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Oral Answers to Questions
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)
Rwanda is fundamentally a safe and secure country with low crime rates. Homicide rates, for example, are well below the average rate across Africa and are lower than the European average. Rwanda respects the rule of law, and has a strong record on economic and social rights and the rights of migrants. However, we are concerned about the restrictions on political opposition, civil society and media freedom, and we regularly express those concerns to members of the Rwandan Government.
Martyn Day
Disturbing reports have emerged in Rwanda of adults who were orphaned during the Rwandan genocide being told to leave the hostel they have lived in for years to make room for UK asylum seekers. How does the Minister square that information with her Government’s commitment to being a force for good in the world?
Vicky Ford
Rwanda has a strong history of welcoming refugees and protecting their rights. Since 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the African Union have been sending refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda. Last month, the UN sent 119 asylum seekers to Rwanda, which it described as a very safe country. I will take the hon. Gentleman’s points on board.
Deidre Brock
According to the Foreign Office’s own website, homosexuality remains frowned upon by many in Rwanda, and LGBTQ+ people can experience discrimination and abuse, including from local authorities. LGBTQ+ Rwandan refugees have been forced to flee the hostility and dangers they have faced there. What account will the UK Government take of that before deporting vulnerable LGBTQ+ refugees there?
Vicky Ford
I thank the hon. Member for her interest. She will know that, unlike most countries in the region, Rwanda has no laws against homosexuality, and its constitution also prohibits all forms of discrimination based on identity. When it comes to women’s equality, Rwanda is one of the top countries in the world. We know that LGBT individuals may still encounter discrimination, and we continue to work with the Rwandan Government and the LGBT community in Rwanda to improve their situation.
Patrick Grady
Exactly. Last year, Human Rights Watch published a report with evidence that Rwandan authorities had arbitrarily detained more than a dozen gay and transgender people—in some cases, violently assaulting them—ahead of a June 2021 conference, accusing them of “not representing Rwandan values”. Is the Minister seriously saying that LGBTQ+ refugees are safe in Rwanda?
Vicky Ford
Let me be clear: our agreement with the Rwandans ensures that people will be kept safe, but let me also say this about Rwanda. It is one of the top countries in the world for economic growth and for women’s equality. Its health service has ensured that a greater proportion of its people are vaccinated against covid than people in any other African country bar one. It outperforms the UK when it comes to organised crime. Rwanda has entered into this partnership willingly because its Government, like us, do not want to see people drowning in the channel.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
We hear a lot about human rights on this issue, but does my hon. Friend agree that by far the worst thing for human rights has been the rise of organised criminal gangs trafficking people by encouraging them to make perilous journeys across the channel? Does she also agree that our plan is the only plan on the table to break that business model?
Vicky Ford
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We have been honest about the fact that this is an innovative approach; as with all new approaches, there is, of course, uncertainty, but doing nothing is not an option when people are putting their lives at risk by crossing the channel in small boats. We need new innovative solutions and partnerships to put an end to this deadly trade and break the model of the people traffickers.
Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)
Will the Minister join me in welcoming the Government’s landmark Rwanda deal, which is already acting as a strong deterrent to those who might cross the channel dangerously? Zero boats have been detected over the last few days.
Vicky Ford
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. I point out that our £120 million investment will help the Rwandans to surmount further barriers to growth and create jobs and opportunities, both for the people of Rwanda and for any asylum seekers who want to settle there.
Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
This policy will do nothing to stop the boats. The Minister has spent the last few days talking up the human rights record of the Rwandan Government, yet the previous Minister expressed concerns around “civil and political rights” in Rwanda. In 2018, 12 refugees were shot dead during protests about cuts to food allowances, and last month, the current Minister said that the UK was raising the latest of many cases of Government critics ending up dead. Is that hypocrisy the reason why the Daily Mirror, The Guardian and the Financial Times were blocked from joining the Home Secretary’s trip to Rwanda—because they would call it out?
Vicky Ford
I have been very consistent. We do have concerns about restrictions on political freedom, civil society and media freedom, and regularly express them to the Government of Rwanda. However, they also have a strong record on protecting refugees. I know the hon. Lady cares about Afghans, especially women, and she will know that Afghanistan’s only girls’ school recently relocated all its staff, its students and their families to Rwanda. The headteacher herself has described their reception in Rwanda as one of
“kindness, and sensitivity, and humanity”.
Those are her words, not mine.
Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)
I really am troubled by this. We think this is a disastrous policy that will not do anything about small boats in the channel, but let us put that to one side. The Minister and the Foreign Secretary must be aware of the grave misgivings among Foreign Office officials about this policy. Can they name a single non-governmental organisation that is in favour of it? Are they just glossing over the human rights concerns about the Rwandan Government? An international development partnership with Rwanda is one thing, but this is entirely different. Are they glossing over concerns in the cynical expectation that the policy will come to nothing? That is the only thing I can think of that would allow them to lend credence to this disastrous policy.
Vicky Ford
We are absolutely not glossing over our concerns about rights when it comes to, for example, space for political opposition, civil rights and media freedom. Indeed, I met the permanent secretary of the Rwandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation in London earlier this year and made those points to her. However, to break the people trafficking model that is causing lives to be put at risk in our channel, things need to be done; doing nothing is not an option. That is why the Government of Rwanda have willingly entered into this partnership; they too want to stop lives being put at risk.
Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)
Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Elizabeth Truss)
The use of rape and sexual violence in conflict is a war crime. The UK is determined to tackle this scourge, which devastates lives. That is why we are campaigning for it to be a red line, on a par with the use of chemical weapons.
Alexander Stafford
The reports of appalling, widespread sexual violence being used by Russian soldiers in Ukraine are deeply disturbing. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Murad code is a vital step to ensuring justice for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, and that we must send a strong message to Russia and to Putin that rape as a weapon of war is evil and we must stamp it out?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is evil, and we have seen horrific sights in towns such as Bucha, where rape and sexual violence were used to terrorise women and children. The UK is leading the charge on the need to collect evidence of those crimes, and under our presidency of the United Nations Security Council we have launched the Murad code, which sets global standards for effective evidence-gathering on sexual violence.
Nickie Aiken
Today’s Daily Telegraph includes the testimony of Anna, a 41-year-old woman from Ukraine who says she was raped by a 19-year-old soldier. I note that the UN Secretary-General is meeting Mr Putin today to discuss humanitarian aid, and I hope he will bring up the use of rape as a weapon of war—a weapon that the Russians seem to be using. With that in mind, does my right hon. Friend agree that, as the UN charter mandate is to maintain international peace and security, perhaps it is time the international community questioned whether Russia should remain a permanent member of the Security Council?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend is right about the appalling reports that we have seen in the Telegraph and other newspapers of the use of rape in Ukraine. The Security Council has a role to play. Under our presidency of the Security Council, we have used it to call out Russia’s lies. We have also hosted President Zelensky, who has spoken to the Security Council. My hon. Friend is also right that we have concerns about an international security architecture that has Russia as one of the permanent members of the Security Council, where it has used its veto as a green light for barbarism. Part of our response has been working more closely with allies such as the G7 and NATO, because we simply have not seen enough taking place at a UN level.
Mr Speaker
I call the Chair of the International Development Committee, Sarah Champion.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
I welcome the Government’s commitment to the Murad code for survivors, but the Foreign Secretary knows that my commitment is to prevention. Women and girls in conflict zones are subjected to particular sexual violence. Rape continues, without apparent consequence, in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Myanmar—I could go on. What plans does the Foreign Secretary have to make tackling sexual violence a part of a broader cross-Government atrocity prevention programme?
Elizabeth Truss
The hon. Lady is right that we are seeing appalling cases not just in Ukraine but in countries such as Ethiopia. Later this year, in November, the UK will host an international conference on preventing sexual violence in conflict. We are working with counterparts such as the Canadians on the idea of a new convention that puts sexual violence on the same level in war as the use of chemical weapons. We are also working across Government with our domestic programme to prevent sexual violence. We are restoring our budget for women and girls, one of the key parts of which is for work on preventing sexual violence. We will shortly release our new international development budget for 2022-23.
Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)
We are hearing heartbreaking stories of children being forced to watch their mothers being raped and then murdered in Ukraine. We are hearing of rape being used as a weapon of war across conflicts, including in Tigray in Ethiopia. International Rescue Committee analysis reveals that women and girls across conflicts are experiencing widespread abuse and exploitation, including rape. What are the Government doing not only to stop this being used as a weapon of war but to challenge the way that women are used and exploited in conflicts across the world?
Elizabeth Truss
The hon. Lady is right: this abhorrent policy is being used to terrorise women and children. It is being used to destroy communities and destroy their spirit. It is a deliberate act. We know that; it is what the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe report on what is happening in Ukraine shows. First, we are working to collect the evidence through a number of bodies, including the Metropolitan police. We are funding the International Criminal Court to collect evidence. We will make sure that the perpetrators are brought to justice. More than that, we need new international agreement on making the use of sexual violence in war a red line. It needs to be regarded on the same level as the use of chemical weapons. That has not yet happened. That is why the UK is hosting a conference on this later this year, and we are working with international partners on this. The hon. Lady is absolutely right: it is appalling and abhorrent.
Mr Speaker
I call the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
I welcome enormously my right hon. Friend’s words on sexual violence in conflict. We have seen the rape of Bucha, sadly, and the rape of so many other towns and cities around the world, most notably in places such as Ethiopia and Mali. However, will my right hon. Friend also talk about sexual violence not in conflict? There is forced genital mutilation of young women and girls around the world, and an extraordinary level of violence in ordinary life outside conflict. The work that her Department can do in helping communities to defend themselves is not just transforming them, but transforming countries’ economies and futures.
Elizabeth Truss
That is why it is so important to restore the women and girls budget, as we will in our new announcement on international development. Key focuses will be girls’ education, ending the use of female genital mutilation, and preventing sexual violence in conflict but also more broadly. My hon. Friend is right. If women do not have this basic security, they will not be able to achieve their full potential, or have the opportunities they should. That is of course appalling for them, but also appalling for the societies they live in. That is why, in our international development policy, we absolutely must start with the most vulnerable, who are women and children.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
Sexual violence and rape are abhorrent anyway, but their use in conflict is a crime against humanity. I very much welcome what the Secretary of State has said about trying to get a convention in place that puts their use on the same level as the use of chemical weapons. On the women and children who are victims now, what work is she doing with our allies to ensure that the perpetrators of these vile crimes are brought to account, and that authorities go after the generals in charge of those soldiers, because these are war crimes?
Elizabeth Truss
They are war crimes. We are collecting the evidence, and we have British people currently working with the Ukrainian Government in Ukraine collecting that evidence. We are working with the International Criminal Court. If the ICC mechanisms are not enough, we will find other ways of getting to the people—not just those who perpetrated the crimes, but those who ordered them to be perpetrated. Also, through the aid budget that we have allocated to Ukraine, we are helping the victims. We are helping the survivors of sexual violence, and we are allocating money to local organisations to help those who have gone through the appalling trauma of being raped and sexually abused in conflict.
Sarah Atherton (Wrexham) (Con)
Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)
The Minister for Europe and North America (James Cleverly)
We have made it clear that we, the UK, will defend democracy at the frontier of freedom in eastern Europe as part of a network of liberty. We are strengthening our partnerships in the region, including on: countering disinformation and propaganda; advancing trade and technology; and supporting transparent, accountable political processes through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and other institutions. On 7 April, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary met NATO Foreign Ministers and affirmed our commitment to defending, and deterring threats to, the alliance members in eastern Europe.
Sarah Atherton
Without doubt, the UK is leading the way in providing military support to eastern Europe. We are doing everything from sending manned Challenger 2 tanks to Poland to doubling the size of our deployment in Estonia. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that the UK is working closely with NATO allies to provide all the support required to defend democracy in eastern Europe?
James Cleverly
I assure my hon. Friend that the UK will continue to play a leading role in NATO to respond to Putin’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. I fly out to NATO tomorrow to meet our new permanent representative and our allies in that alliance. NATO has also announced the establishment of four additional multilateral battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. As I say, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and NATO Foreign Ministers have agreed increased support to regional partners to strengthen their resilience and their ability to defend themselves against cyber-attacks, disinformation, political interference and other physical and political threats to them.
Caroline Ansell
I thank the Minister for his answer. We are all moved by the Ukrainian people’s fight to defend their hard-won democratic freedoms, but several countries in the region are still in transition, including Moldova, Georgia, and NATO allies such as Albania and North Macedonia. What work is the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office engaged in to support reform, so that all peoples in eastern Europe can experience the same democratic freedoms that we have in the UK?
James Cleverly
My hon. Friend is right that many countries in the immediate vicinity of Ukraine are suffering oppression. The UK is supporting democratic reform across the south Caucasus, in Moldova and in the western Balkans, including through programmes that support the strengthening of democratic freedoms to deliver the reform programmes and reduce corruption. We are also working with partners in the western Balkans to support their Euro-Atlantic integration, which is in itself a stimulus to reform.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Britain’s Army is smaller than it has been at any time for 200 years and we currently have plans to reduce personnel in our armed forces by a further 20,000 individuals. Does the Minister agree that if we are to stand by our allies in central and eastern Europe, we need to be in a position where we are militarily strong enough to do so?
James Cleverly
The hon. Gentleman will understand that, ultimately, his question would be more properly answered by Defence Ministers. I can assure him, however, that the close working between the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Ministry of Defence and our international partners will ensure that the UK absolutely remains a top-tier defence country within NATO. We will continue to support our NATO allies and countries in the region to defend themselves against physical and digital threats.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
Many countries of eastern Europe chose to join NATO as soon as they were free to do so, because they regard membership of the defensive alliance as essential to their security and democracy. As a result of Russia’s invasion, Finland and Sweden are considering whether to make such an application; the Foreign Secretary has made it clear that the UK would support an application if it was forthcoming. Is the Minister confident that, in that event, NATO would agree to admit Finland and Sweden to the alliance?
James Cleverly
The phrase that comes to mind is, “When people are free to choose, they choose freedom.” In this instance, a number of countries are seriously considering joining NATO—as the hon. Gentleman says, predominantly Finland and Sweden. I have no doubt that their application will be considered seriously by NATO member states. They are both serious defence players in their own right. Our view is that they would be an asset to NATO. Ultimately, the choice is for the people of those countries, but as my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary has said, we would look favourably on that application.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
It was good to hear the Minister mention the situation in the western Balkans where, of course, democracy and stability are under threat not just from Putin’s Russia but from those who seek to generate chaos locally. I therefore welcome the sanctions that the Government have announced against the Republika Srpska leader Dodik and others. That is an issue that we raised back in March. Can the Minister say what wider discussions he is having with our allies and special representatives in the region, and with Serbia, to maintain peace, democracy and stability in Bosnia, Kosovo and beyond and to counter Russian and domestic threats to undermine all those?
James Cleverly
The hon. Gentleman makes some important points about the fragility of countries in that region. The Prime Minister recently appointed Stuart Peach, who is very experienced and highly regarded. He has been active already in his engagement with the region. I have met him already and intend to do so again. On my visits to eastern Europe, I have discussed some of the challenges with regard to the western Balkans. As he said, we recently imposed a series of sanctions against the leadership of Republika Srpska, who need to be reminded that the best way forward for that country is through democracy and support for the rule of law.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
Democracy is ultimately built on hope. In response to a recent question to the Prime Minister about my suggestion that we fund a new Marshall plan for Ukraine from seized Russian assets, he said that that is something that his Government are working on. Can the Minister update the House as to what work is taking place in his Department?
James Cleverly
My right hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. We are currently supporting Ukraine and eastern European countries through our humanitarian support to deal with the initial and immediate pressures. What we can do in terms of reparations is ultimately a matter that will need to be done at Foreign Minister level within the UK and internationally, but I, and I am sure the Government, take his suggestion very seriously.
Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
The Minister for Asia and the Middle East (Amanda Milling)
We welcome the US’s Middle East Partnership for Peace Act and the proposals for increased international funding for Israeli-Palestinian peace. We share the objective of advancing economic, social and political connections, and peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians. We stand ready to co-ordinate and collaborate further.
Mary Glindon
The recent attacks in Israel and the violence in Jerusalem and Gaza are a reminder of how urgent it is to support projects that bring Israelis and Palestinians together. Can the Minister now confirm to the House when the UK will join the board of the international fund for Israeli-Palestinian peace?
Amanda Milling
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question. UK officials remain in close contact with the US Government about how our existing peace-building projects and funding can better support the goals of the Act. We stand ready to co-ordinate and collaborate further, including regarding the advisory board, as additional information about their plans and priorities become available.
Wayne David
Recent violence in the west bank and in Israel itself underlines the need for an international fund for Israeli and Palestinian peace, but such a fund will not just happen. It actually requires positive support from Governments around the world, including and especially this Government, yet the truth is that our Government are paying only lip service to it. When will the Government remember the success of the International Fund for Ireland and learn the lessons of that success?
Amanda Milling
As I say, what we all want to see is a safe and secure Israel, and we want to have a two-state solution that enables us to do that and also delivers Palestinian self-determination. We are working with the US Government on these projects and the funding that can support the Act, and as and when we have more information about the plans and the priorities, we will co-ordinate with them.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
The last few weeks have seen spiralling tension and violence in Israel and Palestine, with a dozen Israelis killed in a spate of horrific terrorist attacks and more than 20 Palestinians killed in response, including the senseless killing of a teenager and a human rights lawyer. We remain resolutely committed to the goal of a two-state solution, but it feels a very distant prize at present. Can I ask the Minister what she is doing to try to remove the barriers to peace, including ensuring respect of holy sites such as the al-Aqsa mosque, preventing Hamas rocket attacks, ending the expansion of illegal settlements and finally recognising Palestine as a state?
Amanda Milling
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his question, and we are deeply concerned about the very fragile security situation. We are working actively with key partners, including members of the UN Security Council, and both parties to encourage de-escalation of tensions. As he says, there have been some horrific attacks, and we do want to see the situation de-escalated. We are having those conversations to ensure that we play our part in preventing further escalation.
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
The UK’s funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was cut by more than 50% last year. UNRWA provides essential services to Palestinian refugees in the west bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, but it has been described as “close to collapse” due to funding shortfalls. Can we truly say, as Ambassador Allen stated to the UN Security Council in 2018, that
“the United Kingdom strongly supports peace”
between Israelis and Palestinians when it simultaneously sells arms to one side and cuts humanitarian aid to the other?
Amanda Milling
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. As I have said, we are committed to a two-state solution as the best way to deliver Palestinian self-determination and a safe and secure Israel. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe and North America announced last year that we are providing £27 million to support UNRWA, including £4.9 million for its flash appeal following the Gaza conflicts in May.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Elizabeth Truss)
India is the world’s largest democracy and a key partner of the United Kingdom. We are deepening our defence and security ties, as well as securing a trade deal by the end of the year.
