confirm that the Government have brought forward Amendments 86, 88 and 89 on the long-term prospects of biodiversity gains. The Bill currently introduces a 30-year minimum period for biodiversity net gain agreements, and these new government amendments will place a duty on the Secretary of State to review the duration for biodiversity net gain agreements and provide legal powers to increase the duration—that could be up to 125 years, for example, or it could be less. This process will be informed by the biodiversity net gain monitoring and evaluation programme, and will apply at a policy-wide level. These amendments will ensure that an extension of the duration is actively considered in future, supporting the long-term protection of our habitats.
Amendments 85 and 87, proposed by the noble Baroness Jones of Whitchurch, while welcome in intention, would, we believe, deter landowners in key areas from offering land for conservation. Based on the engagement, consultation and evidence-gathering that we have undertaken, setting a requirement for biodiversity enhancements to be secured for 125 years now means that we are less likely to see land offered for enhancement in the right places at the start of biodiversity net gain roll-out. That would mean that we were less able to create the coherent ecological networks that we need and may end up with money for net gain sitting unspent.
If restrictions placed on biodiversity net gain funds are too stringent from the start, landowners are unlikely to commit to the agreements we require. There is strong evidence from international practice that this might lead to the Government being unable to invest biodiversity gain funds and achieve the benefits we want from the policy. For example, in the environmental offsets framework for Queensland, Australia, a shortage of appropriate projects has meant that the state Government have been unable to spend much of the money collected for habitat enhancement. In addition, Ermgassen et al published a paper in Conservation Letters in June this year which sets out an academic assessment of the ecological outcomes of mandating biodiversity net gain that very much supports our position.
The amendments that the Government have introduced strike a fine balance between robustness and managing these risks of land supply. Clearly, I, my colleagues in Defra and everyone involved in the Bill want the habitats created and enhanced through net gain to thrive forever. That is where we all start, but it would be a mistake to let our desire for perfection in future undermine our first and more important steps on this policy. We need to get going.
I have almost been deterred from raising this argument by the introductory remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, but it is fair to say that after 30 years of improvement, a new habitat would benefit from a whole range of protections that already exist in legislation. If those protections have not continuously improved and evolved over the next 30 years and, in 2050, we find that new, beautiful habitats paid for through this scheme can be easily grubbed out in the way that has been predicted or feared by a number of Peers speaking today, frankly, we are in a whole heap of trouble. The world will be a very different place in 2050, and today it is waking up to the urgency. If we have not properly woken up by 2050, this discussion is nothing more than an exercise in academia.
In summary, we need a supply of land in the right places to see biodiversity gains delivered. Setting a perpetual, or 125-year, minimum agreement duration from the start in a newly created policy context creates a serious risk of deterring landowners from offering their land for net gain. That would be a terrible outcome for nature and for society, so we have been careful to design biodiversity net gain in a way that mitigates this risk and maximises the chance of success.
On Amendment 84A, from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, we will publish the biodiversity metric for mandatory biodiversity net gain soon. The Bill’s provisions rightly require proper consultation on the final biodiversity metric before it is published for mandatory application. I can assure the noble Lord that the quality, diversity and function of habitats is already the focus of Natural England’s work on the metric and, as he knows well, our understanding of biodiversity is constantly evolving and improving. I can confirm to him that the metric will be regularly reviewed to take account of the latest scientific evidence and user experience. We will consult on a timeline and metric next year; after that, we expect to suggest a review every three to five years.
I also highlight that we are already on our third iteration of the metric and will consult next year on the version to be formally published for mandatory net gain and on the timeline for subsequent updates. The Government absolutely recognise the importance of species, as well as microhabitats, and the need for connectivity across our landscapes. The biodiversity metric’s habitat scoring is fundamentally linked to the value of habitats to priority species. The net gain regime will work alongside our existing regulatory framework for protected and rare species. This is already embedded within planning policy and practice, and will act in addition to biodiversity net gain.
I would also like to address the way in which the Lawton principles of “bigger, better, more connected” underpin the entire design of net gain, not just the metric. Net gain aims to improve the size and quality of habitats delivered through development; that is the whole point of the policy. The net gain percentage increase of 10% underpins that principle. Natural England’s latest update of the biodiversity metric also includes a strategic significance multiplier, which places a higher value on biodiversity enhancements supported by local nature recovery strategies, providing a wider strategic blueprint for nature investment. We will, of course, consider the Lawton principles when updating the metric and wider policy in future. They are inseparable from the key goals of this policy.
Finally, I highlight to the House that the Government have listened to the points raised by noble Lords about biodiversity net gain and brought forward government amendments on multiple occasions in response. We have extended the biodiversity net gain regime to cover nationally significant infrastructure projects, from major roads to new railways. We have provided for the option to bring marine development in scope of biodiversity net gain in the future, and today I am moving government amendments to ensure our biodiversity net gain policy is protecting our habitats for as long as possible. I hope I have been able to reassure noble Lords and ask them not to press their amendments.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this short debate. I also thank the Minister for his response. With regard to Amendment 84A, in brief, I accept the reassurance that he gave in his reply. The metric will be regularly reviewed in light of scientific evidence. The Government recognise the importance of species and microhabitats, and the need for connectivity across landscapes. Rare and protected species will be safeguarded by regulations that will work alongside net gain, and the Lawton principles will underpin net gain and be considered when updating the metric.