Bob Blackman
I thank my right hon. Friend for her answer, and for the tremendous work she has been doing since she became Foreign Secretary to deepen the relationship with India. Indeed, the Prime Minister’s visit last week built on that relationship. Clearly there is a need for defence, trade and other opportunities, but there is also a requirement to move India away from its relationship with Russia. What will my right hon. Friend do to ensure that our friendship continues with India, and that it is moved back towards the west?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend is a huge champion for the Indian community in Harrow East, and he is right: India is a democracy. We want to work more closely with India and other democracies to reduce dependence on authoritarian regimes such as Russia. We can do that by working more closely with India on defence, which is what the Prime Minister was doing on his visit to India last week, and more closely on trade and investment, so that democracies are working with each other and we are less dependent on regimes such as Russia that have ill intent.
Stephen Metcalfe
Following on from that, will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming the progress made by the Prime Minister last week to boost security in the Indo-Pacific? Will she confirm that following his trip, the UK will continue to work closely with our friends in India to deliver a more secure and prosperous future for both our peoples in the UK and in India?
Elizabeth Truss
That is right. First, we are working more closely with India on defence, to benefit industries in both our countries and make our countries more secure and less dependent on authoritarian regimes. At the same time, we will be delivering more commercial benefits. When the Prime Minister was in India he confirmed deals of more than £1 billion, creating almost 11,000 new jobs in the United Kingdom. There are huge opportunities for more jobs in India and the United Kingdom, and more security for both our countries.
Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)
Last week before his visit to India, I wrote to the Prime Minister, urging him to raise the human rights abuses against Kashmiris, and the increasingly Islamophobic direction of the Modi Government and the persecution of minorities. It seems, however, that the Prime Minister did not even think those grave human rights abuses worth a mention. That is frankly disgraceful. The Government cannot pick and choose the human rights abuses around the world that favour them. When will this Government fulfil their international obligation to the Kashmiris, and to those persecuted by the right-wing Modi Government in India?
Elizabeth Truss
On Kashmir, we encourage both sides to engage in dialogue and find lasting diplomatic solutions to maintain regional stability. We raise our concerns with the Governments of both India and Pakistan.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Following the question from the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), it is important that we strengthen the UK’s economic and security relationships with India. It is equally important that we address the issue of human rights abuses, and the persecution of Christians and Muslims. What discussions have taken place to ensure that when it comes to addressing the persecution of Christians and Muslims, and the abuse of human rights in India, something is being done and India listens?
Elizabeth Truss
Of course we raise the issue of human rights with the Indian Government. Indeed, later this summer we will host a conference in London on the subject of religious freedom, led by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). This is an important issue for us. Looking at the big picture, there is a huge opportunity for the United Kingdom to work more closely with India in the face of some appalling authoritarian regimes, particularly Russia, which has staged an unwarranted, unjustified invasion of Ukraine. It is important that leading democracies across the world stand up for freedom and democracy and work together.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
To isolate Putin on the global stage, we must build the largest possible coalition against his illegal war. India is one country that has so far stayed neutral. The Prime Minister spent last week in India, but No. 10 admitted that he failed even to mention India’s neutrality in his meeting with Prime Minister Modi. That follows the Foreign Secretary’s own failed trip to India where she failed to demonstrate any progress in bringing India into the international coalition condemning Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. Will the Foreign Secretary explain that failure and commit to asking her counterparts in India to oppose Putin’s barbaric war?
Elizabeth Truss
Of course, I have discussed the issue of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine with the Indian Government, but the right hon. Gentleman is completely wrong if he thinks that the right approach for Britain is to go around finger-wagging to the rest of the world rather than working to build strong relationships and partnerships to attract India and others to work more closely with us. On both my visit and the Prime Minister’s visit, we succeeded in moving forward our relationships on trade, investment and defence, generating jobs in Britain and in India with the ultimate goal of working more closely together as fellow democracies and moving away from dependence on authoritarian regimes. The fact is that the right hon. Gentleman prefers gesture politics to getting things done. [Interruption.]
Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)
Mr Speaker
Order. Can somebody on the Front Bench please answer the question?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)
I am terribly sorry, Mr Speaker; I could not hear my colleague over the noise in the House. The UK has been an energetic Commonwealth chair in office, working to strengthen collaboration and co-ordination right across our Commonwealth family, including on recovery from covid, trade, investment and climate. Last week, as we have been discussing, the Prime Minister visited India. The Foreign Secretary has also visited India as well as Australia. I have visited South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Eswatini, and if I were to tell hon. Members where Lord Ahmad has been, we would be here until tomorrow.
Giles Watling
I thank my hon. Friend for her answer—I am normally heard wherever I go. With the recent royal tour of the Caribbean and the Prime Minister’s visit to India in mind, does she agree that, in this post-Brexit world, we should make the strengthening of the Commonwealth—that great family of democracies—a top priority?
Vicky Ford
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and Essex neighbour about the importance of the Commonwealth. We are committed to deepening our ties with all Commonwealth countries, including on trade. We have already signed free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand and we look forward to concluding one with India this year. We have got economic partnerships with 27 Commonwealth countries. We are working closely with many Commonwealth partners on global challenges such as climate and health, underpinned by over half a billion pounds of international investment. Members of the Government are deeply looking forward to attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, in June.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
The Minister for Asia and the Middle East (Amanda Milling)
In February 2022, to mark a year since the coup, the UK co-ordinated a joint statement agreed by 36 countries and secured a strong UN Security Council press statement that called for a return to democracy. We also sanctioned three individuals for undermining democracy and the rule of law.
Rushanara Ali
I thank the Minister for that answer, but, since the military coup on 1 February 2021, the Myanmar military has carried out brutal crackdowns aimed at suppressing widespread public opposition to its rule, and almost half a million people have been displaced, partly due to airstrikes or the threat of them. Will the Government introduce sanctions on Burmese companies that supply aviation to the military and British companies involved in any aspect of the supply of aviation fuel, including shipping and insurance services?
Amanda Milling
I thank the hon. Lady for her question, for everything that she does on Myanmar and for ensuring that we are having this discussion, because it is really important that we keep a focus on the situation in Myanmar. I reassure her that I have many conversations with counterparts on visits. We work closely with partners to put pressure on the regime to de-escalate the crisis, including through targeted sanctions against individuals and entities who are providing support for the military. Obviously, I cannot talk about future sanctions.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)
Promoting freedom of religion or belief is one of the UK’s longest-standing human rights priorities. We are making good progress on implementing the Bishop of Truro’s recommendations to support everyone persecuted for their religion or belief. We are looking forward to hosting an international ministerial conference on freedom of religion or belief in July to drive forward international efforts to promote openness and freedom.
Fiona Bruce
I thank the Foreign Secretary for her strong support for the international conference on freedom of religion or belief, which the UK Government will host in July. Do Ministers agree that that would be an excellent opportunity to showcase how FORB is a priority for the UK Government to many Government Ministers from across the world, whom we hope to welcome to that event, which we expect will be the largest UK-hosted international event of 2022?
Vicky Ford
I thank my hon. Friend for her outstanding work across the world on the Prime Minister’s behalf as his envoy on freedom of religion or belief. She is right to be really concerned about the increasing attacks and the increased severity of attacks on freedom of religion or belief. The conference that the UK is going to lead in July will be enormously important; we will welcome partner countries and stakeholders from all across the world. The Foreign Secretary is very much looking forward to attending it and taking part.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Thank you for your tolerance of me this morning, Mr Speaker.
Will the Minister meet the Christians in Parliament to discuss this subject? An earlier question was about links with the Commonwealth, and children and adults in certain Commonwealth countries are persecuted for their faith. Can we do something about that? Good communication between those of us who are active Christians in this House and the Minister would be most appreciated.
Vicky Ford
I would be very happy, as a Christian, to meet the Christians in Parliament and to meet other faith groups and those who hold no faith. I thank the hon. Member for that invitation.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Elizabeth Truss)
Despite having failed in his initial aims, Putin continues his barbaric war in Ukraine. The United Kingdom, together with our allies, has stepped up sanctions and lethal aid. We have put more sanctions on than any other nation, including on oligarchs and banks, and we have supplied everything from hundreds of Starstreak anti-air missiles to ammunition. This week, our ambassador, Melinda Simmons, is returning to our reopened embassy in Kyiv. We will continue to back Ukraine until it prevails and Putin fails.
Ms Buck
In addition to the devastating impact of the conflict in Ukraine itself, the International Monetary Fund report shows that this is now having an impact on world food prices, particularly affecting some of the world’s poorest communities. In Yemen alone, there is evidence that food prices have increased by 150%. Will the Secretary of State tell us what assessment her Department has made of the impact of rising food prices in some of the world’s conflict zones and what the Government’s response will be?
Elizabeth Truss
The hon. Lady is absolutely right: we are working closely with our international allies. We committed extra billions at the spring meetings last week to help to provide food aid to the rest of the world. We are also restoring our humanitarian budget, as part of our aid budget in the United Kingdom, to help to deal with the crisis.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
Elizabeth Truss
I am working very closely with my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who is our religious freedom envoy. I am pleased to be hosting and attending the global summit to promote the freedom of religion in July, and we continue to make progress on implementing all the recommendations of the Truro review.
Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
Wars rage in Africa, the middle east and now Ukraine. There is a growing climate crisis, food prices are surging and 300,000 children face death by starvation in Somalia. Britain’s reputation is in tatters after two years of callous aid cuts, having shut down the world-renowned Department for International Development. It is clear that Britain needs a strategy for long-term development to stop lurching from crisis to crisis. Can the Secretary of State confirm today exactly when the new strategy will be published? Will it be backed with the funding, focus, ambition and expertise needed to make a lasting difference in the world?
Elizabeth Truss
We will be publishing our new development strategy this spring. There are some key elements to the strategy: first, we will restore the budget for women and girls and restore the budget for humanitarian aid. In the face of the appalling crisis in Ukraine, we have already committed £220 million of development funding, and we are one of the largest donors.
Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)
Elizabeth Truss
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the fantastic work that he is doing with the local community in Keighley and Ilkley. We are seeing people across Britain really contributing to the effort to support the people of Ukraine. We have now issued more than 70,000 visas to Ukrainians. We are working with Foreign Ministers right across Europe to ensure that we are completely co-ordinated, particularly with those Governments that are close by, like the Poles.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
We are now three weeks into the UN-sponsored truce in Yemen, which has resulted in the release of 14 foreign captives including UK national Luke Symons and his family. It is also intended to open roads, allow fuel through the port of Hodeida and allow commercial flights from Sanaa to Jordan and Egypt. But it is a fragile truce that could collapse at any minute, so can the Minister tell me what steps the UK is taking to support Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, to keep the peace and to prevent a return to conflict and a re-escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen?
The Minister for Asia and the Middle East (Amanda Milling)
The UK welcomes the two-month truce announcement in Yemen. I reassure the hon. Gentleman that we continue to support the UN special envoy and co-ordinate closely with international and regional partners.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Amanda Milling
I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for being such a strong voice for the Chagossian community; I know that he has a large Chagossian community in his constituency of Crawley. We have gone to great lengths to find projects for that money that will benefit the Chagossian community. I would like to meet my hon. Friend to discuss what more we can do.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)
I make it very clear that there is an agreement between the Government of Rwanda and the Government of the UK: they have agreed with the Home Office to make sure that the rights of those who go from the UK to Rwanda are protected. May I point out to the hon. Gentleman that just last month, the UN Refugee Agency sent 119 refugees to Rwanda, and the UN itself described it as a very safe country? In December, the UN said that Rwanda had done an excellent job on integrated refugees. Will he please look at what is being said right now about how Rwanda is caring for these people with kindness?
Simon Jupp (East Devon) (Con)
Exmouth has welcomed Afghan refugees and their families while the Government work hard to find them long-term accommodation around the UK, but sadly some of their friends and family members have stayed behind. What reassurances can my right hon. Friend give that UK aid reaches those who need it most in Afghanistan, not the Taliban?
The Minister for Europe and North America (James Cleverly)
Last month the UK co-hosted a donor conference with the United Nations, Qatar and Germany which raised more than £2.4 billion. We work through international agencies to ensure that the money reaches the people who need it, and that half of it reaches women and girls, who are particularly vulnerable in Afghanistan at the moment. We will continue to press the Taliban to adhere to their international commitments, and to press our international friends to ensure that the money is received by the appropriate people.
Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)
Vicky Ford
That fire was devastating. The UK is leading diplomatic and development response efforts on the ground, which include chairing an international co-ordination group that has visited the site and is assessing potential response options. This week our ambassador met the President of Somaliland, senior Cabinet members, the mayor of Hargeisa and the fire service commander to help shape our response. We are leading the international community, but also working with the locals on the ground.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
The Taliban’s decision to suspend secondary school classes for girls in Afghanistan was deeply disappointing. Can the Minister confirm that the Government are working with our international allies in continuing to pressurise the Taliban to allow equal access to all levels of education?
James Cleverly
My hon. Friend has made a valuable point about the importance, internationally, of education for girls and support for women. I can assure him that the UK will always push to increase the availability of education for girls, particularly in Afghanistan, and will also push to ensure that our money, and international money, reaches the people who are most in need and is not siphoned off by the Taliban regime.
Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
Amanda Milling
I will happily follow up that case after this questions session.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
The people of both Myanmar and Ukraine are risking their lives to continue fighting for freedoms that have been taken away. In both those countries, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy was running projects that were making a real difference in bolstering their democracies until the men with guns moved in. Today is the 30th anniversary of the foundation, of which you, Mr Speaker, are a patron, and many Members on both sides of the House have played an active role for a generation in promoting peace and democracy around the world, currently in about 30 countries. The Foreign Secretary has recently resolved our funding issues. Will she agree to play a leading role in events celebrating this anniversary, and ensure that her Department continues to give its own in-house open societies champion every chance to do even more good work?
Elizabeth Truss
I am pleased that we were able to resolve the funding issues so that the Westminster Foundation for Democracy could continue its excellent work. What we are learning about as a result of the Ukraine crisis is the strength of democracies in fighting back and fighting for what they believe in, and it is organisations such as the foundation that help to provide the intellectual ballast for them to do so.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The Spanish Government stand accused of using Pegasus, the controversial Israeli spyware, to hack into the phone of a Scottish solicitor who was representing Professor Clara Ponsati, Catalonia’s former Education Minister and now a Member of the European Parliament. Does the Foreign Secretary agree that if this occurred, it would constitute a disgraceful breach of solicitor-client privilege and a direct attack on a democratically elected politician, and will she take the matter up with the Spanish ambassador next time she meets him?
James Cleverly
I can assure the hon. and learned Lady and the House that we have a strong international relationship with Spain and we are able to raise all kinds of issues. I am not going to speculate or comment on the details that she has raised, as I have no way of corroborating them, but I can assure her that this Government will always stand up for the rule of law and our willingness to support it.
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
The Minister will be aware that next Tuesday is World Press Freedom Day, yet free media are under greater pressure than ever before, particularly in Russia where independent journalism has been ruthlessly suppressed. Does she agree that the need for independent news providers such as the BBC World Service is greater than ever, and will she ensure that they continue to receive all the funding they need?
Vicky Ford
My right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour is absolutely correct. We totally condemn Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the lies it is using to promote it. It is seeking to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty, to obscure the truth and to hide war crimes. An independent media, including the World Service, is vital. We are providing the World Service with over £90 million this year, but we have also created a Government information cell to counter Russian information and ensure that the people of Russia can access the truth.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Amanda Milling
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. We are clear on our position on the settlements: they are illegal under international law and we urge Israel to end settlement expansion. This is something that we raise with our counterparts.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)
Has my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary had an opportunity to raise the cases of my constituent Aiden Aslin and of Shaun Pinner with her Ukrainian and Russian counterparts? These two British citizens continue to be held in captivity and to be tortured and abused for propaganda purposes by the Russian military, which I hope all of us in this House will uniformly condemn. We want to see those individuals released as soon as possible.
James Cleverly
I have discussed the issue of foreign volunteer fighters with the Ukrainian Government. They are clear, and we are clear, that those fighting under the Ukrainian flag for the Ukrainian armed forces in the defence of Ukraine should be treated as Ukrainian military and as prisoners of war, with all the protections that the international humanitarian law affords to those individuals.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
James Cleverly
My hon. Friend the Minister in the other place, Lord Ahmad, discusses these issues with regional partners regularly. The UK remains committed to ensuring the protection of minorities. We will hold the Taliban to the commitments they have made and ensure that where possible we work with international partners to push them to the protection of ethnic minorities, religious minorities and other vulnerable people in Afghanistan.
Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)
I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s work on combating sexual violence in conflict and the fact that the Government have upgraded the money for this area. If she recognises that the International Criminal Court and the United Nations do not bring better outcomes for survivors of sexual violence or bring perpetrators to justice, does she agree that we need to look at a new international mechanism that the UK could lead?
Elizabeth Truss
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend that we need to bring these perpetrators to justice. That is why we are funding the ICC to do more, as well as collecting our own evidence and working with the Ukrainians, but if a new mechanism is needed, we would be prepared to lead the work on that. The conference later this year on the prevention of sexual violence is a good opportunity to do that.
Prime Minister’s Visit to India
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Prime Minister if he will make a statement on his recent visit to India. [Hon. Members: “Where is he?”]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)
I thought we treated women with respect in this place.
The Prime Minister visited New Delhi and Gujarat on 21 and 22 April to deepen our comprehensive strategic partnership with India. The relationship between the UK and India is one of friends, partners and equals. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the importance of greater and deeper partnerships between democracies. This visit enhanced our objectives on green growth, security and defence, as well as trade.
Security and defence are a vital element of our growing partnership, and the Prime Minister discussed next-generation defence and security collaboration, including through supporting the “make in India” approach to security and defence. A commitment was outlined in a joint cyber statement to deepen co-operation across cyber-governance, deterrence and strengthening cyber-resilience. The UK also issued an open general export licence to India, reducing bureaucracy and shortening delivery times for defence procurement. This is the first for a country in the Indo-Pacific.
Another priority is our trade and prosperity relationship, and the Prime Minister agreed with Prime Minister Modi to conclude the majority of talks on a comprehensive and balanced free trade agreement by the end of October 2022. UK businesses also confirmed more than £1 billion of new investments and export deals, creating almost 11,000 jobs here in the UK.
The Prime Minister and Prime Minister Modi discussed co-operation on clean and renewable energy, aimed at supporting India’s energy transition away from imported oil and increasing its energy security. We launched a hydrogen science and innovation hub to accelerate affordable green hydrogen, as well as committing new funding for the green grids initiative announced at COP26. The Prime Minister also confirmed a major new collaboration on science and technology.
Ian Blackford
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am grateful to the Minister for being here but, of course, this was a question to the Prime Minister. There is a clear convention that Prime Ministers have a duty to update this House following their attendance at major summits or following significant visits. This convention has been respected and followed by all Prime Ministers in recent years and, as on so many other matters, the only exception to that rule is the current Prime Minister.
Following the Prime Minister’s visit last week, he should have come to this House to give an update. He has once again failed to do so. Instead, he chose to go campaigning for his party in the local elections, although I suspect that will not do his party much good.
The Prime Minister’s failure to come before the House is by no means a one-off, as he failed to come before the House after the extraordinary NATO summit in March. There is a very clear pattern. This is a Prime Minister who has no respect for the office he occupies, and even less respect for this House.