I still think that, given the concerns expressed by many stakeholders on the current version of the metric, there should be an urgent consideration before it is finally put into practice, so that we can get it as good as it can be. I also accept the point that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, made: that this is an ongoing work in progress and will be continually improved.
With regard to Amendments 85 and 87, I am disappointed that the Government are not prepared to go further. However, I accept the reassurances of the Minister on Amendment 84A and beg leave to withdraw it.
“(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations amend sub-paragraph (3) so as to substitute for the period for the time being specified there a different period of at least 30 years.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment allows the Secretary of State to vary the period for which onsite habitat enhancement must be maintained, subject to a minimum of 30 years.
“(6A) Regulations under this section may amend subsection (2)(b) so as to substitute for the period for the time being specified there a different period of at least 30 years.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment allows the Secretary of State to vary the period for which habitat enhancement of biodiversity gain sites must be maintained, subject to a minimum of 30 years.
“(8A) The Secretary of State must keep under review—(a) the supply of land for registration in the biodiversity gain site register;(b) whether the period specified in subsection (2)(b) or in paragraph 9(3) of Schedule 7A to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 can be increased under subsection (6A) or paragraph 9(4) of that Schedule without adversely affecting that supply.” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to keep under review the supply of land for registration in the biodiversity gain site register and whether the period for which habitat enhancement must be maintained could be increased (see Lord Goldsmith’s amendment to Schedule 14).
Lord Oates
Member’s explanatory statement
The effect of the amendment would be that credits would be retained by local authorities for local use in promoting biodiversity rather than retained by central government.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, regrets that he cannot be in the Chamber at the moment, so I am moving Amendment 90 with his permission.
The Bill seeks to introduce measures whereby a credit system will allow the sale of proposed statutory biodiversity units when improvements on site are not possible. It currently does not require that biodiversity credits raised from developments be retained locally. The amendment that I am moving is simple. It does not seek to change the proposed approach to biodiversity credits but to ensure that the income from such credits is retained locally. Improving biodiversity and protecting nature is self-evidently something that happens in places. Central government sets the legislative and regulatory framework, but it is how local actors, and particularly local government, play their leadership roles that will ultimately determine success.
I turn now to my Amendment 94. I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Whitchurch and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, for their support. If we are to rescue nature and biodiversity from the perilous situation that we have allowed it to get into, the local nature recovery strategy set out in the Bill will be critical. It is equally critical, however, that strategies do not become just more paper gathering dust, and that the powers provided to enforce them are not just vested in a remote Secretary of State issuing regulations from Whitehall but in local authorities, which are on the front line of the battle to save nature.
This Bill is not at all shy about imposing new duties on local authorities or in granting the Secretary of State a whole range of powers to make regulations, but it is painfully, timidly, and indeed speechlessly shy about giving local authorities any of the powers that they need to discharge those duties. Part 6 of the Bill is no exception. Clause 102(3), which governs the content of local nature recovery strategies, allows local authorities to designate areas that
“are, or could become, of particular importance for biodiversity, or … where the recovery or enhancement of biodiversity could make a particular contribution”.
Nowhere, however, is there any power for a local authority to stop a landowner from destroying biodiversity on such designated sites.
My amendment would correct this. It would allow a local authority to issue a biodiversity contravention notice to the owner or occupier of any land designated under Clause 102(3) as a site of importance for biodiversity, where it appeared to the local authority that there was a serious risk of biodiversity destruction or where such destruction had already taken place. The notice could require the landowner to provide information about their operations on the site, to allow access to the site and to comply with obligations to preserve biodiversity as specified in the notice.”
In Committee, I used the example of the Seething Wells filter bed site by the Thames, in my hometown of Surbiton, to illustrate the problem that my amendment would tackle. The land has been disused since it was decommissioned in 1992 by Thames Water and subsequently developed into a haven for plant and animal life, including birds, bats and grass snakes. It has become an important site for diversity in our borough, yet when the new owners started on a programme of wholesale destruction of nature on the site, there was nothing the council could do to stop them, despite it being a site of interest for nature conservation. The council did not even have the power to demand information about what the owners were doing on the site, let alone the power to stop the destruction. Here I pay tribute to the Seething Wells Action Group, which has done so much in our local community to raise the profile of this issue, and I know that many of its members have recently been in touch with the Minister.
Responding to my amendment in Committee, the Minister argued that local authorities either already had the necessary powers to tackle such issues or would gain them in the Bill. But when the Minister and his officials were kind enough to meet me over the summer, they conceded that the council had no powers to act in this case because the site was not the subject of any planning application and so planning powers did not apply. The Minister undertook to look into how this gap in powers might be addressed, although he questioned whether the problem was widespread and what motivation site owners would have for such destruction. Regrettably, since that positive meeting, I have heard no more from the Minister or his officials.
The Earl of Caithness (Con)
My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. They have a common theme because they are based on the fact that, very sadly, a lot of the good intentions of this Bill are going to fail. Although I support the Bill and support the drift of where we are going, they are going to fail because they are based on, and are building on, the existing system that is already a failure.