Now the Minister has fronted up for her boss, I will ask her a number of questions. Can she provide an update on what discussions were had with Prime Minister Modi regarding the deteriorating situation in Kashmir? We all know how difficult and delicate this region is, and it requires constant vigilance and attention. Putin’s war in Europe is rightly our collective focus, but we must not lose sight of other countries and regions where conflict and violence are a constant threat.
Can the Minister also give more details on any progress towards a free trade deal? Reports suggest that October is the timeline for completion. Is that accurate?
What reassurance can she give to our farming and crofting communities, which have already been badly undercut by the post-Brexit trade deals this Government have negotiated? Given the many concerns about ongoing human rights violations in India, what provisions will be made in any free trade deal to promote and protect our values?
Finally, can the Minister guarantee that, whoever happens to be Prime Minister in the next few months, they will again follow convention and come before this House to make statements on significant visits?
Vicky Ford
The right hon. Gentleman should be congratulating the Prime Minister on going to visit one of the world’s largest and oldest democracies, with which we have a deep and broad relationship. India is the world’s sixth largest economy and is set to be the third largest by 2050. Its population is bigger than those of the United States and European Union combined. The relationship between democracies, especially at this time, with democracies under threat, is vital. He asked about the current trade deal. It would supercharge the growth of our trading relationship. Products such as Scotch whisky, let alone cars, currently face tariffs of more than 100%, so there could be particular benefits for the people of Scotland in agreeing this trade deal. If he had been here to listen to the Foreign Secretary earlier, he would know that she answered questions on the relationship with Kashmir, which I am sure we will come to later in this session.
Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)
Does the Minister share my frustration that so often India’s reputation on human rights is traduced in this place unreasonably? Of course, the long-standing dispute in Kashmir gives rise to complexities and suffering, but we must always remember that India is a democracy that respects the rule of law and is doing its best to deal with a very difficult security situation in Kashmir.
Vicky Ford
My right hon. Friend speaks so eloquently on this subject. India is one of the world’s oldest democracies and there is a unique living bridge, including a 1.6 million-strong Indian diaspora in the UK, that connects our countries in so many ways. We must continue to have close, honest and open friendships with countries, such as with Rwanda, because it is important to have these friendships so that we can raise issues that concern us, such as on human rights, when they come up.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
Conservative Prime Ministers being abroad when their leadership is under threat is not something new in our politics, but a Conservative Prime Minister abroad seeking to negotiate binding legal commitments from other world leaders when they have themselves broken the law is new, and the Prime Minister should be here giving a statement. Instead, we have a Prime Minister whose moral authority is so sullied, whose political authority is so weak, that he did not challenge India to change its official stance of neutrality on the appalling, illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. India has a right to remain neutral, but why would a UK Prime Minister waste such an opportunity to at least try to convince our Indian friends to join us in standing up to Putin’s aggression? This sends out a worrying message that our Prime Minister lacks both the ambition and the ability to effectively use Britain’s diplomatic clout to influence others.
Questions were also raised when the Prime Minister visited a JCB factory owned by a Conservative donor, when bulldozers are being used on properties owned by Muslim people, yet the issues of communal violence and human rights breaches were not even raised by the Prime Minister, despite his promising to do so. That is not standing up for Britain and our values on the world stage; that is a moral failure from a Prime Minister too distracted by trying to save his own job. On trade specifically, the Prime Minister spoke about a deal by October. Labour values the historic link with India and the growth of trade, but we must set the standard high, not engage in a race to the bottom. So will the Minister confirm what the Prime Minister said to Prime Minister Modi about human rights, about binding commitments on climate change, about what he expects on labour standards and trade union rights, on gender equality and on protecting our public services, and about how he will prevent the outsourcing of UK jobs to India? What will the Prime Minister do to support exporters to take advantage of trade opportunities? The Minister mentioned Scotch whisky—is the negotiating aim for the removal of tariffs altogether? Finally, what will the Prime Minister do to meaningfully involve business, trade unions and civil society in the negotiating process itself, so that they are not presented with a “take it or leave it” deal at the end of the negotiations?
Vicky Ford
On Ukraine, the British Prime Minister and Prime Minister Modi released a statement immediately after their meeting which unequivocally condemned civilian deaths and reiterated the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The right hon. Gentleman might like to take a look at that statement.
We are aware of recent reports that properties were demolished in New Delhi and other states. We condemn any instance of discrimination because of freedom of religion or belief, regardless of the country or the faith involved. If we have concerns, we raise them directly with the Government of India. Our network of deputy high commissions will continue to follow the reports closely, while also recognising that it is a matter for India.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about the free trade agreement. It could supercharge the growth of our trading relationship, which already totalled more than £23 billion in 2019. There is a great opportunity to forge a new economic partnership to the benefit of both countries. The information published at the time of the launch provides detailed information on what the UK seeks from a deal and the reasons for that, but we are just at the start of talks. We need to make sure that the final deal is mutually beneficial and acceptable to both countries, as the right hon. Gentleman knows. As is normal, more information on the shape and scope of the FTA will be made available at an appropriate time as negotiations progress.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
You and I, Mr Speaker, were looking forward to a visit to India during the Easter recess, but we have witnessed the Prime Minister’s groundbreaking visit. He is the first Prime Minister to visit the state of Gujarat, which is where Shri Narendra Modi was Chief Minister and is the powerhouse of the Indian economy. Many Gujaratis live in the UK, and wherever they have come they have brought with them economic power and the ability to contribute directly to our economy. Will my hon. Friend confirm that the plan is to conclude the free trade talks by Diwali? We will then be able to have a double celebration of Diwali—the Hindu new year—and a new opportunity for a free trade deal between our two great countries.
Vicky Ford
My hon. Friend is a great supporter of the people of India. Many members of the Indian diaspora live in his constituency and he is always incredibly good at standing up for them and wanting closer ties between our countries. The two Prime Ministers agreed that they want to conclude the majority of the talks on the comprehensive and balanced free trade agreement by the end of October. I hope that will give us all something to celebrate in the autumn.
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
The Minister said that we are at the start of the negotiations; will she confirm that the trade unions, business and civil society will be included in any discussions in both countries?
Vicky Ford
I am afraid the right hon. Lady will have to discuss the details of the negotiations with my counterparts in the Department for International Trade. There has been a public consultation, which showed that a significant number of barriers prevent UK companies from trading and investing in India. We want to reduce barriers but must also listen to those who are involved throughout the UK. The right hon. Lady really needs to raise the matter with a trade Minister.
Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)
The partnership between the UK and India is not only vital to both our nations but important for global peace and security. Will my hon. Friend confirm that the UK Government will continue to discuss global security matters with India?
Vicky Ford
Absolutely—my hon. Friend is spot on. It is vital, at this time, that countries that believe in democracy come together and work more closely against authoritarian regimes, against aggression and in favour of global security.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Had the Prime Minister been here today, I would have inquired of him whether, while he was in India, he impressed on the Indian Prime Minister the fact that the £2 billion increase in trade with Russia at a time when we had sanctioned it in respect of Ukraine potentially undermined our position, and whether he tried to persuade the Prime Minister of India that that was not an acceptable route for a UK trading partner. Notwithstanding the statement that the Minister read out, will she assure us that the Prime Minister made the case to the Indian Government for sanctions against Russia?
Vicky Ford
I thank the hon. Lady for her point. Again, the two Prime Ministers made a joint statement condemning the civilian deaths that have occurred during the Russian invasion, and called for an end to all hostilities. One of the key issues was increasing our defence and security partnership with India. That is about helping India to become more self-reliant and less reliant on imports from other countries.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I very much welcome the strengthening of relations between the UK and India, two great democracies. In that vein, what discussions did the Prime Minister have with his Indian counterparts on the defence of democracy against growing threats from autocracies, not only in the Indian Ocean region but in Europe?
Vicky Ford
An absolutely key part of the visit was about great democracies coming together to stand against aggressive states. The Prime Minister discussed India’s commitment to transforming defence and security co-operation and enhancing engagement in support of a free, open and secure Indo-Pacific. That whole part of the region, and its security, was a key part of the discussions between the Prime Ministers.
Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister could not make himself available for this urgent question—an important part of the work that he should be doing. We know that this Prime Minister does not want the duties that he is assigned.
The Minister said that India is the oldest democracy, but it was founded in 1948; that does not make it the oldest democracy. India is a human rights abuser across all its country—for the Sikh community, for the Muslim community, for the Christian community and particularly strongly for the Kashmiri community. The Minister talks about signing an agreement in the run-up to Diwali, but that would be dancing on the human rights and civil liberties of all those people who have been persecuted in India. Does she accept that that is not acceptable to us as a democracy?
Vicky Ford
We do not pursue trade at the exclusion of human rights. We regard both as an important part of a deep, mature and wide-ranging relationship with our partners. The partnership with India is very important for both our countries.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
East Lancashire has a wide diaspora community, not just from India but from the wider region, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. Will the Minister illuminate the House on what steps her Department will take to engage that diaspora when it comes to negotiating a free trade deal, not just in India, but in the wider region? I suggest to her that entrepreneurs in east Lancashire who go to work every day know better what supercharges the economy than civil servants who work from home.
Vicky Ford
My right hon. Friend makes a really important point. It is businesses and entrepreneurs who create jobs and employ people; it is not Governments, and we should always remember that. It is important therefore that we listen to the voices of businesses and entrepreneurs while we seek to negotiate trade deals. Trade deals are there to tear down the barriers that they often face when trying to free up business opportunities. Their voices must be listened to as part of the negotiations.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
Three British citizens—Saeed and Sakil Dawood and Mohammed Aswad—were murdered in the communal violence in India 20 years ago. Their families have been asking that the remains of the bodies, which are held by the authorities, be returned to them in this country. The Prime Minister knows of the issue and has been asked to do something about it. Did he raise it when he spoke with Prime Minister Modi?
Vicky Ford
The hon. Gentleman raises a very serious case. I am not aware of the details, but I will follow up with my noble Friend Lord Ahmad, who leads for us on Indian matters in this case. I know that the Prime Minister raised a number of different consular cases with the Prime Minister of India, and handed over a note on various other consular cases, but I will ask Lord Ahmad to get back to the hon. Gentleman on the issue that he has raised.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
India has been dependent on Russian defence equipment for a very long time. It is therefore vital, in the process of our closer alignment and partnership with India, that we do all we can to discuss and take forward a defence relationship that includes equipment and manufacturing. Does my hon. Friend agree that that security reason above all makes it vital that the Prime Minister—whoever the Prime Minister of the day is—visits India and takes forward that relationship?
Vicky Ford
I agree that it is important to have a very strong UK-India defence relationship. That is why we work together as trusted partners in the India-UK defence and international security partnership framework. As I said in my opening statement, part of that is about supporting the Government of India’s “made in India” approach to security and defence. The two Prime Ministers noted the importance of robust defence industrial collaboration for manufacturing and key capabilities. It is absolutely correct that, at this time of global insecurity, we work with partners such as India to make sure that they are more self-reliant in their security.
Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that, although we all want an improved trading and diplomatic relationship with India, it should be on the basis of shared values, including religious tolerance and respect for minorities? As the Prime Minister is not here to answer for himself, can she tell us what representations he made to Narendra Modi about the concerns of British Muslims—including in my constituency of Batley and Spen—that Islamophobia and attacks on religious minorities are on the increase in India?
Vicky Ford
The UK is absolutely committed to defending freedom of religion or belief for all, and to promoting respect and tolerance between different religions and indeed between religious and non-religious communities. We condemn any incidences of discrimination because of religion. Our high commissioner in Delhi, and our network of deputy high commissioners across India, regularly meet religious representatives, and have run projects to help support minority rights. The Indian constitution protects all communities, but we will always raise human rights issues with countries across the world where we have concerns.
Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend confirm that, as the UK holds the COP presidency, the Government are working to support India’s energy transition away from imported oil and towards a more sustainable energy source, to address both energy security and climate change?
Vicky Ford
Yes. As president of COP, the UK is absolutely focused on ensuring that the promises made in Glasgow are delivered. I was really pleased to hear that during the Prime Minister’s visit we launched the hydrogen and science innovation hub to accelerate affordable green hydrogen; we committed new funding for the green grids initiative that we announced in Glasgow; and there was collaboration on the public transport electrification. Globally, we also committed up to £75 million to rolling out adaptable clean tech innovations from India to the wider Indo-Pacific and to Africa. That benefits not only India but the Indo-Pacific, Africa, the UK and, indeed, the planet.
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I wish every Sikh on these islands a happy Vaisakhi, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) on securing the urgent question.
The Minister mentioned Scotch whisky but not the Scot Jagtar Singh Johal; she noted a list of priorities, but not Jagtar Singh Johal. Can the Minister advise on whether, in discussions with Prime Minister Modi, the Prime Minister—not civil servants, not with a note—directly challenged the arbitrary detention of Jagtar Singh Johal, who now faces a death penalty, and question the trial-by-media that my constituent has faced since 2017? If not, why not?
Vicky Ford
The Prime Minister did raise Mr Johal’s case and handed over a note on consular cases. The 2030 roadmap for India-UK future relations, which was agreed by the UK and Indian Governments, includes a commitment
“to resolve long-running or complex consular cases.”
The Foreign Secretary has agreed to meet the hon. Gentleman and for Mr Johal’s brother and wife to join the meeting. I know officials are in contact to schedule that meeting.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)
Just last week, the Opposition parties were having a go at Rwanda; this week it appears to be India, and goodness knows what country it will be next week. Can the Minister confirm that it is vital to have a good relationship with India that benefits not only the UK, but Scotland?
Vicky Ford
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, as ever. India is the world’s sixth largest economy, a member of the Commonwealth, a long-standing democracy and a good friend of the UK. We must continue to keep our good relations with India going.
Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
In recent months, there have been reports that prominent Muslim women in India have appeared on unsanctioned apps listing them for auction, and leading public figures have openly called for Muslims to be killed. In Karnataka, a court passed a ruling banning schoolgirls from exercising their religious beliefs by wearing the hijab in class. Did the Prime Minister raise concerns about human rights violations by the Indian Government, including the anti-Muslim violence that many feel is being whipped up by Narendra Modi and the ruling BJP?
Vicky Ford
It is a shocking story that the hon. Lady tells, but we do engage with India on a range of human rights matters. We work with both union and state governments and with non-governmental organisations to help to build capacity and share expertise to promote human rights for all. As she knows, supporting women and girls is a top priority for this Government and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Where we have concerns, we raise them directly with the Government of India, including at ministerial level.
Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being at the opening of the next round of trade talks between the UK and the United States in Aberdeenshire. There was genuine excitement, particularly from the businesses represented in the room, at the prospect of a deal by Diwali with India. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) has said, given the situation in the world right now, of more immediate concern is our security and defence relationship. Can my hon. Friend the Minister expand on what was discussed by the Prime Minister and Narendra Modi about how we can improve our defence and security relationship with India?
Vicky Ford
I know my hon. Friend, as a former member of the Royal Navy, cares passionately about our defence. The leaders agreed to intensify co-operation as trusted partners under the India-UK defence and international security partnership framework. They noted the importance of robust defence industrial collaboration and worked specifically on the issue of cyber-security in a joint cyber statement. The aim is to deepen co-operation across cyber-governance, deterrence and strengthening cyber-resilience. The open general export licence will also reduce bureaucracy and shorten delivery times for defence procurements. This is the first time we have signed such a deal with any country in the Indo-Pacific.
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
Mr Modi has the right to set India’s own foreign policy, of course, but did the Prime Minister specifically raise India’s continuing trade with Russia and Mr Modi’s decision to abstain on the UN motion condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Vicky Ford
It is right that every country in the world has the right to make its own decisions. The UK should not go finger-pointing at our friends and partners every time we decide to do something different from them. I know the two Prime Ministers discussed the situation in Ukraine. This is a time when it is really important that democracies stand together and deepen the way they work together to prevent aggression and to strengthen global security. That is why the two Prime Ministers released a statement immediately after their meeting in which they both unequivocally condemned the civilian deaths that have been happening in Ukraine and reiterated the need for an immediate ending of hostilities.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
A trade deal with India is incredibly important. It is extraordinary that the Prime Minister has not come here to make a statement and that the Government have had to be dragged here by an urgent question titled “Prime Minister’s Visit to India”. We want to raise issues with the Prime Minister about human rights, religious tolerance, the impact on jobs both here and in India, women in particular and peace across the world, particularly in the light of India’s failure to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That shows that we have a Prime Minister who is not capable of doing his job. He is avoiding scrutiny in this House because of the troubles he has created for himself. It is an absolute disgrace. What does the Minister think that having her, who was not even on the delegation, at the Dispatch Box answering for the Prime Minister says to the Indian Government?
Vicky Ford
It is really important that the Prime Minister of our country goes to visit other major Prime Ministers and to make deals that are good for our security, our defence and jobs in this country. Our Prime Minister answers questions from MPs in this House every week on Wednesday, and they will get to question him tomorrow.
Mr Speaker
Subject to being on the Order Paper and being taken, I must admit, because otherwise everybody will think they have an entitlement.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
While the Prime Minister was away in India, the London School of Economics published research showing that our trading relationships with the EU have plummeted by one third since the Prime Minister signed that trade deal and it came into effect. Will the Minister tell the Prime Minister when she sees him after this UQ that no free trade deal he could ever achieve with India will replace the damage done to Britain’s international trade by Brexit?
Vicky Ford
I know the Prime Minister keeps a close eye on trade and economic numbers and on the prosperity of this country at a very difficult time for world prosperity.
Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)
The Prime Minister began his trip to India with a visit to a JCB factory, just one day after the company was embroiled in controversy after its bulldozers were used to illegally demolish Muslim homes and businesses in Delhi, and following widespread anti-Muslim violence in India, which is widely seen as being whipped up by Modi and the ruling BJP. I ask the Minister again, since she has failed to answer the question: did the Prime Minister challenge Modi on the BJP’s role in anti-Muslim violence in India, or did he again disregard human rights abuses? Does the Minister acknowledge that the visit to the JCB factory was a mistake?
Vicky Ford
We condemn any instance of discrimination because of religion or belief. I will say it again and again: protecting freedom of religion or belief is one of the top human rights priorities for this country. Where we have concerns, we raise them, including at ministerial level.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
If I heard the Minister correctly earlier, she said that we do not pursue trade agreements to the exclusion of human rights. In the Prime Minister’s attempt to escape the consequences and publicity surrounding breaking his own laws by very quickly announcing this trade agreement, can the Minister confirm whether he raised any red lines on human rights at all that would stop this deal’s proceeding?
Vicky Ford
We regard both trade and human rights as important parts of a deep, mature and wide-ranging relationship with our partners. India is one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in the world, and it is absolutely right that we work with it as a partner, both raising issues of concern and trying to increase economic ties to the benefit of all our constituents and the people of India.
Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)
I am going to try again, since the Minister did not answer my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) when she asked. We know that during the Prime Minister’s visit he was photographed leaning out of a digger in a JCB factory. Just days before, the BJP had used JCB diggers to bulldoze Muslim shops and homes and the gate of a mosque in New Delhi. Local governments in a number of other Indian states have carried out similar demolitions. I ask again: did the Prime Minister raise that with Modi? If not, why not? Does the Minister accept that the Prime Minister’s visit to India has helped to legitimise the actions of Modi’s far-right Government?
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
When the Prime Minister raised the case of Jagtar Singh Johal, did he do so on the basis that for the past four years Mr Johal has been the victim of arbitrary detention?
Vicky Ford
I know that the Prime Minister raised his case, I know that he handed over a note on consular cases, and I know that the Foreign Secretary has agreed to meet with the hon. Member who represents Mr Johal’s constituency and with Mr Johal’s brother and wife. We deplore and condemn the use of arbitrary detention in all circumstances.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
We should be concerned about human rights abuses of religious minorities across India. We should be concerned about the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian Government. We should be concerned about the military lockdown in Jammu and Kashmir and the resulting human rights issues. I really do wish the Prime Minister was here to answer. The Minister said earlier that we do not pursue trade at the cost of human rights. If that is correct, what clauses to protect human rights do the Government intend to put into any trade deal with India?
Vicky Ford
As regards Kashmir, any allegation of human rights violation or abuse is deeply concerning and needs to be investigated thoroughly and transparently. We have raised our concerns about Kashmir with the Governments of both India and Pakistan. We are very clear on the importance of rights being respected. We continue to call for all remaining restrictions imposed since the constitutional changes in August 2019 to be lifted as soon as possible and for any remaining political detainees to be released. It is for India and Kashmir to find a long-lasting political resolution on Kashmir, but that also needs to take into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
My constituent Syed has been in touch regarding persecution of Muslims in India. Because the Minister has not answered anybody else’s question on this issue, let me specifically ask her: what did the Prime Minister say to Prime Minister Modi about the persecution of Muslims and those of other faiths in India?
Vicky Ford
As I have said again and again, we engage with India on a range of human rights matters, working with the union and state governments, and where we have concerns we raise them directly with the Government of India, including at ministerial level.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
It is incredibly important that we increase co-operation, ties and trade with allies across the globe, including India, but it is extremely discourteous that the Prime Minister could not even update the House about his visit, as is convention. Why could he not be bothered to raise at the highest level the much publicised issues of human rights of minorities and the detention of British citizens, and why did he not convince his Indian counterpart to show support and solidarity with the people of Ukraine, as is our collective effort?
Vicky Ford
The Prime Minister was on a mission looking at increasing trade between our countries, increasing security and defence at a time of global interest in security and defence, and addressing the issues of climate change and making sure that we help India to deliver on the important promises that it made at COP. I have already told the House that we raise issues of human rights in India at ministerial level, and that we raise consular cases. I think that the hon. Gentleman should welcome that. On Ukraine, I point again to the joint statement that the two Prime Ministers made immediately after their meeting.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Through the European Scrutiny Committee, on which I served for a number of years, when the United Kingdom was a member of the European Union, this House had sight of every trade deal before it was signed. Every trade deal the UK entered into as a member of the EU was subject to the consent of this House. Given that Brexit was about taking back control to this Parliament, can we assume that the Minister will commit that any trade deal with India will be brought back to this House for consideration before it is signed?
Vicky Ford
I can confirm that information on the shape and scope of the free trade agreement will be made available at an appropriate time as negotiations progress.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I start by wishing all my constituents in Warwick and Leamington a happy Vaisakhi. The trade deal would have been an extremely important matter for the Prime Minister to take questions on, particularly as it relates to my constituency, where Tata is very much represented; it is a major part of our regional, if not the UK, economy. The much-respected Jonathan Powell said that at all meetings, it was normal for a Prime Minister to be attended, on a one-plus-one basis, by the opposing Prime Minister or President. Will the Minister confirm that that happened on this trip? Will she also specify whether the Prime Minister raised the issue of joint sanctions, or of India reducing its dependency on Russian energy?
Vicky Ford
The entire point of this trip was to increase co-operation between the UK and India, to increase trade deals between ourselves, and to make sure that India can become more self-reliant. On energy, as I have updated the House, we made progress in a number of areas on the move towards clean energy. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, moving towards the use of more renewables and clean energy is a key part of our domestic strategy to help reduce reliance on fossil fuels. As regards one-on-one meetings with leaders, a number of times, on recent visits to countries, I have met one on one, as opposed to one plus and one plus, as occasionally people may want to discuss things directly. I cannot confirm who was in the room, but I am sure the hon. Gentleman can ask the Prime Minister tomorrow.
Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) on bringing forward this urgent question. I have respect for the Minister, but it is a matter of fact, at this late stage, that she has been unable to answer many of the questions asked. I do not criticise her for that; I criticise the Prime Minister for putting her in this position and for the discourtesy shown to the House. I will ask an easy one: can she tell us, for the record, about the Government’s best-case scenario of a boost to UK-India trade from this agreement, and does it come anywhere near to touching the sides of the proven—as calculated by the London School of Economics and published this morning—decline of 25% in UK exports to the EU relative to the rest of the world?
Vicky Ford
As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, when it comes to trade deals, we need to look at what is negotiated in the final partnership to see which sectors will benefit most, and it is important to have a trade deal that benefits both partners. We believe that this could significantly increase, and indeed supercharge, the trade between our two countries, which already totals over £23 billion. There are various sectors in which there are significant barriers. I mentioned that Scotch whisky has a tariff of over 100%, and cars do as well. I am sure that as these negotiations progress, further analysis will be looked at.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
This too might be a tough question for the Minister to answer, but has the Prime Minister insisted on specialists in human rights and environmental matters being included on trade delegations to India during the ongoing free trade negotiations?
Vicky Ford
As I have said, we are just at the start of talks. The final deal would need to be mutually beneficial and acceptable to both countries. I am sure that the hon. Lady can ask questions about who takes part in which delegations in International Trade questions.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
Let me return once again to defence. At the G7 last year, considerable mention was made of the new D-10 grouping, which includes India and is against the autocracies of the world. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has the Prime Minister taken the D-10 forward, because it could be extremely useful to this country in terms of our future stance, and if not, could the Minister encourage him to do so?
Vicky Ford
I have heard the hon. Member’s comments. More widely, it is absolutely key that we continue to work with democracies to counter aggressors and strengthen global security. India is one of those countries that it is really important to work with at this time.
Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
The Prime Minister secured no new commitments on human rights and no immediate concessions on Scottish whisky, and did not change the Indian Government’s stance on the war in Ukraine. Is it not safe to say that the only thing he succeeded in last week was getting 4,000 miles away from his Back-Benchers?
Vicky Ford
During the meeting, UK and Indian businesses confirmed more than £1 billion in new investments and export deals, creating more than 11,000 jobs in the United Kingdom. I suggest that the hon. Member talks to one of the individuals taking up one of those jobs and tells them that there was no worth in this visit.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)
During talks with Prime Minister Modi, did the Prime Minister discuss India’s relationship with China and how pressure from China could slow or hinder trade deals?
Vicky Ford
I have given a great deal of detail on what was discussed about trade and security; security in defence, including cyber-security; and climate change. I cannot go into further detail at this time.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Minister for the details of the visit to India. There is a strong and growing evidential base showing high levels of persecution of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Kashmiris and other ethnic and religious groups. Can the Minister say what talks about persecution and human rights abuses took place? Are the Indian Government committed to allowing the freedom of expression that we have in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
Vicky Ford
I know that my hon. Friend was born in Omagh, as I was. It is a part of our country where differences in religious views have led to violence. I know that he cares about that as passionately as I do. We engage with India on a wide range of human rights matters, including issues relating to freedom of religion and belief, and we will continue to do so. We are working with non-governmental organisations to build capacity and promote human rights, and where we have concerns, we raise them with the Government of India, including at ministerial level, because friends should be able to have difficult conversations when there are differences of opinion, and should stand up for those whose human rights are threatened.
Point of Order
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have a constituent whose father-in-law has been detained in a country where there are known human rights abuses. My constituent’s father-in-law is a British citizen with no family history in, or previous ties to, the country where he is being held. He faces imminent trial on a charge that carries the death penalty, and he is due to appear in court this week. I have been told by my constituent that his father-in-law’s lawyer believes that intervention from the British Government will make a difference in his case.
I contacted the private office of the Minister for Asia and the Middle East before the Easter weekend, stressing the urgency of my constituent’s case and requesting that she meet me. It is unacceptable that in this most urgent case, my office did not receive so much as a holding response from the Minister’s private office until yesterday afternoon. Mr Speaker, can you advise me on how to draw the Government’s attention to this incredibly serious and timely issue?
Mr Speaker
I thank the hon. Member for giving notice of her point of order. I expect Ministers to respond in a timely way when a matter is urgent, as in this case. The Member has put her point on the record, and it will have been heard by those on the Government Benches. I am sure that Ministers will now engage with the issue, and I hope it can be speedily resolved. Especially in the case of a crisis such as this, we need Ministers to react more quickly. We certainly need to get Departments to act, too.
I put on record that it is unhelpful when we write to Departments and they do not answer letters in a timely way. It is also unhelpful when, having been contacted by constituents—for example on the matter of Ukraine—Departments say, “Do not ring us directly. You need to get on to your MP,” and then the MP gets a holding letter that says, “Do not contact us. We are trying to deal with this quickly.” We need a joined-up Government that supports Members of Parliament. Come on—let us all work together.
Bill Presented
Ministers (Tax Residency Status and Trusts) Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Christine Jardine presented a Bill to require Ministers of the Crown to disclose their tax residency status and that of members of their household, and to disclose whether they and members of their household are beneficiaries of trusts held abroad; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 6 May, and to be printed (Bill 306).
Whistleblowing
Tuesday 26th April 2022
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Whistleblowing Bill 2021-22 View all Whistleblowing Bill 2021-22 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
A Ten Minute Rule Bill is a First Reading of a Private Members Bill, but with the sponsor permitted to make a ten minute speech outlining the reasons for the proposed legislation.
There is little chance of the Bill proceeding further unless there is unanimous consent for the Bill or the Government elects to support the Bill directly.
For more information see: Ten Minute Bills
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to establish an independent Office of the Whistleblower to protect whistleblowers and whistleblowing in accordance with the public interest; to make provision for the Office of the Whistleblower to set, monitor and enforce standards for the management of whistleblowing cases, to provide disclosure and advice services, to direct whistleblowing investigations and to order redress of detriment suffered by whistleblowers; to create offences relating to the treatment of whistleblowers and the handling of whistleblowing cases; to repeal the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998; and for connected purposes.
Mr Speaker, if you name an industry, I can name you a scandal brought to light by whistleblowers—whistleblowers who were stifled, ignored or gaslit before they were listened to. For every one listened to, there are more would-be whistleblowers who remain silent or who were silenced.
As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for whistleblowing, I have met countless brave individuals who have dared to speak out. Many have suffered emotional damage from the treatment they have experienced. Many have faced threats to their livelihoods and suffered consequences at work—retaliation, harassment, unfair dismissal and blacklisting. Many are forced to drop their claims due to the cost of litigation, the inequality of arms and the toll taken on their families and mental health. Meanwhile, the wrongdoing they highlighted is swept under the carpet, and they become the victim.
Through whistleblowers’ bravery and willingness to speak out, we have been made aware of countless scandals of corruption, negligence and mismanagement that have cost the Government or businesses billions of pounds, and that, tragically, have often directly or indirectly cost lives. Whistleblowers are universally acknowledged as the cornerstone of fair and transparent societies; the purpose of any whistleblowing law should be to protect the whistleblower and the public interest by ensuring freedom from retaliation, and ensuring that allegations are properly addressed and fully acted on. That is what the public and those who speak up expect, but it is not the reality.
Surprisingly, whistleblowing does not have a formal legal definition in the UK, although it is generally understood to be the exposure of criminal or ethical wrongdoing. However, it is universally recognised as the single most cost-efficient and effective means of intercepting crimes and exposing cover-ups.
Why are we arguing for change? By way of background, the UK became the first EU country to introduce whistleblowing legislation with the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. The law was heralded as a watershed moment and expectations were high. Whistleblowing was now legitimate; there were protections for workers in employment tribunals and an expectation that wrongdoing would be addressed. However, according to the whistleblowing charity Protect, just 4% of employment cases are successful, and PIDA, our world-leading legislation, is now seen as a discredited and distrusted law that has failed to protect whistleblowers or the public against wrongdoing and harm. Where we once led the way, we now lag behind.
In fact, last year, the International Bar Association examined countries with whistleblowing legislation against a list of 20 best practices. The UK met just five of the 20. Meanwhile, the EU whistleblowing directive was passed, which sets minimum standards of protection. Although only eight of the 27 members have currently adopted it, it meets 16 of the best practice criteria. Europe has overtaken the UK. A 75% failure rate against international best standards underlines the need for change.
The reality is that our current legislation is not working. If it were, we would not have repeated scandals such as Rotherham and Rochdale where vulnerable children were abused and groomed over many years. Reports to police were made and concerns were raised by those working closely with the young victims, but instead of investigating those concerns, the police investigated the whistleblowers, so it is no surprise that whistleblowing is seen as a risky option.
The risk of failing to blow the whistle, however, can be devastating. Nowhere is that more evident than in healthcare settings where it is especially vital that there is a culture where it is safe to speak up. Worryingly, a National Guardian’s Office survey reported a decline in speaking up culture in the NHS. That was echoed by the NHS staff survey, which also showed a drop in the number of staff who feel safe to speak up about concerns within the organisation.
We know that a positive culture of speaking up is good for patient safety and staff wellbeing. The maternity scandals at Morecambe Bay and Shrewsbury and Telford demonstrate the tragic consequences when staff are scared to speak up or are ignored. It is simply unacceptable that any whistleblower should describe a climate of fear where staff felt unable to report what they saw and experienced.
Whistleblowers are as relevant to the business world as to healthcare. Economic crime and fraud are significant drains on the private and public sector. The National Crime Agency reports that the cost of fraud to the UK economy is £190 billion per year. To put that in perspective, in the year to 2022, planned spending for the Department of Health and Social Care in England was £190 billion. I know where I would rather that money go. It is in the Government’s and society’s interest to prevent the haemorrhaging of money to criminals and to bring it back to communities.
Developing an open culture that encourages speaking up in every aspect of life will benefit us all. Changes to how we handle whistleblowing will save money. Whistleblowers are the informed insiders who see and report negligence and in doing so prevent the harm that often leads to litigation. The office of the whistleblower will be the champion of whistleblowers. It would be responsible for setting, monitoring and enforcing standards for the management of whistleblowing cases. It would also provide advice services and a clear avenue for disclosures. In addition, it would direct investigations and handle redress for whistleblowers.
Despite the strong direction from Ministers, WhistleblowersUK reports that it has seen evidence of the continued use of confidentiality clauses to shut down whistleblowing. It is unacceptable that whistleblowers are silenced and coerced into signing non-disclosure agreements. The office of the whistleblower will put an end to that practice and be the one place for all whistleblowers. It will be one central place where any would-be whistleblower could come for advice and one central place to support regulators and organisations and to ensure that standards are made and maintained.
That is why the Bill is needed: we need a cultural shift where whistleblowers are welcomed and encouraged, not dismissed and penalised. People should be able to speak up and know what options are available to them. They should be compensated for detriment and recognised for their bravery. Whistleblowing benefits everyone.
The Whistleblowing Bill will set up an independent office of the whistleblower to make whistleblowing work properly and safely for everyone. It will champion whistleblowers and whistleblowing. It will be a central point where the would-be whistleblower could come for information and support. It will have support and advice services for regulators, organisations and the public. It will set standards and report back to the Government. It will ensure that those who inflict or suffer detriment will be properly compensated or properly held to account. It will have real teeth with the ability to issue redress orders, fines and penalties. For the worst offenders, there will be prison sentences.
The Bill will make whistleblowing work by ensuring that concerns are investigated and acted on. It will transform our culture, normalise speaking up and put an end to the discrimination against whistleblowers.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Mary Robinson, Lucy Allan, Dr Lisa Cameron, Chris Clarkson, Philip Davies, Chris Green, James Grundy, Dame Margaret Hodge, Kevin Hollinrake, Dame Andrea Leadsom, Mrs Maria Miller and John Penrose present the Bill.
Mary Robinson accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 6 May, and to be printed (Bill 307).
Judicial Review and Courts Bill (Programme) (No. 3)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),
That the following provisions shall apply to the Judicial Review and Courts Bill for the purpose of supplementing the Order of 26 October 2021 (Judicial Review and Courts Bill (Programme)), as varied by the Order of 25 January 2022 (Judicial Review and Courts Bill (Programme) (No. 2)):
Consideration of Lords Amendments
(1) Proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement.
(2) The proceedings shall be taken in the following order: Lords Amendments 1 to 3, 5, 11, 4, 6 to 10, and 12 to 22.
Subsequent stages
(3) Any further Message from the Lords may be considered forthwith without any Question being put.
(4) The proceedings on any further Message from the Lords shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement.—(David T. C. Davies.)
Question agreed to.
Judicial Review and Courts Bill
Tuesday 26th April 2022
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 View all Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Commons Consideration of Lords Amendments as at 26 April 2022 - (26 Apr 2022)
14:30 - The House divided: - Ayes: 297 / Noes: 56 - Question accordingly agreed to.
14:46 - The House divided: - Ayes: 297 / Noes: 61 - Question accordingly agreed to.
14:58 - The House divided: - Ayes: 299 / Noes: 168 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I must draw the House’s attention to the fact that financial privilege is engaged by Lords amendment 11. If it is agreed to, I will cause the customary entry waiving Commons financial privilege to be entered in the Journal. Before I call the Minister, I ask hon. Members to indicate whether they want to contribute to the debate, because not many have put in.
Clause 1
Quashing orders
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (James Cartlidge)
I beg to move, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.
Madam Deputy Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Lords amendment 2, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 3, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 5, Government motion to disagree, and Government amendment (a) to the words so restored to the Bill.
Lords amendment 11, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 4, 6 to 10 and 12 to 22.
James Cartlidge
I begin by discussing some of the key changes made to the Bill in the other place as a result of amendments brought forward by the Government and I will then turn to the other Lords amendments. Since we last debated the Bill, further measures have been added by the Government with unanimous support from the other place.
First, Lords amendment 7 seeks to give greater flexibility to the online procedure rule committee when it comes to establishing standards relating to dispute resolution conducted online before court proceedings are initiated. It will enable parties who tried to resolve their dispute online prior to commencing legal proceedings, but who do not resolve some or all of their dispute, to then transfer into the legal process seamlessly.
Secondly, Lords amendment 10 will allow coroners to provide registrars with additional information to help to ensure that deaths do not go unregistered. It will address an anomaly whereby, in a small number of cases, families do not register a death when coroners authorise the disposal of a body before any formal death registration has been completed.
Finally, Lords amendment 12 will allow pro bono cost orders to be made in tribunals in much the same way as they are already available in the civil and family courts. It captures the majority of tribunals in which cost orders might be made, but it also creates a power for the Lord Chancellor to bring additional tribunals within the scope of the power through secondary legislation. I urge hon. Members to support those amendments.
A series of minor and technical amendments were also made to the Bill by the Government. I do not intend to go through them in detail, but if any hon. Member has a question about them, I will endeavour to address it in my response to the debate. [Interruption.] I shall expect a flood!