Let me give some examples. Since 2000, Defra has spent £10.3 billion or thereabouts on biodiversity. Agri-environment schemes have cost us £8.5 billion in the last 25 years. Roughly 28% of our land is designated for nature and biodiversity, and yet we have an appalling and increasingly bad record. Why? Because the current system is failing. Let me give just a couple of examples. Because of climate change we have gone for bioenergy and we have planted more maize. That has caused huge environmental problems and been very damaging for biodiversity. We are encouraging people to plant trees on what they call unproductive farmland, but that unproductive farmland is the haven for many of the red-list species, and we are damaging those. This Bill is going to build on those failures, and I believe we need to change tack. I know my noble friend will not accept that that is the right way to go but, nevertheless, I believe it is worth putting on the record that it is the right way to go.
We have to accept that there is more to improving biodiversity than just habitats. In the last amendment, my noble friend Lord Goldsmith said that habitats were very important and that we had to improve them. Yes, habitats are important, but they are not the only thing that is important. Equally important, as I have said many times, is winter feed, early spring feed and farming practices and management, in particular predator control. I give the example of the Allerton Project, which is entirely devoted to improving biodiversity and has hugely increased songbird numbers, but it cannot get waders and curlews back because of the lack of predatory control. We need to alter our stance on that.
I have three amendments: Amendment 92A refers to “nature-friendly farming”. These are the people who are managing the land. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, is right that the local authorities have a role, but the bulk of the land is in the hands of the farmers and we need the farmers on side. We need to encourage those that are nature-friendly-oriented. Farming and nature cannot be divided or separated; they have been separated for too long and here is a good chance in the Bill to put the farmers in the position they ought to be in.
Amendment 98 relates to wildlife conservation licences. I tweak the Bill in this respect, in that I propose the use of the word “status” instead of “survival”, as effectively a single individual of a species could be considered to be survival. Population can mean anything from an individual site colony to the total number of that species in the UK. Therefore, scale comes into any definition of detrimental to survival, as reducing the population at the local level may not actually have a bearing on the overall population due, for example, to infill from the current year’s young of the species.
My third amendment is Amendment 105. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, spoke on the last amendment in support of what I have said. She feared we would be going backwards if we do not get this right. The purpose of Amendment 105, which is a sunset clause, is to allow us to take a deep breath and stop us going backward if we are. My noble friend Lord Goldsmith said on the last amendment that there would be serious trouble if habitats in 2050 are not in the state we want them to be in. The purpose of this clause is to allow the Secretary of State to stand back, take a look and say “We were well intentioned, but we got it wrong. We need to change and go in a slightly different direction for the sake of biodiversity and the environment.”
We now have binding targets in the Bill but, as my noble friend Lord Benyon, who was in his place a moment ago, said on 25 May in this House:
“We are always wary of targets”.—[Official Report, 25/5/2021; col. 890.]
I am extremely wary of targets when it comes to biodiversity, because every target we have aimed at in the last 25 years has been missed. The purpose of Amendment 105 is therefore to give the Minister a chance to stand back, have a rational look and, if necessary, take a different direction.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, whose passion for improving the Bill from the government Back Benches is evident even at this hour. I commend him for that. I declare my role as a vice-president of the LGA and the NALC.
I shall deal with Amendments 90, 91 and 94 together. Amendment 90 appears in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and is also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, while Amendment 94 is also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. They all deal with the fact that the people who know best about a local natural environment are local people. We confront again, as we do in so many different areas, the fact that the UK—and England in particular—is one of the most centralised polities on this planet. That has many negative effects for people, but it also has negative effects for nature.
On Amendment 90, as the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, we keep giving local government responsibilities but, through a decade of austerity we have seen fewer resources in local communitiesw available to deal with those responsibilities. We have gone through a cycle where local authorities barely have enough funds to meet their statutory responsibilities—those dictated from here in Westminster. They do not really have enough funds for that, let alone to reflect local priorities and desire for action.
The amendment signed by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb is particularly telling. We can think of so many case studies; the noble Lord, Lord Oates, gave one. I was also struck thinking about the case of the River Lugg in Herefordshire last year, where we saw trees felled, the river bridged and a reprofiling of the riverbanks along a 1.5 kilometre stretch, to the shock and horror of local people. Investigations are still ongoing, so I will not go too far into this, but the country was alerted to this through local people using social media and through the local media outlets picking up this story. Of course, it was at local level that the knowledge arose, and perhaps at local level some action could have saved some biodiversity or nature there.
I was up in Kendal a few years ago in a village that was struck by flooding, and the vehicles driving along a particular road were pushing flood water into people’s homes. The local people were shaking with anger and frustration; if they had been allowed to close that road, they could have stopped those homes being flooded, but they were told they would face police action if they did so. That is the kind of emergency situation where we need to ensure that local people are able to act, whether it is a biodiversity emergency or a flooding emergency affecting people’s homes.
I really hope that we might see some progress on Amendments 90, 91 and 94. I also want to mention Amendment 92A, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. The Nature Friendly Farming Network represents a really activist group of farmers; I have met quite a number of them. They are doing some very strong things at that nexus between acknowledging the need to produce food and looking out for nature. Here we have a very modest addition to the Bill that would acknowledge and put on the statute book recognition of, and support for, the important work of nature-friendly farming. I hope that we will hear from the Minister about that amendment.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, my Amendment 91 in this group seeks to give some bite to the nature recovery strategies, which are a very welcome addition into this Bill by this Government. As they stand, however, local authorities will be producing them but they will be almost irrelevant in terms of the planning process, because they would not be a material consideration. My amendment therefore seeks to ensure that local authorities have to act in accordance with them rather than just take account of them.