I now turn to the amendments that the Government did not bring forward in the other place. Lords amendment 4 removed the presumption, which provided that a court would have to use the new quashing order powers if they offered adequate redress and there was no good reason not to do so. Lords amendments 1 to 3 remove prospective quashing orders from the Bill.
The courts have several duties with regards to judicial review. They have a duty to individuals who may have been adversely affected by a decision or action, a duty to Parliament to review whether a decision was taken in accordance with the process and procedures set down by the law, and a duty to respect their own limitations and not review the merit of a policy decision or artificially constrain a decision maker’s discretion. They also have wider duties to justice, fairness and the public interest. On many occasions, these duties align and the best outcome for a case is clear, but on other occasions these duties can conflict with the result that the nuance of the circumstances can be lost in the bluntness of the remedy.
The new powers brought forward in this Bill, as introduced, would allow the courts to respond flexibly. As such, I was disappointed that the other place voted, albeit narrowly, to remove the power for quashing orders to be made with limited or no retrospective effect, and I do not need to speak hypothetically. In Canada, another common law country, prospective remedies have been used for some decades to good effect. They have been used, for example, to help vulnerable people maintain important workplace protections that would have ceased to exist had a quashing order applied retrospectively.
Turning to the presumption, I can be brief. The Government do not accept the argument that the presumption fetters discretion or is in some way dangerous. Its purpose is to precipitate the rapid accumulation of jurisprudence on the use of these new powers. In furthering that purpose, however, we have heard persuasive arguments that it is in fact unnecessary. I am reassured, particularly by the learned former members of the judiciary who contributed to the debates in the other place, that judges will use these powers and consider their use regularly without the need for the presumption. Consistency and predictability for their use are further fostered by the list of factors in clause 1(8). I can therefore confirm that the Government will not be bringing back the presumption.
Lords amendment 5 replaced the ouster clause used to remove so-called Cart judicial reviews with a measure that would only prevent such challenges reaching the Court of Appeal, preserving the route of challenge from the upper tribunal to the High Court. I am very grateful to the other place for bringing forward this suggestion, and while I appreciate the sentiment behind such a compromise position, the Government cannot accept this as a meaningful solution to the problems we have set out. While it would tackle some of the resource question, it does nothing to reduce the burden on the High Court or upper tribunal—approximately 180 judge sitting days per year—which is where the burden mainly falls. It also does not tackle the current anomaly of a further challenge to a permission to appeal decision after that application has been rejected by both a lower and a senior court—what has come to be called in this debate, “three bites at the cherry”. The Government propose to bring back the original ouster clause, along with a technical amendment on the Northern Ireland carve-out, to ensure its terminology is consistent with other provisions.
Finally, Lords amendment 11 seeks to provide legal aid for representation for bereaved people at all inquests where public bodies—for example, the police or an NHS trust—are legally represented. While the Government are sympathetic to the intentions of those in the other place, I am afraid I do have concerns about this amendment. As drafted, this amendment would make access to legal aid in these circumstances automatic, removing the means and merits tests, and leading to significant and open-ended costs to the taxpayer. This would go against the principle of targeting legal aid at those who need it most by allowing funding for those who could comfortably afford the cost themselves.
I am very grateful to the hon. Members for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) and for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) for meeting me several times to discuss this issue, including with colleagues in the other place. I have assured them that the Government are continuing to make changes to help ensure that bereaved families are truly placed at the heart of the inquest process. Aside from our recent removal of the means test for successful applications for representation through the exceptional case funding scheme, we are also proposing to remove the means test for legal help in relation to any inquests where there is a potential human rights breach or significant wider public interest as part of the means test review that is currently out for consultation. These changes will genuinely help them navigate the inquest process, where appropriate, and I urge hon. Members to await the outcome of this consultation before pursuing further legislation on this issue.
I am grateful to the Members of this House for all their scrutiny of the Bill so far, and I hope today we can accept the changes proposed by the Government on the amendment paper. Even if there remain some small disagreements between us, I am sure all hon. Members here today would like to see this Bill reach Royal Assent, particularly as it contains a number of important court recovery measures. I therefore urge hon. Members to accept the compromises the Government have made, and allow the Bill to finish its passage through both Houses as quickly as possible.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I thank those who have worked to improve this Bill during its progress through both Houses. Without embarrassing him, I would single out my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), who volunteered to lead on the courts part of this Bill—that is, most of it—before he had even finished with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. I would also mention the efforts of our colleagues in the other place, particularly my noble Friends Lord Ponsonby and Baroness Chapman and senior Cross Benchers, who are a large part of the reason why we are discussing successful Lords amendments today—all credit to them.
In the spirit of consensus that has been a feature of much of our proceedings, I thank the Minister and his team for at least listening and entertaining our views, even if we did not in the end see eye to eye, and for their significant concession in removing the presumption from clause 1. Since the Bill was first introduced, I have also been lucky enough to work with many individuals and organisations with particular expertise on the issues covered. I would like to put on record my thanks to the Public Law Project, Inquest, Justice, Liberty, the Bingham Centre, the Law Society and the Bar Council, but that list is not exhaustive.
The majority of amendments before the House today—Lords amendments 6 to 10 and 12 to 22—are Government amendments that amend part 2 of the Bill. For the avoidance of doubt, we do not oppose these. We had issues with part 2 of the Bill, but these were mainly procedural and are, I hope, open to correction in the light of experience. Our objections to part 1 are more fundamental, and we are grateful to the other place for highlighting these in Lords amendments 1 to 5. I will deal with these and then come on separately to Lords amendment 11.
First, by way of a little context, we see no purpose whatsoever in clauses 1 and 2 of this Bill, and it would be our preference to remove these clauses from the Bill entirely. Our attempts to do so in Committee were not successful, but our principal objections were reflected in the Lords amendments. Lords amendments 1 to 3, in the name of the noble Lord Marks, remove prospective-only quashing orders from the Bill.
One of the ways that the Government wish to change—they say improve—judicial review is to introduce a remedy that only rights a wrong for the future, without looking to compensate the complainant or those who have come before them. This has rightly been described as having a chilling effect on meritorious applications. It was not recommended by the independent review of administrative law that was supposed to found the basis of part 1 of the Bill. It does not, as the Government somewhat disingenuously claim, add to the armoury of the administrative court; it simply seeks to restrain its powers. That fact is given away by the clunking fist of the presumption in favour of prospective orders and of suspended orders, which clause 1 also sought to introduce. In a step bordering on the disrespectful, the Minister sought to tie the hands of the court in applying its discretionary powers, so I am delighted the Government have seen the light and do not today oppose Lords amendment 4, in the name of Lord Anderson. That extracts the worst of the sting in clause 1.
Lords amendment 5, in the name of Lord Etherton, was a pragmatic attempt to make sense of the Government’s proposal to abolish Cart judicial reviews in clause 2 of the Bill. It met both the Government’s complaint that these were too profligate and the real concerns of practitioners and others that errors of law would lead to human tragedies. It would also have mitigated the concerns about unnecessary and unwelcome employment of an ouster clause. Cart judicial review, as Members here know, is engaged when the High Court reviews a decision of the upper tribunal to refuse permission to appeal a decision of the first-tier tribunal.
Clause 2 abolishes this type of judicial review altogether, yet most cases that satisfy the threshold for Cart are compelling. In many examples, as we discussed in Committee, these are asylum or human rights cases—issues of mental health, special educational needs or entitlement to basic incomes and support needs—which have serious consequences for the claimants if errors of law have been made and are sometimes matters of life and death. Lords amendment 5 narrows the ambit of Cart so that in the majority of cases there is no onward right of appeal. The only exception would be where the case raises a point of law of general public importance. In that situation, the claimant could apply to have the case considered by the Supreme Court.
The amendment represents a compromise between the Government’s desire to save the cost of Cart judicial reviews and the need to preserve an essential judicial check against serious errors of law. All that has been argued in the other place, and votes won—albeit narrowly—on amendments 1 and 5. In discussions, the Government have conceded on the presumption. We accept that that is a significant concession, and we do not intend to press any votes on the Lords amendments clauses 1 and 2 today.
Let me turn to Lords amendment 11. Eleven days ago, on 15 April, we marked the 33rd anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, where 97 people lost their lives at a football game. For 33 years the families of those who were lost have fought, and continue to fight, for justice. They faced cover-ups and fundamental failures of our legal system, which only prolonged their suffering. Many campaigners—prominent among them the Mayors of Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region, former colleagues of ours in this place—are asking for a comprehensive Hillsborough law, which we support. Lords amendment 11 addresses an important plank of the Hillsborough law, but it goes beyond that by providing equality of arms for all bereaved families at inquests and inquiries.
The amendment would require the Government to provide public funding for bereaved families where the state is represented. It is remarkable that, even with the cuts in legal aid that we have seen over the past 10 years, current rules do not provide that. This is an issue not just of access to justice, but of basic fairness. How can it be that state bodies have unlimited access to public funding for the best legal teams and experts, while families are often forced to pay large sums towards legal costs, or risk representing themselves or resorting to crowdfunding?
Five years have passed since Bishop James Jones delivered his report on the experience of the Hillsborough families. In that report, Bishop Jones made 25 recommendations, which included publicly funded legal representation for bereaved families. In May 2021, the Justice Committee recommended that for all inquests where public authorities are legally represented, non-means-tested legal aid or other public funding for legal representation should be available for people who have been bereaved. The inquiry by the all-party group on legal aid last year reached a similar view, and many voices are saying the same thing: it is time to level the playing field when state actors are represented in inquests.
The Government have acknowledged that there is more to do on this issue. They are minded to offer non-means-tested legal aid for early advice and representation where exceptional case funding is engaged. With respect, that is not enough. It would not help—to give only some examples—in the situations of families of those who suffer healthcare-related deaths in detention, self-inflicted deaths of voluntary patients in mental health settings, those under the direct care of a mental health trusts in the community, deaths in supported accommodation, or care settings where the person has been placed by a public body or local authority. It would not have helped Coco Rose Bradford, a six-year-old girl with autism who was taken to hospital in Cornwall and died unexpectedly on 31 July 2017. In January 2022, the inquest into her death concluded, finding it to be due to natural causes—something Coco’s family disputes. Coco’s mother, Rachel Bradford, told the inquest how she watched her daughter die in front of her, and how the hospital dismissed the family’s concerns, even though Coco was in glaringly obvious pain. Rachel gave evidence that Coco’s autism played a role in how she was treated by medical staff, and that the professionals wrongly viewed her as being unco-operative and non-compliant.
Members of the local community donated to contribute towards the family’s legal costs for the inquest. Coco’s mother said in a personal statement:
“Without our barrister offering to act pro bono at the inquest hearing we’re not sure what would have happened. It seems desperately unfair that we have had to crowdfund to cover our legal fees, and rely on our barrister waiving her charges, when the hospital’s legal team are paid for by our taxes.”
Cases such as those are daily injustices in our coroners courts. We can no longer ignore the voice of Bishop Jones or Rachel Bradford. I urge members of this House to retain Lords amendment 11 because it is the right thing to do. If the Bill passes without the inclusion of Lords amendment 11, we will miss another opportunity to ensure that fairness is at the heart of our legal system.
From the day this Bill was introduced, we have puzzled about why the Government were wasting time interfering with judicial processes that are designed to improve the quality of executive decisions, rather than tackling the record backlog of cases in our courts and protect the victims of crime. By supporting Lords amendment 11 the Government could make a small but significant step to improve the court system and the experience of bereaved families.
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the Front-Bench speakers in this short but important debate. I welcome the Government’s stance on presumption and their acceptance of the amendment made in the Lords. It is worth remembering that Lord Faulks, who chaired the independent review that gave rise to all these proposals, took the view that no harm was done by removing that presumption, and that thereafter the discretionary power to have a prospective-only order that can be considered by the courts if it meets the interests of justice was, as I think he put it, an extra club in the bag of the judiciary. That is the whole point of it: it extends the remedial powers available. At the end of the day the presumption was not perhaps necessary, and the Government have taken a sensible and pragmatic stance on that. The principle of having that extra flexibility in the remedy is not objectionable, and I am glad the Opposition have not opposed it.
Some of the other changes made by the Government in the Lords are welcome. The ability to make payment for pro bono representation in a number of cases is welcome, and I am glad the Government have moved in that direction. Practitioners and the judiciary alike will welcome the changes to make online procedure rules easier and swifter to deal with, so those are practical changes.
Two issues then remain, including Cart appeals and litigation. I must respectfully differ with the shadow Minister and their lordships on that, and it is perhaps worth quoting what Lord Faulks said about it in the other place—after all, he examined this issue with probably more care than anyone. His stance was that the independent review into administrative law
“came to the firm conclusion that Cart ought to go. It did so carefully considering the fact that Parliament should be slow before reversing decisions of the Supreme Court.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 31 March 2022; Vol. 820, c. 1736.]
That was its view, having carefully considered the evidence, in adopting a cautious approach to such a change.
Cart was controversial at the time, and it remains controversial. Lord Carnwath, who has given evidence to the Justice Committee in the past, raised questions about the Cart appeal, with his specialist knowledge of the genesis of the upper tribunal. The general view of many is that, to quote a phrase used by Lord Hope in Committee, it was a “legal misstep”. There are, of course, a tiny number of successful cases, but those should be set against the very real burden that falls not on the Court of Appeal, where Lord Etherton— for whom I have great respect—served, but on the justice sitting in the Queen’s bench division. That is where the judicial pressure is, and we should look to remove something that many practitioners, and in private many members of the judiciary, regard as an unhelpful burden on them.
In immigration cases in particular, convention rights will be engaged, but they will have been engaged from the outset. By the time we get to the Cart appeal, they will have been argued and considered by the first-tier tribunal and by the upper tribunal which, as Lord Carnwath pointed out, was designed to be a superior court, and to have in effect the judicial weight and equivalence of the High Court. An anomaly arises from the Cart decision, and it is right and proportionate to remove it.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the SNP spokesperson, Anne McLaughlin.
Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)
I will speak briefly about the parts that apply to Scotland, which are significant and potentially extremely damaging to people’s rights to access justice. Because Scotland is currently compelled to do as we are told as part of this Union—we do not have the normal powers of a normal independent country—even our own democratically elected Government can do nothing about that damage. If that is not an argument for voting yes in the 2023 independence referendum, I do not know what is.
It is also interesting that, on this Bill, as with the Nationality and Borders Bill and the policing Bill, it has been left to the House of Lords—the unelected House—to represent the views of the people and attempt to get rid of the most egregious parts of each horrible piece of legislation. As a big fan of democracy, that does not make me any more inclined to support an unelected Chamber, but I want to pay tribute to those Members who have worked so hard, often into the early hours of the morning, on all of the amendments to try to make an awful Bill a tiny bit more palatable.
Lords amendment 1 removes the power to include provision and quashing orders, removing or limiting their retrospective effect. Those on the Opposition Benches, and in particular those of us who were on the Bill Committee, tried hard to get the Government to understand that if quashing orders are not to be applied retrospectively, there will be a very chilling effect. Many of us talked about the landmark case of Employment Tribunal fees that Unison brought to the Supreme Court in 2017, where the Court found that Parliament was wrong to limit people’s access to justice by charging them to use the Employment Tribunal. It found in favour of the claimants, and the quashing order had immediate effect, so the fees were abolished immediately and the Government were required to refund anyone who had paid them in the past. Given that people were being charged up to £1,200, that was a great outcome that will have made a big difference to many.
However, if the Government get their way and Lords amendment 1 is not agreed to, should something similar happen in the future, anyone who had paid such fees would be unable to claim their money back. Who would put themselves through all that for no tangible outcome? There will be zero incentive to challenge the Government or other public bodies, so those public bodies and the Government will be able to proceed safe in the knowledge that they can do whatever they like. The Scottish National party therefore absolutely supports the very sensible Lords amendments 1, 2 and 3.
At last, the Government have seen sense and agreed to Lords amendment 4. There was something sinister about the Minister wanting the power to tell the judiciary how to do their jobs. Judges have a suite of remedies at their disposal, and they should decide which are the most appropriate, so I am relieved that they finally agreed to that amendment.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
I wonder whether the hon. Lady is making an argument that contradicts her previous one. On the one hand, she said that she does not want retrospective quashing orders to be available to a judge to make a decision on, and the other hand, she argued that judges should be trusted to make their own decisions. Surely judges can be trusted to make decisions on whether a retrospective quashing order is or is not appropriate in an individual case.
Anne McLaughlin
We have had this discussion so many times before. The hon. Member needs to go and look up the meaning of the word “presumption”.
Lords amendment 5 is about Cart judicial review—in Scotland, it is Eba judicial review. The amendment would insert a new clause to enable appeals of an upper tribunal decision to refuse an appeal to the High Court and then to the Supreme Court if considering a point of law or if it is in the public interest. It is a compromise, and surely the Government can accept one further minuscule compromise. After all, as we have pointed out to Government Members on numerous occasions, the Government claim that their measures were motivated by a high number of attempts versus the low rate of success, but the evidence to support their position was so flawed that the Office for Statistics Regulation decided to launch an investigation, which found that the real success rate was at least 15 times higher than the Government were telling us. I do not think that we have had an apology for that obfuscation yet, but these days Government apologies tend to have something of a hollow ring to them. Therefore, instead of apologising, why do they not just accept that their stats were flawed and accept the compromise amendment?
Worse: the Government insist on thinking that a Cart judicial review is successful only if the appellant actually wins. The truth is that a successful Cart judicial review is one where the flawed decision of the upper tribunal is appealed and reversed. That has nothing to do with the final outcome of the case. If we base the figures on that, the stats show just how vital a safeguard Cart judicial reviews are. Using accurate figures, the Public Law Project calculated that 40 people every year would be otherwise incorrectly denied their right to appeal in cases where, as we heard from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), the stakes can be incredibly high. We are talking not about trivial cases, but sometimes life-and-death cases. The tribunal system considers access to vital benefits, and removing that layer risks leaving people with disabilities and those facing destitution and homelessness without a last line of defence.
The tribunal system also considers immigration cases, as we heard. If it is so flawless, how am I able to tell the story again of the Venezuelan man who fled to the UK after witnessing the violent murder of his friend by state actors who would most certainly have come after him, had he remained in Venezuela? The first-tier tribunal and the upper tribunal surmised that he had nothing to fear. Thankfully, he had that last line of defence, which the Government are trying to take away and the Lords are trying to save, and he was able to judicially review the decision. The upshot was that the man was allowed to appeal. He won and was saved from deportation and almost certain persecution and death.
Retaining the restricted supervisory jurisdiction, as proposed in Lords amendment 5, would help to avoid injustice. However, voting against the Lords amendment would be a clear demonstration that people such as the man I mentioned, people who are dependent on disability benefits, and people facing homelessness are irrelevant to the Government and to Conservative Members.
Lords amendment 7 is on the online procedure rule committee. We were disappointed that neither House accepted our very reasonable request to include just one representative on the committee with knowledge and experience of the Scottish legal system. When we proposed such amendments during previous stages, I said that accepting them would
“allow the Government to keep up their pretence about respect for Scotland”.—[Official Report, 25 January 2022; Vol. 707, c. 939.]
They have declined to do even that, as has the House of Lords. It is extremely disrespectful to Scotland and our distinct legal system.
The Bill is just one part of a broader programme of constitutional reform designed to allow the Government to restrict the rights of their citizens and, in particular, some of their most vulnerable people. The Bill needs to be seen as part of a whole alongside the independent Human Rights Act review, which is under way, a review of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which is on its way, and a succession of relevant pieces of legislation that are currently before Parliament—very currently, in fact; some are being considered this week and even today—such as the Elections Bill, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and the Nationality and Borders Bill.
Those proposals all have something else in common: they are decisions that should be taken by the countries affected. We should not have one country deciding for other, smaller nations. Why do the people of Scotland have to put up with what Liberty called
“a concerted attempt to shut down potential routes of accountability and exert the power of the executive over Parliament, the courts and the public”
when they have consistently voted for parties opposed to those things? I will tell hon. Members why: because a slim majority of people were frightened into voting against independence in 2014.
The people of Scotland will be far more afraid of all this legislation being imposed on us than any daft scare stories that the coalition of Unionist parties can come up with next time around. We will always show solidarity to people in the rest of the UK who are fighting these terrible wrongs, but next time, in 2023, I am confident that the people of Scotland will vote yes to independence and yes to making far better decisions for ourselves.
Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)
I rise to speak chiefly to part 1 of the Bill. It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin), and I listened with great care to her speech. She and her colleagues often accuse the Prime Minister of wanting to have his cake and eat it. I gently but firmly suggest that she is doing the same on this occasion by relying on the unelected House, which she does not believe should exist because she is a unicameralist. That would mean that her argument about relying on the second Chamber when it is convenient is a somewhat unattractive one.
Anne McLaughlin
Does the right hon. and learned Member not understand that Members who support the system of an unelected Chamber and put people into it—the Scottish National party does not—are the ones who are being hypocritical when they then criticise it? I operate within the existing system, but I am trying to change it. However, Government Members support the system and then get angry when it fails to do what they want it to.
Sir Robert Buckland
I am grateful to the hon. Lady; her comments show the value of interventions, because we can have a genuine debate about a very important issue that goes to the heart of Lords amendments. My concern about the Lords amendments to clauses 1 and 2 is that their effect would be to go further—I am sure that it was not intentional—than their lordships’ usual role of providing close scrutiny and careful amendment, where the principle of the Bill is maintained but some of the details are altered. We have seen an example of that on presumption, on which the Government have rightly conceded.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I rise to speak to Lords amendments 1, 2 and 3, all tabled by Lord Marks in the other place. I appreciate that the Government have made some concessions and I thank the Minister for his meeting with me.
Amendments 1, 2 and 3 would remove from the Bill the power to make prospective-only quashing orders. They are backed by the Law Society and Justice, and I urge Members across the House to back them too. Judicial review is one of the most powerful tools that an individual has to enforce their rights. Challenging the Government through the courts when they get things wrong is one of the core principles of our parliamentary democracy.
Wera Hobhouse
No; I am conscious of time and Madam Deputy Speaker is anxious that we proceed.
The principle should not be party political but one shared across the House. It is disappointing to see the Government pushing ahead with plans to restrict judicial review by opposing the amendments. Unamended, the Bill is described by the Law Society as “chilling”; clauses 1 and 2 undermine judicial review. Prospective-only quashing orders could be hugely harmful to those seeking justice: they would not only deny redress to someone who had been harmed by a public body’s unlawful action, but actively serve as a disincentive to those seeking justice through judicial review.
Let us imagine a person who had incorrectly been deemed ineligible for carer’s allowance by the Department for Work and Pensions. That person successfully challenges the decision through judicial review. Prospective-only quashing orders would mean that the person did not receive the back payments unlawfully denied to them. Those payments could mean the difference between a person heating their house or going cold, or between eating or going hungry.
To make matters worse, extensive delays in courts mean that decisions could be put off for even longer. Prospective-only quashing orders arbitrarily discriminate between those affected by an unlawful measure before a court judgment and those affected after one. There are numerous examples. In 2017, the High Court ruled that a Home Office policy to deport EU rough sleepers was unlawful and discriminatory. The policy was scrapped. If a prospective-only quashing order had applied, then potentially only those receiving a removal notice would be protected; all those who had already faced removal or had had a removal notice issued against them would still have faced deportation. That would not have been justice.
Important as they are, the damaging effects of prospective-only quashing orders go far beyond individual cases. They damage the basic principle that underpins our democracy: that individuals must have the power to challenge the powerful when the powerful get things wrong. If the Government or public bodies are spared the risk of retrospective legal consequences, the motivation for good decision making is lower. Public bodies will take their chances, particularly in issuing welfare benefits, because the cost of getting things wrong would still be lower than getting them right in the first place. That is bad not only for those seeking redress from the courts but for all of us. It should ring alarm bells for all of us.
The Bill is just another Government programme of constitutional reform that weakens the institutions and rights that hold them to account. We saw that in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Nationality and Borders Bill and the Government’s voter ID proposals. We Liberal Democrats will continue to stand against any attempts to weaken the institutions and rights that hold the Government and the powerful to account. I urge Members across the House to do the same and vote in favour of Lords amendments 1, 2 and 3.
James Cartlidge
I am grateful to all those who have spoken about the Bill today. I have only a short time, so I will briefly canter over the points raised in this important debate. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) for recognising that we have made a significant concession on the presumption; we, in turn, are grateful for having been enabled to bring important reforms to judicial review through clauses 1 and 2.
On the issue of judicial review and prospective-only quashing orders, I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) made a good point to the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) in saying that we cannot have it both ways. The Bill gives new powers and flexibility to judges; we should not at the same time fetter judges and try to predict what they would do in individual cases. That is the key point. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), Chair of the Justice Committee, said, this is about giving judges an extra club in the bag—a golf analogy; I said that it was another tool in the toolbox. Whether we use DIY or sport analogies, we all understand that there is an extra tool for the judiciary—more powers and flexibility.
On the issue of Cart JR, my hon. Friend made a really important point. The resource issue is about High Court judges, particularly in the Queen’s bench division, who after all hear some of the most serious cases around the country, not just in London.
I understand where my hon. Friend is coming from, and concerns from all hon. Members, when it comes to legal aid. I have previously expressed my strong sympathy—particularly for MPs in the north-west, who have had a long experience around Hillsborough. Of course we are looking at that and other matters.
The hon. Member for Hammersmith is aware of the measures that we have already introduced. Even if we agreed on this measure, the Opposition would surely have to accept that it simply would not be possible for such a significant measure to be introduced at such a late hour in the course of a Bill. Were we to continue to go back and forth on this, we would risk undermining the Bill—and we must not forget that it also contains very important measures on criminal procedure, not least changes in magistrates’ sentencing powers. As soon as those new powers come in, they will start to have an impact on our backlog by ensuring that cases that would otherwise be dealt with in the Crown courts can be heard in magistrates courts. I therefore think it important for the Bill to receive Royal Assent.
As I have said, I am pleased to commend the vast majority of the Lords amendments to Members, but I ask them to join me in disagreeing with Lords amendments 1, 2, 3, 5 and 11, and agreeing to the Government’s amendment (a) while disagreeing with Lords amendment 5.
Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.
Backbench Business
Childhood Cancer Outcomes
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered improving outcomes for childhood cancer.
I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us this debate, and to all the medical professionals, scientists, charities and, above all, the bereaved parents who have helped to inform it.
This debate is in honour of Sophie Fairall. Sophie was just 10 years old when she died last September, 12 months after having been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma. During her illness, Sophie created a bucket list. It included lots of fabulous things. She wanted a pair of high heels and she wanted to cook with Gordon Ramsay. But Sophie’s list was very special, because she also wished for improvements in the way we look after others who were in the same position that she was. She wanted better play facilities for children in hospital wards. From her bed she painted ceramics, which were sold to raise £6,000 to buy new toys for her ward. Most hospitals only have play specialists at very limited hours. No data is even collected on the numbers of play specialists working in the NHS. So, on Sophie’s behalf, I ask the Minister to look at the provision of play specialists.
Sophie also wanted better hospital food for poorly children. She was worried about the parents who spent hours at the bedside and often did not get to eat at all. Often during her own treatment Sophie felt poorly at set mealtimes. Later, when she was feeling a bit better, there was no capability at the hospital to make her anything to eat. That is little surprise, because in Portsmouth hospitals the meals get sent from Wales, 200 miles away. In October 2020, following a review led by Prue Leith, the Government launched a new blueprint for hospital food. Can the Minister provide an update on how that work is progressing and how they plan to ensure nutritious, child-friendly food that can be delivered flexibly during children’s treatment in hospital?
After Sophie’s death, her fantastic mother, Charlotte, vowed to continue to highlight all the failings and missed opportunities she experienced in how we research, detect, treat and care for children with cancer, and how we improve cancer outcomes. Charlotte Fairall is here today and I pay tribute to her determination and devotion to that cause. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] I want to start with a spoiler alert for the Minister. Today, I am going to be asking for a new childhood cancer mission, a concerted effort to bring together the very best in research, genomics, training, treatment, philanthropy, medical and allied health professionals, the brightest and the best, to really change our approach to childhood cancer once and for all.
Childhood cancer is often referred to as rare, but it is the biggest killer of children under the age of 14. In this age group, there are around 1,800 new cancer cases every year. One in 320 people will be diagnosed with cancer before their 20th birthday, and 12 children and young people diagnosed every single day in the UK. How can that be described as rare?
The most overwhelming concern is around diagnosis. Early detection is the next frontier in adult cancer and for children it is even more vital, yet for so many children that diagnosis comes far, far too late. Sophie had suffered for a few months with tummy problems. The GP first suggested Gaviscon and then that it could be irritable bowel syndrome, but when Sophie started bleeding her very worried mum was advised that she might have started her periods. Sophie had just turned nine. By the time her worried parents took her to accident and emergency, the paediatrician found a 12 cm tumour in her little tummy.
Sophie’s story is not unusual. Over 53% of childhood cancers are picked up through A&E rather than through primary care, compared to 22% of adult cancers. In terms of diagnosing advanced cancer, as a nation we rank near the bottom of the European league tables. There is little or no training for general practice and let me reiterate that we are talking about the biggest killer of children under the age of 14. There are also no national referral guidelines for GPs with concerns that a young person may have cancer. A local GP from Gosport, who has practised for over 30 years, told me that he has no specific training on childhood cancer and would readily attend any training available. The Government are investing in 100 new diagnostic centres, but there must be robust referral guidelines in place, specifically regarding children, to help ensure that that improves the diagnosis of paediatric cancers.
The game changer would be paediatricians in primary care, which so many other countries have. Until then, we need childhood cancer training for healthcare professionals. We need national referral guidelines specifically for children, and we need an education campaign for parents on the signs and symptoms of childhood cancer. I know that is not straightforward. There are 88 types of childhood cancer with various symptoms, but we only need look at the success of the training and publicity surrounding the signs and symptoms of meningitis, which has seen numbers fall, with 461 cases of meningitis last year and 30 deaths. It is time to do the same with childhood cancer.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Lady and colleagues on securing this debate. She is making an outstanding case. One of the cancers that affects children is brain cancer. If we take glioblastoma, the five-year survival rate for children is only 20%. I am sure she recognises that not only do we need improved diagnosis—the point she is making—but more research. That is what the Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission is about: more research to understand the make-up of those cancers, so we have more effective treatment and more children may survive.
Dame Caroline Dinenage
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I shall talk about research in a moment, but childhood cancer research is currently the Cinderella of cancer research and we need to do much more to address that.
Once a child has been diagnosed, the gruelling process of treating the cancer begins. Between 1997 and 2018, only 18 new drugs were approved for 22 paediatric oncology indications, and they were generally for quite specific or relapse cases. That means many children are often given the same treatments as adults—incredibly aggressive chemotherapies and radiotherapies—and in many cases children’s treatments have not changed for decades. Even if the cancer is beaten, the child’s body is often so ravaged by the treatment as to leave long-term impacts from which they may never recover.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
My hon. Friend is speaking remarkably passionately about this important issue, about which many of my constituents have been in touch with me. They include Julie and her son George, and Leah and her son Toby—both children are suffering and living with cancer. Does my hon. Friend agree that much more needs to be done when children finish the course of treatment to support not only the child but the family, in terms of their recovery from the physical and emotional impact of the treatment?
Dame Caroline Dinenage
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point: there is such a huge impact on families who support a child through cancer and we need to look at how we support them in the round.
I have heard from parents of children who are known as cancer free—so they are probably counted as a success statistically—yet some of them are still in hospital because of the disastrous impact of the treatment itself. Very many survivors are left with long-term hormone deficiencies, some of which are life threatening. Survivors can also experience neurological, behavioural, cognitive and visual impairment. The St Jude Hospital in the United States takes an annual survey of former patients. By the age of 50, they all—100% of them—have life-altering health issues, from fertility issues to severe neuro-disability. I would love to know whether similar surveys happen here and whether the conclusions are the same.
As other Members have said, it is vital to find better treatments specifically for children, which means better research is vital. Children’s cancer is fundamentally different from adult cancer in that so much of it is developmental rather than environmental. The good news is that progress is within our reach—there is so much potential in immunotherapy and genomics—and the even better news is that the UK has a fantastic research community and the most comprehensive database of childhood cancer genomes anywhere in the world. The bad news is that paediatric oncology research is the absolute backwater of cancer sciences. It does not have the focus, the money, the public relations or the prestige of other forms of research. Until there is a concerted effort to change that, children like Sophie will be failed.
I expect the Minister to tell me today that great progress has been made on the cancer survival rate among children. Seventy years ago, children simply did not recover or survive a cancer diagnosis; now around 80% do. But the figures belie the fact that for many cancers, including the rhabdomyosarcoma that killed Sophie, the survival rate is as low as 20%. For another cancer, DIPG—diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, which is a form of brain tumour—the survival rate is 0%. It is literally a death sentence. Can you imagine being that child? Can you imagine being that parent?
There is no doubt that research investment drives survival rates. Since 1960, the survival rate for childhood leukaemia has improved from 10% to 80%. By contrast, only two multinational clinical trials have ever taken place for rhabdomyosarcoma. With only 60 cases diagnosed in the UK per year, there is very little scientific evidence or appetite to develop and complete clinical trials. It is of no interest to big pharma. So we need to look much more imaginatively at how the National Institute for Health and Care Research can encourage more research in such types of cancer.
We also need to look at how new treatments can be brought forward much more quickly. I met Kevin and Karen, who lost their son Christopher just days before his sixth birthday from an aggressive form of brain tumour. They raised concerns about the EU paediatric regulations, which they feel are outdated and do not reflect the latest technological advances. Now that we have left the EU, we have the opportunity to produce new legislation that will incentivise world-leading pharmaceutical products, especially for children, and we need to take that opportunity.
Today, I ask the Minister to start a children’s cancer mission. We have seen from the incredible work on brain cancer inspired by our much-loved former colleague Tessa Jowell how much progress can be made when we are galvanised to bring together the best of Governments, charities, research, academics, medical and science into centres of excellence.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
My hon. Friend is speaking beautifully and powerfully, as always. When the late Baroness Jowell came to see us at the Department of Health, we got the clear impression that she would not take no for an answer. She recognised that although research funding was important, the thesis around which the research proposals were then taken forward was the key. She galvanised the brain cancer and tumour charities into bringing that forward, and that has revolutionised the number of proposals on which they conduct research. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to do that across the board in cancer, but specifically in paediatric oncology?
Dame Caroline Dinenage
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I know that, as a former Minister responsible for this issue, he cares about it deeply. I want to bring everybody together in centres of excellence to make sure that we can galvanise everything to that point. I assure my hon. Friend that we will not take no for an answer either.
I am keen for the Government to look at progress in the Netherlands, where the Princess Máxima Centre for paediatric oncology has brought together the care for children and their families, scientific research, and an academy for health professionals, all under one roof, along with a foundation. The centre has a mission: to cure every child with cancer with optimal quality of life. The Government’s 10-year plan for cancer is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move the dial on cancer outcomes. Will the Minister agree, as part of that work, to look at a children’s cancer mission? Will she bring together a working group of paediatric oncologists, charities, parents and young cancer survivors to formulate a plan to drive forward the work on how we detect, treat and care for children with cancer?
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. I am sure colleagues will understand that, as this is a two-hour debate, I will have to set a time limit. I shall start with a four-minute limit, of which I have advised the first speakers.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
Leukaemia is the most common cancer in children. For most, the treatment will be chemotherapy and, more recently, the use of targeted therapies such as CAR-T. The treatment will take place over a number of years and there will be many bumps in the road in what is a very difficult journey.
I will never forget the phone call from my wife 15 years ago telling me that our nine-year-old son had leukaemia. For us, it soon became clear that the only route open to us would be a stem cell transplant. We were very fortunate that we found a donor for our son, but far too many children—particularly those from non-white backgrounds—are still not as lucky. There have been great improvements in recent years, but a lot more work still needs to be done.
The transplant process is not easy, involving radiotherapy and isolation to try to avoid infection as the immune system is so weakened, and then there are the post-transplant effects which, in the worst cases, can involve graft versus host disease, which can kill the patient, as well as infertility, premature menopause, fatigue, muscle problems, a higher chance of secondary cancers—I could go on.
We are making medical advancements, and some of the treatment is now far less severe than it was those 15 years ago. But that is the physical side of the illness; what of the psychological issues that children who have had cancer treatment will almost certainly face? About three-and-a-half years ago, I had a debate in this Chamber on this very subject, highlighting what I thought were the problems. Regrettably, those problems are still there today and, with covid, have arguably got worse.
Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab)
A constituent of mine, Richard Case, lost his son Cian two years ago. Two years ago, I had a debate in this Chamber—the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) responded for the Government—on international research for children with childhood rare cancers, and looking at how the G7 and the G20 could focus on global research and innovation in tackling childhood cancers. Progress has been limited. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is time that finding cures for childhood cancers was a global research priority?
Mark Tami
I agree, and I think that vital work needs to be carried out now.
Fundamentally, psychological support should not be an add-on. It is not something that we should have to seek or press for our children to receive; it should be part and parcel of the overall treatment programme. For many people, it is about coming to terms not only with the treatment, but with the fear that the illness could come back again. That is a hell of a pressure to be put on a young person.
Young people may also find it difficult to talk to their own families about some of these issues and the concerns they have. That is why professional counsellors and clinical nurse specialists can play an important role in this respect. Reintroduction into school, for example, can be a traumatic experience for young cancer patients, as well as for their classmates, because they might look very different from when they left the school. I remember a young girl telling me that the worst part of what had happened to her was not the treatment, but the fact that she lost her hair—coming to terms with that is very difficult.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
On that point, will the right hon. Gentleman take this opportunity to congratulate the Little Princess Trust, which takes donations of hair to create wigs for children? Quite often, it is other children who donate their hair to make those wigs. It is a great charity, and I hope that many people will acknowledge it.
Mark Tami
I agree. It is so important to help young people feel as normal—if we can use that word—as possible. I have always been struck by how important the hair issue, and having fit-for-purpose wigs, is to girls in particular—in some circumstances the wigs are not very good.