I am grateful for the support for the amendment from Members from all Benches, and to the Minister and his team for discussing the matter with me. I am also grateful for government Amendment 93 that has been produced as a concession, but saddened that it is still just guidance. I suppose that I should not have really expected the Government to compel local authorities to do anything. It is also a necessary step, given that the pilots for the nature recovery strategies showed that local authorities said: “These won’t work unless we get more guidance,” so the Government had to do something. However, it is a step in the right direction, and it will help local authorities to ensure that nature recovery strategies are used properly in the planning system.
I am particularly grateful for the letter that the Minister sent to Peers, which said specifically just how important nature recovery strategies would be within the planning system as a tool for protecting the environment. That is an important statement, and I am grateful for it. Clearly, we have expectations for a planning Bill some way down the road; we are not sure quite how much of it will survive, if we are to believe the newspapers over the weekend. However, there will be a planning Bill, so without prejudicing what might come in future, I accept gratefully the concession that the Government have offered. We might have to return to this issue when we see what those planning changes are, at which point, we will be happy, I am sure, to take up the cudgels again.
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak to a number of amendments which have been debated at this late hour in your Lordships’ House. I will make my comments brief.
I turn first to Amendment 90 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, on supporting local authorities to be able to keep funds as they are better placed to promote biodiversity than people sitting in Whitehall. My noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch mentioned the Environmental Audit Committee’s recent inquiry, Biodiversity in the UK: Bloom or Bust?, earlier this evening. This report highlighted that funding shortfalls and a lack of in-house ecologists in local authorities means that they may not have the capacity to deliver some of their statutory duties under the Bill, specifically biodiversity net gain and local nature recovery strategies. Local authorities are essential to the successful implementation of many of the Bill’s provisions. However, their effectiveness relies on the resources and expertise they have available to deploy these crucial tools.
Moving to Amendment 91 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, I absolutely agree that local councils need to be empowered. I look forward to hearing the response from the Minister to see how he will reassure the noble Baroness, who made some pertinent points in this area.
I also agree with the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Oates, in Amendment 94. It is important that strategies do not become just more paper gathering dust and that the powers provided to enforce them are not controlled from Westminster but in local authorities, which are on the front line and know better how to save nature in their localities.
I am also grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, for raising a number of important points, and I appreciate his efforts and sincerity in wanting to improve this landmark Bill.
Finally, the Minister will be glad to know that we are happy with government Amendment 93. It is good to see that the Government have listened to the concerns across your Lordships’ House and accept that local authorities require more support and information concerning the conservation and enhancement of biodiversity.
In the same spirit in which the Minister has presented Amendment 93 to address cross-party concerns expressed in Committee about empowering local authorities, I hope he can address the concerns of noble Lords who have spoken on the various amendments in this group. I look forward to his response.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I thank noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. The Government have listened carefully to the valuable debate both here and in the other place, and I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for their drive in this area in particular.
We share the desire to make sure that local nature recovery strategies are actively used and delivered, and we entirely agree that the planning system is a key mechanism for achieving this. That is why we have tabled government Amendment 93 to make it a legal requirement for the Government to produce guidance on how local planning authorities should “have regard” to local nature recovery strategies. Local planning authorities, as part of the planning system, will have to “have regard” to relevant local nature recovery strategies, as will all public bodies. Defra is supporting MHCLG in developing proposals for planning reform ahead of the introduction of the planning Bill, including creating a clear role for local nature recovery strategies.
Turning briefly to Amendment 91, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, I appreciate that she is also seeking to ensure that local nature recovery strategies are actively used, and I know she tabled this amendment before the government amendment in my name was tabled. I thank her very much for her thoughtful response and her—was it support?—gentle support for our amendment. The local nature recovery strategies will be developed collaboratively to identify where changing the way land is managed will give greatest benefit for nature and the environment, which will also reflect local priorities. The shared vision will then guide the delivery of biodiversity net gain, environmental land management schemes, planning, use of nature-based solutions and many other current and proposed actions for nature’s recovery across the public, private and voluntary sectors. To do this, each strategy must capture potential actions relevant for all these purposes, brought together to create a coherent overall approach. The duty on public authorities to “have regard” to the strategies will require them to consider which of these proposed changes they can realistically make and then take that action. The amendment the Government have tabled will strengthen the integration of the strategies into the planning system in particular.
Turning to Amendment 90 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, local authorities will be able to fund habitat creation or enhancement on their own land by selling biodiversity units to developers, on exactly the same basis as other suppliers on the market. Local authorities may also choose to work with other local landowners to bring additional habitat creation or enhancement opportunities to the market. Statutory credits are separate from market biodiversity units. They are intended to be sold by government as a last resort, when developers are unable to achieve net gain on site or off site, either on their own land or by purchasing biodiversity units on the market. It is therefore necessary for central government to sell credits as a last resort and use the revenue to invest in new habitat creation and enhancement.