As has already been touched on, support should be available for family members of young cancer sufferers. I remember when everyone would phone up all the time and ask how my eldest son was, but no one would ask how his younger brother was. They were not being mean; it was just that their focus was on that child. During the whole treatment process, there is a financial cost to travelling to and from a specialist centre, and for some the choice is between employment or caring for their child. That is the choice that a lot of people have to make, so there are enormous pressures there. I found it particularly helpful to speak to a nurse from CLIC Sargent—now known as Young Lives vs Cancer—who would come round to give my son his treatment. She understood how you felt, and it was good to have an honest discussion with her about some of the issues you were facing.
I think we need to place psychological support on an equal footing with addressing the physical treatment of childhood cancers, with equal access to support, not as an afterthought or an add-on, but as part and parcel of the process, from diagnosis to dealing with the long-term effects.
Holly Mumby-Croft (Scunthorpe) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for her work in securing the debate. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) for sharing his personal insight into the situation with the House. This subject is incredibly important, and I know that we will hear further contributions from Members across the House, emphasising that the issue affects us far and wide across the country and in the communities that we represent, and highlighting once again how devastating cancer can be.
Cancer is a horrible disease. Of course, we all know the statistic of one in two people suffering some form of cancer during their lifetimes. We would be hard pressed to find anyone in this House who has not been affected by that devastating and cruel illness in one way or another. It is that much more devastating and cruel when it makes a child poorly.
I was recently contacted by my constituent Laura, who explained the impact that cancer had had on her family. I have the privilege, with Laura’s permission, to say a few words about how this terrible disease has affected her and her whole family. Laura had a daughter called Ebony. Many people in Scunthorpe will know Ebony and her story. In 2016, just before Ebony’s 10th birthday, the family noticed that she had a swelling on her arm. As many of us would, they assumed that she had perhaps had a bump in the playground and that it would get better, but unfortunately it did not. After a trip to the GP, Ebony and her mum went to a Sheffield hospital, where she saw a specialist and had a scan, and they heard the terrible news that no parent ever wants to hear: that Ebony had cancer. I cannot imagine how that felt, and I know hon. Members on both sides of the House share that.
The cancer Ebony had was rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare type of cancer that can affect soft tissue. It can affect anyone of any age but, sadly, it most often affects children, and the form she had was particularly aggressive. Of course, Ebony underwent treatment, which was horrendous for her and horrendous for her family. Despite the fact that that was very difficult, Laura tells me that she remained a very special and caring girl all the way through her treatment. She remained brave even when her hair fell out.
I did not have the opportunity to meet Ebony, but it is clear that she was a remarkable person. She got to ring the bell twice after her rounds of chemotherapy were complete. While she was undergoing treatment, one source of joy for Ebony and her family was that she was going to be a big sister. She was so excited that she could not wait to meet her little sister and even picked out a name, Ella. In September 2019, the family were given the news that the cancer had returned and had spread to Ebony’s abdomen. She made the decision not to continue treatment and she passed away on 24 January 2020.
I sit on the all-party parliamentary group on brain tumours, and we discuss these issues all the time. I will quickly raise some of the issues we hear about from the specialists and clinicians we talk to: the significant challenges they face in accessing the money the Government have allocated for research into brain tumours. It is costly in time and resources to make those applications. I urge the Government to do all they can to remove the bottlenecks that those clinicians face and to ensure that they get proper feedback when applications are unsuccessful, so that they can access the funding and find the hope that we need to give to young people suffering from this devastating disease and to their families.
Ms Anum Qaisar (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
I begin my contribution to this important debate by extending my sincere congratulations to the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage). She was very eloquent in speaking of Sophie’s legacy.
In the past few weeks I have been speaking to my constituent Nadia Mahjid, who lives in Airdrie and whose son Rayhan sadly died from a brain tumour. I asked Nadia what she wanted me to say, and she asked me to tell his story. These are her words:
“Rayhan Majid was a happy, sweet and caring four-year-old boy… He loved sports and all things yellow including the Transformers Bumblebee and the Minions.
Rayhan was born in June 2013 in the midst of a heatwave and when he arrived, everybody remarked that he had brought the sunshine with him.”
Rayhan was
“always an active and healthy boy who was rarely unwell however, in October 2017, he started having severe headaches and sporadic episodes of vomiting.”
As with Sophie, GPs did not detect anything and it was not until Rayhan was taken to A&E, in his case six weeks later, that the decision was taken to conduct further tests. Sadly, an aggressive and cancerous tumour was detected in his brain:
“At that point the tumour had already grown…and as a result it was not able to be completely removed during surgery.”
Nadia says that,
“the aggressive surgery left our son Rayhan unable to talk, walk or swallow”,
and that he
“had to have a second surgery to have a shunt permanently inserted into his brain to prevent fluid build up.”
Devastatingly, however,
“the tumour re-grew and spread immediately after surgery even before radiotherapy and chemotherapy was commenced…it was decided to press on with the original treatment plan. Our Rayhan underwent 6 weeks of radiotherapy at the highest dose permitted for a child his age.”
The radiotherapy
“had no positive impact on Rayhan’s cancer either, a post treatment MRI scan showed the disease to be present and even more widespread than it was to begin with. The final treatment offered for our son Rayhan was high dose chemotherapy… A few hours after receiving his first dose of chemotherapy drugs, Rayhan’s heart rate and breathing started to be negatively impacted as well as him developing an allergic reaction to one of the many drugs he had received that day.
Rayhan tragically died a cruel, slow and painful death over the course of the 5 days of chemotherapy treatment, at the end our son was completely paralysed and unable to talk or even blink his eyes.
Rayhan was our ‘little ray of sunshine’. His light was cruelly extinguished by a relentless disease”.
I have a number of questions for the Minister, but she graciously offered to meet me after I wrote to the Prime Minister, so I will ask just one as I am pressed for time right now. Does she accept calls from Cancer Research UK that the UK Government should commit to maintaining a regulatory environment that facilitates international cancer studies, including a commitment to maintain the UK-EU data adequacy agreement and the compatibility of UK and EU trial regulations?
Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way, especially as she is giving such a heartfelt, passionate speech on behalf of her constituents. Ben was a young Coventrian who tragically passed away aged seven after just one year following his diagnosis with a rare childhood cancer—alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma. In his memory, his parents set up Pass The Smile For Ben, raising funds for treatment and research into rare childhood cancers. Will the hon. Lady join me in paying tribute to Ben’s parents, Sarah and Scott, and echoing their call for more funding and better treatment for children with rhabdomyosarcoma?
Ms Qaisar
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and I completely agree.
Every year in April, the month that Rayhan died, the neighbours of Rayhan’s family decorate their street in yellow, his favourite colour. His nursery has a bench to commemorate him. Rayhan was, and is, a much-loved boy. He died four years ago this month. This was a tribute from his mum, Nadia, on the anniversary of his death:
“When you were born you brought the sunshine with you and when you left, the colours drained out of our lives and this world has not been the same since.
You had to experience many things in your short life here that no child should ever have to, and many adults do not even experience in a lifetime.
We hope wherever you are it is worlds apart from all the pain, procedures and trauma you had to endure here and that we couldn’t protect you from.
We hope that in your new world, you are healed, happy and free to play, run and be a child again.
We are sure that you will be lighting up the heavens with your brilliance, that your laughter is echoing through the gardens of Jannah, that you are surrounded by friends aplenty and that you are having the most amazing, wondrous time, seeing and doing things that we cannot even imagine.
We love and miss you beyond measure Rayhan. Your Dad, your big brother, your little sister, all your family and I.
We include, remember and honour you everyday and we will never let you be forgotten. You are still our boy and the heart of our family even though you are not in the same world.
Our beautiful little Ray of Sunshine, our darling child, we miss you always, we love you forever.
4 years with you didn’t feel like enough, yet 4 years without you has felt like a lifetime.
Rest in Peace our darling boy.”
Rob Roberts (Delyn) (Ind)
Jordan Giddins, or Giddo to his friends, from Flint in my constituency was 18 years old when he died, and tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of his passing. At age 11, he became unwell with a mystery virus, and little did he or his family know that it would be the start of a seven-year battle with a deadly illness. It was determined that Jordan had HLH, a very long name that I will not mispronounce, which is a very rare blood condition that usually impacts infants and young children. Jordan attended Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and had various courses of steroids and chemotherapy, which seemed to be working. He was eventually able to return to school, catching up on the time that he had missed, and starting his life once again.
Nine months later, sadly, he suffered a relapse which the doctors said could only be cured by a bone marrow transplant. At this point, he was just 13 years old. His sister Beth was 16 and she was a match. No greater gift could a sister give to her brother than a life-saving donation. But four years later, it was something as innocuous as having a slight pain in his shoulder that got worse that eventually led to a scan which uncovered a golf- ball-sized mass on his ribs. A further biopsy was carried out which confirmed that it was Ewing sarcoma, another very rare form of cancer which mostly affects children and young people. It all started again, even more intense than before. The regime for the treatment of Ewing sarcoma, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) said, is more than 50 years old. Mandy, Jordan’s mum, is a nurse practitioner. In her words:
“I’ve never seen anyone suffer like he suffered with this treatment”.
It is basically giving adult-level chemotherapy to children, and their bodies just cannot cope with it.
Jordan celebrated his 18th birthday hooked up to a drip in hospital. Still upbeat, as was his way, he was making so many plans for the upcoming year—a music festival and a lads’ holiday with his friends—but over the Christmas period in 2016, he became unwell again, and the relapse was confirmed in January. There was no relapse protocol and, after a couple of experimental treatments, he passed away on 27 April 2017.
Mandy talked about her anger that we are still using treatment protocols from 50 years ago on children. She paid tribute to staff in Glan Clwyd Hospital in north Wales, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and the specialist cancer centre in Clatterbridge on the Wirral.
As my hon. Friend mentioned earlier, the problem is one of research. They say that childhood cancer is rare, and it is. Childhood cancer accounts for less than 1% of all cancers in the UK. It is easy to talk about in those terms—1% is nothing—but that 1% is 1,800 new cases diagnosed every year in children aged between 0 and 14: 1,800 sons and daughters who go through devastating and punishing treatments, and 1,800 families with constant anxiety about whether their son or daughter will become part of those statistics. It is one child in 500. Suddenly, it does not seem so rare at all.
Jordan’s passing did not end his story. Jordan—or Giddo, as he was known—had the gift of brightening up the lives of the people with whom he came into contact. The charity, Giddo’s Gift, has been set up in his name to provide gifts to make the lives of people suffering as he and his family did a bit more bearable. Since 2018, Giddo’s Gift has granted 176 financial wishes along with 23 bereavement grants. That is £112,000 in total, and I am proud to report that the local community in Flint has raised £263,000 and counting. My plea to the Minister, who I know is extremely big-hearted and cares deeply about this issue, is to sit with these families, hear their stories and make sure that no parent ever has to bury their child again.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on how she introduced this debate today. Many Members who have already spoken have become the voice for the voiceless in this debate. It is probably what Parliament should be for—to cry out for those who are most vulnerable, most needy and most deserving, yet do not have a voice.
Like many, I want to be the voice for one of my voiceless constituents today; I want to speak for Jake Oliver. Jake is four. He is currently in the haematology ward of the Royal Victoria Hospital for sick children, being looked after by some of the most magnificent staff in cancer services who deal with young people and children in particular.
Jake’s mum wrote to me, saying that she wanted me to speak in this debate because
“I honestly wouldn’t wish on any parent/family what we have been through in the past 19 months and continue to go through daily…Jake being so unwell and not getting a diagnosis quicker! 8 awful weeks before we knew he had cancer and at the age of 4. It breaks my heart to think my boy was so sick and didn’t know what was going on in his wee body…It took a further 6/7 days to stabilise him in hospital before we could begin biopsies….4 years old and he was basically being suffocated by a large mass surrounding his heart and lungs, cutting off his blood and air supply.”
I think we will hear many messages today from hospital beds and people’s homes about their little ones and how they need care. It is important that we recognise that every single effort has to be made to help these young people. Early diagnosis is clearly a key point.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
It strikes me that I have had a similar piece of correspondence from my constituents about their three-year-old son Alfie, who is undergoing treatment for leukaemia. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that awareness among GPs would go a long way to ensuring that these young people—my three-year-old constituent, and his four-year-old constituent—get treatment sooner that is perhaps less aggressive?
Ian Paisley
If Jake could speak today, he would say “Hear, hear!” to what the hon. Lady has just said, because early diagnosis has been key. As other hon. Members have said, waiting several months before the GP was able to get the child to A&E and then have them diagnosed is not appropriate. It is not the GP’s fault. More money has to be put into research. There has to be more awareness, more skills training and more discovery research done, so that these problems do not arise again and again. As the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said earlier about his own little kid, if there had been greater awareness at the GP level, these things could have been avoided and we would have at least had an early diagnosis and earlier treatment.
The fragmented experience that many young people and their families are going through must be addressed. We have heard already from hon. Members on both sides of the House that the fragmented service is not good enough. Jake will not take the excuse that some of those issues had to be set aside because of covid. He will not accept that excuse and his parents will not accept that excuse—and rightly so. They will not accept the excuse that there are not enough resources and enough money being made available.
Some hon. Members will not like me making this point, but I will make it: we spend more on abortion services than on childhood cancer research. Hon. Members should think about that and the weight of that. Surely we should be putting resources into childhood cancer research to save the most vulnerable lives that are already with us. That is where the effort should be made.
I agree with the points and statement of the hon. Member for Gosport and with the strategy that we must outline and deliver urgently. Let us not have another debate in a few years’ time about the issue. Let us have a celebration that we have done something—that we have directed those resources, changed lives, and had the ability to encourage the research. Let us bring together the experts who we know are already out there so that little boys such as Jake and the little girls who have been mentioned know that the treatment will be made available and that the research will result in their lives being saved, so we will see a difference. Let us give Jake and other children across this kingdom a chance.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate. I thank my constituents who have written to me about the debate to bring it to my attention. It is important that we bring local and personal experiences into this place when we are thinking about policy and legislation. I am grateful to Sophie’s mum, Charlotte, for sending me notes about Sophie and her beautiful picture. It is impossible not to be brought to tears—I am a crier anyway and I am pregnant at the moment, so I hope that hon. Members will forgive me if I go.
The theme running through many of the examples that we have heard today, and the correspondence that I have received, is a plea for the Government, MPs and policy makers not to misunderstand childhood cancer and not to write it off as rare, because so much flows from that label in terms of funding, attention and even time in this place. I understand that with 80-odd types of childhood cancer, it is complicated, but that is absolutely no excuse. We have already heard that it is the biggest killer of children under 14. I have not done the maths, but I know that that is many, many devastated families, even in the Stroud district, whom we cannot overlook.
One constituent wrote to tell me that the death of a friend when they were in their teens still plays on their mind. The GPs and out-of-hours services that he accessed did not have the training to identify that his symptoms were due to bone cancer and, as a result, after 13 gruelling months—we have heard time and again the horror of the treatment that the children go through—he died from the disease. Had his diagnosis been made sooner, my constituent is absolutely clear that his chances of survival would have been greatly increased.
We hear comments about mystery viruses and mystery symptoms. One of my greatest concerns is listening to the reality of pushed GPs, who are busy people and who are not equipped or trained enough to be able to spot some of the signs soon enough.
Ms Nusrat Ghani (Wealden) (Con)
Is that because there is not enough research? I was surprised to learn that only 4% of funds raised for cancer research and treatment are directed towards childhood cancer and that children, unfortunately, are receiving treatment for adult bodies. It all requires greater investment, which is obviously something that the Minister can respond to. As my hon. Friend has, I have had many cases in my constituency, particularly in Crowborough, Mayfield and Forest Row.
Siobhan Baillie
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. What I will say is that that is certainly not due to lack of care and love, because GPs absolutely want to do the best for their patients. Whether it is research, whether it is training, whatever it is, we have to fix this, so I support the calls for a children’s cancer mission, and urgently so. I want to bring everybody together for research and awareness raising.
I am very lucky that Meningitis Now—that fantastic charity, which has been mentioned—has absolutely turned around understanding and knowledge about meningitis in my constituency. It is a small charity, but it packs a punch. Why can we not do that for childhood cancer research and sufferers?
Post-pandemic parents, as I have just said about GPs, will look to call 111 for advice. We told parents and we told the whole country, “Don’t go to the A&E. Don’t go out to your NHS. Call 111.” So this is also about training that is really focused on that service.
Listen, the Minister is a fantastic Minister. I am bothering her all the time about lots of things, so I know her intellect and her care for people up and down the country. The Government have already committed to improving cancer outcomes, and the 10-year plan is absolutely an opportunity to make changes for the hundreds of families who are affected and desperately need our help.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. The last speaker on four minutes will be Taiwo Owatemi, and we will drop the time limit to three minutes thereafter.
Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would like to start by thanking the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) and the Backbench Business Committee for bringing forward this important debate. I am so grateful to contribute following so many powerful and moving speeches today.
As a trained cancer pharmacist, I am only too aware of the issues associated with childhood cancer, which is why I want to use my time here to raise awareness concerning a key issue that specifically affects childhood cancer outcomes. Outside infancy, cancer remains the most common cause of death in children and the most common disease-related cause of death in teenagers, yet less than 4% of all cancer research funding is spent on cancer that primarily affects children. Childhood cancer research has been underfunded and neglected for decades in comparison with investment in researching cancers that affect adults. That unacceptable inequality of resources has fatal consequences for children in the United Kingdom.
This was the case for Ben Crowther, a seven-year-old boy from my constituency of Coventry North West, who tragically died in 2019 due to the aggressive form of childhood cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma. Though RMS can occur at any age, it most often affects children, as we have heard from many Members in the House, and therein lies the crucial distinction. Ben’s type of cancer most often affects children, yet research into that type of cancer has largely plateaued in recent years. Ben was treated with the best medicine available to him at the time. However, much of the treatment was decades old, and Ben’s doctor could not recommend that he join any clinical trials to give him a better chance of survival because there were simply no ongoing clinical trials for that form of cancer that he could join.
Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an extremely powerful speech in memory of her constituent Ben. One of my constituents died at the age of only five years old from a brain tumour, and tragically he is far from alone. While 80% of children survive childhood cancer as a whole—still far too low—80% of children with brain tumours die within five years of diagnosis. It is the biggest cancer killer of those under the age of 40, yet brain tumours receive less than 1% of the national spend on cancer research. Does she agree that funding must be increased in order to improve outcomes for children and adults with brain tumours?
Taiwo Owatemi
I agree. My hon. Friend makes an important point. We need more funding for cancer research across all cancers.
His medical team did everything they could to save Ben but, in the end, decades of circumstantial neglect of RMS patients failed him. With Ben in mind, I just wish to make two brief points today. The first is that this Government must do better to encourage research into cancers that primarily affect children, not just adults. Parent-led charities and special named funds such as Pass the Smile are fundraising at grassroots level, but it is not right that the burden of raising funds should fall on the shoulders of bereaved parents. Secondly, we must treat the issue of childhood cancer outcomes with more urgency. We regularly call childhood cancers “rare”, but we must not lose sight of the fact that cancer is the disease that most commonly kills children.