We do not, however, want lots of money to come through the route of government-supplied credits. We want the market to provide locally led solutions, in which local authorities will of course play a key part. We intend to set the cost of government credits in a way that does not undercut the biodiversity unit market.
Turning to Amendment 94, I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Oates, regarding the degradation of important sites for nature. I thank him for our discussion over the summer. As he said, I recently received a great deal of correspondence from concerned residents in Kingston regarding the Seething Wells filter beds site; I have read it with interest and will respond over the coming days. However, for this debate, I must address the implications of this amendment for local authorities and the protection for biodiversity more widely.
I am afraid that I do not agree that giving local authorities such sweeping powers is the best way to address the issue. It would amount to de facto protection of the entire country, which, although on the one level it would be fantastic, could have a wide-reaching effect on land use nationwide, creating confusion over whether an area is protected. We have a system of protections for our best sites for nature and our most important landscapes. Wildlife, including all nesting birds and other rare and declining species, is protected across the country. The forthcoming Green Paper will explore specifically how these protections can be strengthened and improved.
Turning to Amendment 98, tabled by my noble friend Lord Caithness, Natural England’s assessment of licence applications will be evidence-led and based on robust science, taking into consideration the likely impact on the relevant population and biodiversity. The Government remain fully committed to our international obligations on biodiversity. The wording used for these proposed tests within a reformed Wildlife and Countryside Act is in alignment with Article 9 of the Bern convention on the conservation of fauna and flora. I agree with my noble friend that any assessment of impact should be at the scale of the population concerned. The clause in this Bill intends to do that by referring to any population of the protected species concerned, be that at local, regional or national levels.
Amendment 105 was also tabled by my noble friend Lord Caithness. As I said, the Bill introduces a comprehensive statutory cycle of monitoring, planning and reporting. Our proposed objectives for domestic biodiversity targets reflect current draft international targets being developed under the CBD. The Government are already developing an evaluation and monitoring programme for biodiversity net gain and have commissioned the first stages of delivering this. The relevant public authorities will report every five years on their actions to comply with the biodiversity duty, including contributions to net gain and local nature recovery strategies; those strategies will themselves be regularly reviewed and updated. These processes go beyond merely reviewing regulations and will ensure that the Government’s actions are both adaptive and effective.
Finally, turning to Amendment 92A, I fully agree that future farming practices should support nature recovery. We are strengthening the existing duty by requiring authorities to “have regard” to clear strategies that will include specific actions. However, having regard to a broad concept such as “nature-friendly farming” would not make the overall duty any clearer or more meaningful. Also, to reiterate the point I made in Committee, where an authority has influence over farming or has farms on its land, it already needs to consider what it can do to ensure that biodiversity is supported. The Government have already committed to aligning environmental land management farming schemes for rewarding environmental benefits with local nature recovery strategies; this should be revolutionary for our countryside and biodiversity. With the environmental land management schemes contributing to biodiversity enhancement through the provisions of the Agriculture Act and targets set in the Environment Bill, we believe that an amendment such as this is not necessary.
I hope I have reassured noble Lords. I beg them to withdraw or not press their amendments.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response. He will not be hugely surprised to know that he has not reassured me, particularly in regard to Amendment 90 and my Amendment 94. He is wrong to state that my amendment would mean that the country was de facto covered—that is, that these local authority powers would de facto cover the whole country—as they would apply only to sites designated under Clause 102(3).
However, overall, I regret that the Government have arranged business so that a meaningful vote is not possible on my amendment tonight, and also that a number of noble Lords who would have liked to take part in this important debate were not able to. It is critical that local authorities are given not just duties but also powers to implement them. The Minister can be assured of our determination to ensure that local authorities are given these powers, which they need to protect biodiversity in their local areas, and we will seek the next possible legislative opportunity to do so. In the meantime, with great regret, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Teverson
“(c) agroforestry.”Member’s explanatory statement
The amendment enables agroforestry to be seen as a direct mechanism for public authorities to meet their biodiversity targets.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership. Following the Sunday Telegraph article yesterday, I should declare my “not-at-all” interest in and non-membership of climate—forgive me—
Lord Teverson (LD)
Yes, Extinction Rebellion. That was not where the emergency amendment that we debated last week came from. I will speak to Amendments 92 and 102, and I thank very much the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support.
As the amendments specify, their purpose is to strongly raise the profile of agroecology, which is very important for the way agriculture moves into the future. It is very striking that when we think about trees in a rural context, we think of forests and also farmland that on the whole does not have trees or may have trees around the boundary, young trees as part of hedgerows, or maybe the odd copse in the middle, at the sides or in the corner of a field. But that need not be how we practise our tree planting and growing and our harvesting of the products that come from trees.
At the moment we have that divide, but agroforestry is very much a combination of those types of agriculture; it is farming with trees, not farming and forestry. There are great benefits to this. Clearly, it is not right for the whole of the British countryside—I would not argue that at all—but some strong benefits come from it. Those are that we can plant more trees, and more diverse types of trees, and they are not necessarily trees just planted within meadows or pastural land; they can be, for instance, a grove of hazel trees within an arable field too. There are a number benefits from this, in terms of climate change, sequestration, water management, soil health, animal welfare, shade and retention of water. Clearly, there is also the extra income to farming from what those trees can produce, such as fruit, nuts or timber, from the types of wood that can be used for timber, then replanted and replenished. There is a wide range of benefits to using agroforestry and bringing it much more predominantly into farming systems in this country.
In 2016, a survey showed that, in Europe generally, agroforestry accounted for some 9% of land use, whereas within the United Kingdom that was down to 3%. So the purpose of these amendments is to raise the profile of that form of agriculture in England by way of the Environment Bill, but also to have the benefits that flow from it.
The Earl of Dundee (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for moving the amendment so ably. Its consensual premise is that agroforestry development usefully contributes towards afforestation targets. Although most of the target of 30 million trees that the Government have committed to plant will apply to upland areas, through agroforestry an increasing proportion could be planted on lower ground, which is otherwise, nevertheless and for good reason, often the sole preserve of agricultural production.
Yet, conversely, agroforestry itself, where deployed on lower ground, can much assist afforestation targets as a result of designing fields of agricultural crops with trees planted at certain wide intervals between them. Through agroforestry, as carried out on United Kingdom farmland, it is estimated that 920 million trees could be planted in fields and, in so being, would cause our agricultural output to reduce by only 7%.
The practice brings huge benefits for biodiversity, climate and nature, as well as financial advantages for farmers. Thus, not least, it is strongly backed by informed land bodies including the Woodland Trust, the Soil Association, the Nature Friendly Farming Network, Sustain, the Landworkers’ Alliance and the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission.
My noble friend Lord Caithness has just correctly lamented how many projected targets of all kinds we fail to attain. However, in this case, in seeking to plant enough trees, we are all the more likely to achieve our aims by encouraging agroforestry. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will therefore agree that, as the amendment urges, agroforestry should now be part of legislation as a very welcome and balanced mechanism for public authorities to meet their biodiversity objectives.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 104 in the name of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, who, alas, cannot be with us at this late hour. With his permission, I shall lay out his amendment, which would reduce the importation of tree disease by ensuring that all trees planted by or for the Government would adhere to a biosecurity standard.
Over the last 30 years we have imported more and more plants and trees, and plant diseases have gone up correspondingly. We have at least 27 new pests and diseases recorded with impacts on native plant and tree species. Wales alone is set to lose more than 6.7 million larch trees because of the spread of phytophthora ramorum—one should not have to say that at this time of night. Sweet chestnut blight is spreading like wildfire. Ash dieback is well recorded, and its impact will see something like 90% of our native ash trees going and a cost to the economy of £15 billion by 2050.
On the continent, xylella fastidiosa is rampaging through the lands and is as near as the Netherlands and Denmark. It eats everything, basically—over 500 species of tree and plant so far. If it arrives in the UK, the effects on our native species could be devastating, so this is a really important issue. However, we do not need to do what we currently are doing, which is to import a very large proportion of our tree and plant supplies. We could be growing these trees in particular here in this country. The Government are one of the biggest purchasers in the market for trees so, if we are to change the way in which trees are sourced and minimise the risk, it is only right that the Government take the first step. The new biosecurity standard that the amendment calls for would set a new standard in sourcing of trees by government agencies and third parties from UK growers, thereby curtailing the risk of importing diseases on tree stock and at the same time delivering investment that would see hundreds if not thousands of new jobs created. I hope that the Minister can consider this amendment.
I support Amendment 92 on agroforestry, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and declare my interest as chair of the Woodland Trust. To give one example, we did a very interesting experiment in Wales with electronic sheep. It is true to say that shelter belts protected the electronic sheep. Now that we are doing it with proper sheep, those protected by tree shelter belts produce bigger lambs with less lamb and ewe mortality. Therefore, there are all sorts of benefits for animal welfare and biodiversity, and I am sure that the Minister is clear about their benefits of hedgerows and very short trees. Farming needs agroforestry, but nowhere is it enshrined in statue as the desirable way forward, and this amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, would do just that.
Amendment 103 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, whom I have just usurped from introducing his own amendment before I speak to it, is a great amendment. The noble Earl has been doing wonderful work on the UK Squirrel Accord. We really must take effective action on animal damage if we are to see a big increase in protection of ancient woodlands and the increased creation of woodlands that climate change requires. Deer management, for example, is failing in many parts of the UK because of a lack of the co-ordinated action by all landowners in an area that must happen if proper control is to take place. Amendment 103 would ensure that all public authorities play their role and encourage other private landowners to do so in that co-ordinated, area-based way which is essential.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, a note to self is to employ the noble Baroness, Lady Young, as my speechwriter.
I shall speak to Amendment 103. Before I make my few remarks, I thank the Minister and his Bill team, who met me. We had a productive exchange of views. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, who have supported this amendment, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I declare my farming interests, but also particularly my interest as a trustee of the Blair Charitable Trust, which not only has substantial landholdings in the north of Perthshire but runs land on behalf of a number of other substantial landholders, and therefore is one of the largest forestry concerns in Scotland. There are no grey squirrels in north Perthshire but my gosh there are a lot of deer, so I do know about that.
I also chair the Squirrel Accord, which is the coming together of 40 organisations across the whole of the United Kingdom to try to deal with the grey squirrel problem: its killing of broadleaf trees in Britain, preventing fresh broadleaf plantations in, for the example, the south of England being made today simply because the trees will be destroyed before they reached maturity. The Squirrel Accord includes all four Governments of our country and their nature agencies, the major voluntary bodies and the major private sector bodies. No one who has ever been asked to be a part of the accord has said no, and we are a number of years old.
As I said, the accord deals with the grey squirrel problem. Therefore, I am pretty familiar with that. The problem is simply that these animals will destroy the trees before they reach maturity. Therefore, all the planting that we need to do, for admirable climate change purposes, will simply not succeed if we do not put in place a good management system so that the trees can see themselves through to adulthood. As I mentioned in Committee, the Royal Forestry Society surveyed its membership and got 777 responses this year. The grey squirrel was noted as the number one threat to the planting of trees. I meet the Deer Initiative every now and then. It is similarly trying to promote a UK-wide way of handling this.
The Squirrel Accord has a good plan for how to manage everything. It is a plan that involves plenty of science, and the major science for fertility control, which is just one element of it, is being done at Defra’s own laboratories. It is now three years into a five-year project and going well. We have good science and good connections to deliver the product of that science in various ways into the countryside of Britain to deal with the problem. However, if there are refuges then we will get nowhere, because the responsible landowners and land managers will do everything and those who are not interested will do nothing. The purpose of the amendment is to try to cater for that and to make sure that the Government not only have the powers to handle it but will exercise those powers.
At this late hour I will not make many more points, but in the meeting I had with the Minister and his Bill team there was mention that the Government felt that they may have the powers. I, with my rather elderly wig on, felt that those powers probably needed to be newly minted, but it would be helpful to hear from the Minister whether he believes that he really does have those powers, and to hear comfort that those powers will be exercised so that there can be no giant refuges and so that all the work of the Squirrel Accord and the Deer Initiative, which I hope will be reinvigorated, and the work of those up and down the land who are trying to promote the ability to plant trees, particularly our native trees again, will not go to waste.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and indeed all the speakers in this group. On Amendment 103, I have to draw to noble Lords’ attention a study published about three weeks ago by the Woodland Trust and the National Trust of a trial that found that there are practical alternatives to plastic tree guards. I note that the Woodland Trust is planning to stop using plastic tree guards by the end of this year. Given how much we have debated plastics in other parts of the Bill and much discussion of the problem of microplastics, that is very much to be appreciated, while also offering support for the need to make sure we protect young trees.
I will also briefly comment on Amendment 104, so very ably and expansively introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I fear electronic sheep may be wandering through my dreams.
Earl Cathcart (Con)
My Lords, this is the first time that I have spoken on this Bill. I know that convention says that one should not speak on Report if one has not been involved in the previous stages of a Bill, but there are mitigating circumstances. I have such appalling broadband strength in Norfolk that though I can send and receive emails, due to the lack of broadband, invariably they are not received on the day they are sent, so Zooming is out of the question. I came down during Committee to speak to a number of amendments, only to be told that I could not speak, as I should have put my name down 48 hours beforehand.
Before I start, I declare my interest in woodland and my farming interest in Norfolk. I support Amendment 103, moved by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. I fully concur with what was said in Committee about the awful damage that deer and, in particular, squirrels do to young plantations. My noble friend Lord Lucas said in Committee that he had a cumulative tree loss of about 60% due to squirrels. With this in mind, is it any wonder that the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said this in Committee?
“In my part of the Chilterns, a large forestry management business is refusing grow beech again until the grey squirrel is controlled.”—[Official Report, 12/7/21; col. 1652.]
If nothing is done, future trees planted using government grant funding will be destroyed by grey squirrels at a wasteful cost to the taxpayer. But squirrels do not just damage woodland. An overpopulation of squirrels will not only bark strip young trees but steal the eggs and fledglings of our songbirds. We are told that broad-leafed woodland can have up to 18 squirrels per hectare if nothing is done. Where they get that figure, I do not know. I have a wood on the edge of my farm in Norfolk of about 1 hectare. Last year, we dealt with about 25 squirrels in that wood, and this year we have so far accounted for over 40 in that same wood. One must wonder what all these squirrels are going to eat, and where they have all come from. As far as their eating is concerned, they are not only going to bark strip young trees, but they will also steal songbird eggs and fledglings, which are easy pickings. They have been known to eat adult songbirds if they can catch them.
We are constantly told that certain species of songbirds are in decline, and the blame is being put squarely at the door of modern farming practices. I would argue that squirrels also have a detrimental effect on songbird populations, and if we want to have a healthy songbird population, we must control the squirrels. In answer to my second question of where these new 40 squirrels have come from, I would argue that after catching 25 in the first year, we have created a vacuum, and it takes only a few weeks for that vacuum to be filled from neighbours who have no squirrel control programmes. They are also prolific breeders.
It would be helpful if the Government, even if they cannot accept this amendment, took steps to ensure that all landowners, and especially government and public body landowners, control their squirrel numbers. I argue that the damage to squirrels is twofold: by bark stripping our trees, and decimating our songbird population. I support the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, and hope the Government does too. By accepting this amendment, they would be killing two birds with one stone.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, we have had some excellent contributions this evening, and I am sure that because of the lateness of the hour, your Lordships do not need to hear my views on this. The Minister will be much more enlightening in his response to the debate.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I offer many thanks to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. Protecting trees and woodlands is a priority of the Government, and I hope my response will reassure your Lordships on this.
I start with Amendment 92, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. There are numerous ways for public authorities to fulfil the biodiversity duty, such as creating habitats for pollinators or other threatened or declining species. However, it would not be appropriate to prescribe each one on the face of the Bill. We want authorities to identify where there are opportunities to make a change, but we do not want to force public authorities to have regard to a particular form of land use that in many cases will not be relevant to their functions. We will provide detailed guidance to support public authorities with both what they should do to comply with the biodiversity duty and what they should report on.
Our environmental land management schemes are about giving farmers and land managers an income for the environmental public goods they provide. We are considering how more environmentally sustainable farming approaches, including agro-ecological approaches such as agroforestry, should fit within environmental land management. Turning to the noble Lord’s Amendment 102, I share his enthusiasm for agroforestry systems, which will undoubtedly play an important role in delivering more trees into our farmed landscape, improving climate resilience, and encouraging more wildlife and biodiversity in our farming systems.
We have outlined support for agroforestry within the England Trees Action Plan, which sets out our aims for expansion, investment and research in agroforestry systems. That includes commitments to support agroforestry across the sustainable farming incentive, local nature recovery and landscape recovery schemes. The England Trees Action Plan also laid out the intention to develop the evidence base for agroforestry, further aiding responsible authorities to invest in agroforestry systems.
Agroforestry systems compatible with basic payment scheme support have been defined in the publicly available Rural Payments Agency guidance document Agroforestry and the Basic Payment Scheme. As the commitment to support agroforestry and definitions of it have already been published, I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, feels reassured and I ask him to withdraw his amendment.
I turn to Amendment 103 from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who I thank for meeting me over the summer. As I mentioned when debating the amendment in Committee, woodlands created using public funding must conform to the UK forestry standard for woodland creation management plans. Such plans include steps to reduce grazing from browsing mammals, including through active management, barrier protection, and the development and monitoring of deer management plans.
In the England trees plan that I mentioned earlier, we announced a number of commitments to go even further to protect our woodlands from browsing animals such as deer and grey squirrels. They include updating the grey squirrel action plan, which we will publish next year. We will be consulting with the signatories of the UK Squirrel Accord as part of that update process. We are also working with the UK Squirrel Accord to support the ongoing research into grey squirrel management.
Very briefly, I say to both the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and my noble friend Lord Cathcart that the Forestry Act provides a legislative basis for the management of pests affecting woodlands, which is a core part of management for anyone who receives public money. Given the ongoing work and progress in this area, I do not believe that we require new legislation to ensure that newly planted trees are protected from browsing animals.
Turing to Amendment 104, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for his amendment, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young, for presenting it. The Government are committed to increasing biosecurity, and we support the plant health management standard and certification scheme—an independent, industry-backed biosecurity standard available to the market and international supply chains.
Our existing biosecurity legal framework already implements a comprehensive range of measures to address and minimise biosecurity risks. Recognition of the importance of domestic production to meeting our planting commitments is clearly a very big part of that. We engaged with the nursery sector to inform our England Trees Action Plan and we have provided support for the nursery sector. In the plan, we committed to fund nurseries and seed suppliers to enhance the quantity, quality, diversity and biosecurity of domestic production. We will help the sector to better plan for sapling supply and demand, ensuring that suppliers can produce the right stock at the right time, with all the economic benefits that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned. A further published strategy is not necessary to ensure that this is delivered.
I thank noble Lords for their valuable contributions at this very late hour, and ask that they not press their amendments.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I apologise to Extinction Rebellion for having completely forgotten its name. No doubt there will be a picket line outside my farm gate when I return to Cornwall later this week.
I thank every noble Lord for their contributions—particularly, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her examples and the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I look forward to her amendment on a tree strategy when we meet again, which I think we still have to do. And I thank the three noble Earls for their contributions.
I am not going to prolong this evening. I thank the Minister for his enthusiasm for agroforestry and his recognition that this is an important part of the jigsaw for the future. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
“(2B) The Secretary of State must issue guidance to local planning authorities as to how they are to comply with their duty under subsection (2A)(a) when complying with subsections (1) and (1A) in their capacity as such authorities.(2C) Guidance under subsection (2B) must be—(a) published by the Secretary of State in such manner as the Secretary of State thinks fit,(b) kept under review, and(c) revised where the Secretary of State considers it appropriate.(2D) The first guidance under subsection (2B) must be published by the Secretary of State within the period of two years beginning with the day on which section 98 of the Environment Act 2021 comes into force.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to give guidance to local planning authorities as to how they are to take a local nature recovery strategy into account when discharging their duties under new section 40(1) and (1A) of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 concerning the conservation and enhancement of biodiversity.
“(7) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament, and publish, the guidance.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires guidance under Clause 102 of the Bill concerning the content of local nature recovery strategies to be laid before Parliament and published.
“(7A) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament, and publish, the guidance.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires guidance under Clause 105 of the Bill concerning species conservation strategies to be laid before Parliament and published.
“(8A) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament, and publish, the guidance.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires guidance under Clause 106 of the Bill concerning protected site strategies to be laid before Parliament and published.