Finally, I wish to thank Ben’s parents, Sarah and Scott, for allowing me to share Ben’s story, for their bravery and, above all, for their desire to ensure that no other family goes through what they have been through. I hope that the Government will listen to the stories that Members have shared today, and take the necessary steps to encourage greater awareness and improve research into cancers affecting children.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Thank you. There is now a three-minute time limit.
Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate. The level of attendance shows how important this issue is for MPs and for the country as a whole. According to the charity Children with Cancer UK, on average 12 children and young people are diagnosed with cancer every day. On 4 February 2014, nine-year-old Georgia Morris was one of them. I declare an interest because her parents, Richard and Selena, are friends, and Georgia went to my children’s school.
Georgia was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a brain cancer that predominantly affects children. No one knows what causes neuroblastoma, or how to cure or treat it. Georgia got the best care possible from the NHS—her parents are keen to stress that—but it was care within the bounds of contemporary medical knowledge, which is severely limited. Since no one knows how to cure neuroblastoma, Georgia’s treatment was essentially a series of clinical trials of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. She was given particular dosages to see whether they had any impact, and she showed extraordinary fortitude in the face of that. All those trials were funded by charity, with virtually no support from Government. According to Children with Cancer UK, of the 12 children and young people diagnosed with cancer every day, two will not survive. On 16 October 2016, aged 12, Georgia was one of them, dying at home with her family at her bedside. She would now be 18.
Georgia is far from unique. As we heard earlier, more children die from cancer than from any other sickness. When she was diagnosed, her parents were surprised to be told that there was no known treatment for neuro-blastoma, and little research into finding one. After she died they set up Georgia’s Fund, and have so far raised more than £200,000 for the charities Neuroblastoma UK and Children with Cancer UK. Working with the country’s top specialists, they are pushing research forwards. That is an amazing achievement, but it is also a drop in the ocean. I have many cancer research facilities in my constituency, which I visit, and I know that finding cures is painstakingly time consuming and expensive. Charities cannot do it on their own, and it is essential that Governments do more to support research into cancers that take lives so young.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) said, we need a national mission for childhood cancer. It is certain that in time a cure for neuroblastoma will be found. It will be too late for Georgia, but not for other children. The more research we do now, the more young lives will be saved. We must do all we can to ensure that innocent children no longer have to go through what Georgia and her parents and family went through.
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
I have spoken previously about a fine young man from East Renfrewshire called Daniel Caplan, who passed away at the end of 2020 aged 17, having been diagnosed with diffuse midline glioma. His brave family have kept raising awareness and funds in the memory of their lovely boy. Every nine days, a UK family gets that particular diagnosis for their child, which is devastating.
Another local family has a teenage daughter who is undergoing treatment for leukaemia. Her father made a number of important points that I would like to put on the record. For example, some current therapies for cancers, including types of leukaemia, are particularly onerous and can lead to challenging side effects in the long term. A lack of research means that in some areas, treatment and care has barely advanced in 40 years, so research is very much needed. He also made the point that professionals in the field are doing tremendous work, but they need more backup. Charities are taking on too much of the heavy lifting, and we need a Government commitment to that specific research.
I would like to make most of my remarks in relation to one wee girl from Barrhead, because recently so many people there have been in touch to ask me to raise the case of little River. I have heard from River’s mum, Katie, and am grateful that she spoke to me. When she first got in touch, she wrote:
“If you ever had to live on a child’s cancer ward, anyone would soon realise that childhood cancer isn’t that rare. They deserve so much more than 3% government funding.”
She also said that she really appreciated my speaking about little River. I am glad to speak about the wee girl and know that everyone in the Chamber will want to send their best wishes to River, her family and the other families that I have mentioned.
Little River is only two, and she was diagnosed with a brain tumour last September. She has been through surgery, she is going through intense chemotherapy and she will need further treatment. She is also in intense physio rehab. She is really going through the mill, but she is ploughing on with the love and support of her family. However, even when understandably her mum could be focused only on River, she points out that she is thinking of not only her girl but all the other children who would benefit from greater emphasis on research. That better treatment and increased knowledge can come only with better research.
River is being treated at the Schiehallion ward at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. Her mum says that the staff there are so lovely, which I know is true—I have heard it so often before—and we are all grateful to staff across the UK for the outstanding work that they do. But, fundamentally, none of us can disagree that we need a commitment to further research, because, without that, we will not see the better outcomes, the better treatment and the better ways forward that these children and their families deserve.
Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)
With a all the moving stories, this is a difficult debate to listen to, but I congratulate my near neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), on securing it. Hampshire is a small community, so it can be no surprise that nurses who treated Sophie live in Romsey and Southampton North and that her family have friends who live in my constituency. I have heard from them about Sophie’s bucket list and what her mother Charlotte wants to secure for children suffering from cancer, and that very much echoes comments made to me by my constituent Jane O’Brien, who lost her son George to teenage cancer some years ago. The O’Brien family have dedicated their time to setting up George’s trust, to raising funds to bring the first ever teenage cancer unit to Southampton General Hospital and to raising funds for the world-leading immunology centre in Southampton. Of course, we have heard today that too little of that research and money goes to childhood cancers, which are not as rare as we would like to hope.
George’s family have made a really important point to me about when he was diagnosed. When he went to the doctor’s surgery on the Tuesday, nobody recognised how serious his symptoms were. He died on the Friday, a matter of days later, but they felt strongly that the support was not there for them as a family. They did know what George had died of. They were not given the same level of support and assistance that other bereaved families might have received in similar circumstances.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making a typically powerful speech and she makes a key point. We must be better at linking up parents so that they have crucial peer-to-peer support as they go through the unimaginable horrors they face in such situations.
Caroline Nokes
That is a really important point, not just for parents but for the wider family and siblings who also need such help.
When I was a very new MP, I remember being contacted by my constituent Pip Armitage, who came to see me with Sacha Langton-Gilkes—the most amazing woman—to talk about the charity HeadSmart. They made a point that we have heard several times in the Chamber: we need a joined-up strategy and public awareness. We have heard about the meningitis campaign that has seen hugely improved awareness among families, parents and the medical profession and enables the condition to be identified early. In George’s case and that of too many childhood cancer victims, the condition is diagnosed too late because GPs do not have the awareness and the family do not know what signs to look for.
Sacha ran the most phenomenal campaign to put awareness cards, particularly on brain tumours, into schools and local authorities, and that was really effective. As part of the children’s cancer mission that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport is rightly calling for, we need to have that same level of public awareness campaigning on childhood cancers. We need better referral guidelines for doctors, so that doctors such as George’s GP, who I levy no criticism at, spot the signs and refer children quickly and efficiently to the brilliant hospitals that are there to treat them.
This is such a crucial subject. As we can see this afternoon, there is enormous cross-party support for something to be done. I know that the Minister is listening hard and I look forward to what she will propose.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing this very important debate. My constituent, Emma, contacted me about the experience of her family, when her 17-year-old daughter, Ruby, became ill with T-cell lymphoma, an aggressive form of blood cancer. Ruby passed away in May 2020 aged just 18. I am speaking today for Ruby; for my constituent, Helena, who is currently going through cancer treatment, whose mum Katherine has been in touch; and for every other family in Dulwich and West Norwood facing a diagnosis of childhood cancer.
Ruby and her family really struggled to get a diagnosis after she became ill. She had six GP visits, while her family became increasingly concerned, before a GP referred her for the hospital tests that revealed that she had a 9 cm tumour in her chest. By the third GP visit, Emma had googled Ruby’s symptoms—a very swollen face, shoulder pain, tiredness and odd bruising to her abdomen—and she asked the GP whether Ruby could have a cancerous tumour obstructing her vena cava. She was told, “Not in one so young”, and was made to feel that she was an over-anxious parent, but that is exactly what Ruby had. It took three further GP appointments before she was referred for tests.
Ruby’s family now live with the additional pain of knowing that an earlier diagnosis might have saved her, and they are calling for better training for GPs in spotting cancer in children and young people and better practice in listening to and taking seriously parents’ concerns. Improvements in both those areas would increase early diagnosis, with life-saving consequences.
Ruby had 10 months of gruelling cancer treatment, and her mum highlights the lack of funding for research or progress in developing new treatments. The drugs used to treat Ruby’s cancer were approved in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. They have terrible side effects and long-lasting health consequences for children who survive their cancer.
Ruby’s family also highlight the impact that a childhood cancer diagnosis has on the wider family and the lack of support that is available. One parent often has to give up work and the average estimated additional costs associated with supporting cancer treatment are £600 a month.
Ruby was a remarkable young woman. She believed that the most important thing in the world was to be kind and to speak out against injustice and unkindness. Her motto was, “Live Kindly, Live Loudly”, and her family are seeking to keep Ruby’s memory alive by raising £500,000—roughly what the NHS spent on treating Ruby’s cancer—for the Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group. I recognise and encourage that vital and inspirational work. However, I also call on the Government to recognise the avoidable suffering that families such as Ruby’s face when a precious child or young person receives a cancer diagnosis, and to commit to the change that is needed—better training, more research and additional support for children and their families—to ease their suffering at this most difficult of times.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
I chair the all-party group on brain tumours, which has been referred to. We have heard today of many children who have lost their lives, and many families who have faced that—we hear of that all the time in our APPG—but I want to focus my comments on the children who survive, but who do so with a terrible acquired brain injury.
This is how an acquired brain injury occurs. When a child first has a tumour, their brain is already being injured by the tumour. They may then have surgery and, again, more injury will be done to the brain during the surgery. Radiotherapy will cause more injury to the brain, and drug treatment, and so on, after that will cause further injury to it. If the brain tumour is got rid of and the child is cured of brain cancer, they are left with a life-long brain injury that will curtail their life chances and life experience.
At the moment, we in the UK do not do very well in supporting such children. Many, many children survive a brain tumour—brain cancer—but they live for years with terrible eyesight, poor access to education and all sorts of disabilities and challenges in their daily lives. Their family spend their lives trying to access all sorts of support and rehabilitation.
Quite rightly, the Government have announced that they will put together an acquired brain injury strategy. People now have the opportunity to take part in the call for evidence about what should be in the strategy. I make it very clear to the Minister that the strategy must include a chapter for children who face an acquired brain injury because of a childhood cancer or another illness or diagnosis. That would really focus us on the opportunity for immediate and intensive rehabilitation and therapy to allow those young ones to have the best possible chances, as they deserve. It would allow families to continue to support children, possibly for the rest of their life; some of them will live into old age.
We launched an inquiry into the cost of living with a brain tumour. We talked about life chances rather than money. We met ambassadors, who are children who have had brain tumours and brain surgery, and heard about all the challenges that they have faced—the amazing prejudice and barriers that they face every day of their life, particularly in the transition from childhood NHS treatment to adult treatment, as the Minister will fully understand. So much is dropped, but the opportunity is there to give those children and their families a really good lived experience and good life chances. That requires a proper understanding of what is needed to support children with an acquired brain injury as a result of childhood cancer.
Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for securing this enormously important debate, and to the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) for his very moving personal account.
My observations are based on a lifetime working in NHS cancer care and on having led the first Teenage Cancer Trust unit at the Middlesex Hospital for a period of time—this was the world in which I existed. I hope that the Minister will pay attention to some of my observations from that career, because I think they will be useful in informing policy.
I agree that there is a need for an overarching strategy, but some of the problems discussed today are perennial; they have been there forever, and there really needs to be a concerted effort to address them. Unfortunately, some of them cannot just be solved with money. In addressing diagnosis, treatment and ultimately outcomes and survivorship, we need to think about why diagnosis is delayed, about why diseases are considered to be rare and about the ultimate impact on outcomes for children and young people. The reason for many late diagnoses is that most GPs never see a case of childhood cancer, let alone cancer in an adolescent, so the effort that goes into raising awareness and training may seem misplaced, given how rare an occurrence it is.
The other challenge is that many of the symptoms with which children present are things that GPs see day in, day out. Fevers, lumps and bumps, lethargy, pains in the tummy—all those symptoms are standard fare, so it is very difficult to cut through to the truth and identify types of cancer. The essential thing is a greater emphasis on driving awareness. It has to be a core part of any differential diagnosis when examining a child that there is always a chance that they have something much more sinister than a cough, cold or fever. It is about making sure that that is built into standard practice.
Another point that I would like to make, although I may run out of time, is that these diseases are incredibly rare. Because the subsets are so rare, it is very difficult to do longitudinal studies.
Helen Hayes
The hon. Member speaks about the rarity of these diseases. Will he join me in recognising, as other hon. Members have done today, the work on brain cancer that is being done in the name of my predecessor Baroness Tessa Jowell? It provides a model for a children’s cancer mission to bring together expertise in the area.
Neale Hanvey
I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. I agree: there has been an enormous amount of work across a range of disease profiles, and I want very swiftly to name some of the key people with whom I have had the great pleasure to work in my time. Professor Jeremy Whelan has done a huge amount of work on soft tissue sarcomas and bone tumours, and Professor Andy Pearson from the Royal Marsden Hospital has done a huge amount of work as well. I also want to mention all the members of the multidisciplinary teams who make that kind of research and progress viable.
Let me finally say something about the bigger picture. Cancer does not exist in a bubble; it exists in the social fabric of where we live, and people with cancer, particularly children, are not immune to challenges such as the cost of living crisis. If we want to do a robust piece of work in order to make progress, it must involve research and treatment, but it must also improve the life chances of children more generally.
Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) and congratulate her on securing this important debate. The courage and bravery of the children and their families about whom we have been hearing is deeply moving, and should on its own be enough to galvanise some change.
I want to use my speech to reflect on my very brave constituent Alice Wakeling. Unfortunately I never got to meet Alice, but I am honoured to say that her mother, Sara, has joined us today in the gallery. Having worked with Sara since becoming an MP in 2019, I have been truly inspired by her dedication, her resolve and her love, and I hope to do both her and her amazing daughter justice this afternoon in telling their story in the time that is available to me.
Alice was a healthy three-year-old when she began to develop a small lump on her neck. After eight weeks of diagnoses and tests, the family finally heard the news that anyone would dread. The lump, which had continued to grow and was now putting pressure on Alice’s airways, was a stage 4 fusion-positive alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma. We heard about that condition earlier today, when we heard about Sophie.
Rhabdomyosarcoma is a rare soft tissue sarcoma. It grows in the voluntary muscles of the body, such as the muscles that we use to move our arms or legs. In Alice’s case, the primary tumour was attached to a gland in her neck, and there was a small tumour in her lung. She was given a 50:50 chance of survival over five years. Let me remind you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that she was just three years old.
After 20 months of intensive chemotherapy at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Alice proudly rang the bell at the end of her treatment, but 15 months later the cancer came back. At the age of four, Alice saw her odds of survival drop to just 8%. Great Ormond Street suggested a procedure in Amsterdam known as AMORE. The treatment was incredibly gruelling for poor Alice, but she got through it, and once again she rang the bell. A few months later, however, the news that they had all dreaded: the cancer was back again. After an ultrasound, the doctors found a large mass in her abdomen, with similar masses forming around her bladder and pelvis. They said that there was nothing they could do, and I think that Alice had just had enough. In August 2019 she was taken home, under the care of the out-patient palliative team at Great Ormond Street, where she died peacefully two months later. She was seven years old.
Throughout her illness, Alice’s parents, Sara and David, became part of a worldwide network of medical professionals to help children undergoing cancer treatments. They now run Alice’s Arc, an amazing children’s charity for those suffering with cancer, and they campaign for more and new curative treatment options for children at relapse. We have heard today about the need for greater funding, for more training for GPs and more money for research. I think that all those things can and will be possible, and will be a fitting tribute to Alice and all the other children we have heard about today.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing the debate. I have been receiving emails during the debate from constituents who are delighted that this important subject is being discussed.
I want to pay tribute to a family in my constituency—to John and Hayley McGee and their incredible, inspirational daughter Elsa, who sadly passed away from childhood cancer. This is how they explained their journey:
“We sailed through the initial treatment and naively believed we were the fortunate ones. Elsa hated everything about chemotherapy, hair loss, lack of taste but most of all the lack of control. Her strong, sassy and sometimes aggressive attitude is what kept us all from falling. She was determined not to let this get her down. Our beautiful girl had no desire to be a girly girl but just to be accepted, hair or no hair. With a personality that always left a huge Elsa sized impression on the hearts she touched, she will be missed by many.”
When John and Hayley were asked what changes they would like to see, they said they would like:
“More involvement from the government with better funding for children’s cancer research. New, less aggressive treatments and most importantly, a cure.”
They also pointed out the fact that only 3% of cancer spend is going into researching childhood cancers.
Another constituent has been in touch with me as well. Natalie has talked to me about the experience of a child close to her, Jack, and she has three demands that she wants me to register in this debate. First, there is a need for biobanking all childhood tumours for genomic sequencing. Secondly, we need dedicated funding for childhood cancer research and treatments. Thirdly, she asked me to register a point that we have already heard today, namely that childhood cancer should be treated differently from adult cancer in diagnosis, in treatment pathways and in support services.
In the debate today, we have heard the unimaginable—for those who have not been through them—difficulties that families have gone through when their child has been diagnosed with cancer, treated for cancer, and all too often died from cancer. This debate is incredibly important as we look forward to giving people hope. The hon. Member for Gosport deserves real congratulations, as does everyone who has worked to bring this crucial issue to the House today, and we have seen the unity for a better future for all those diagnosed with childhood cancer and for their families.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
I was going to make quite a different speech, but I am going to start by saying that, from Kirkcaldy to Kent and from Gosport to Glasgow, we have heard such a strong message of support for so many families in this great country, and I have to say that I am incredibly moved. My hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) and many others have recounted stories of great sadness and great tragedy, but what I am going to take away from this is not the tragedy or the sadness but the extraordinary love, courage and strength that so many families across the United Kingdom have shown, wherever they are from, whatever their background and however cancer has affected their young lives. They have shown extraordinary resolve and determination to be together as a family, to strengthen each other, to hold together and to really make a difference, even if lives are brief and even if the cancer is brutal. They have shown amazing determination to be so united in the face of such a horrific disease.
I am going to talk about a wonderful family I am privileged enough to represent. Claire Scott is just the most extraordinary woman—forgive me, I know that there are others in the Gallery, but Claire is a remarkable individual. When she was just about to give birth to her second child, Kylie, she found out that her first, Liam, had neuroblastoma. She had that extraordinary, horrific moment that so many families have had, of having to take in news that nobody would wish on anyone—not even their worst enemy in this place. We would all rather that these incidents never happened, but the truth is that they do. What Claire did when she heard the news was motivate herself and mobilise her friends around her to raise money to support the care that her son was receiving and also to take him to the United States to try an experimental vaccine. I am very glad to say that Liam is still with us. He is currently in remission and I very much hope he stays that way.
There is clearly an extraordinary amount of innovation coming through pharmaceutical routes and various other routes, and we really need to encourage that. We need to invest in it, we need to welcome the scientists and we need to celebrate the achievements of so many who are working on this right now. I am delighted to say that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care met Claire recently and was able to talk to her about the possibility of looking at the various forms of treatment that are available and that may come in.
Caroline Nokes
There is clearly a challenge, in that therapies that are available abroad are not yet available here. Would my hon. Friend agree that more work needs to be done on that?
Tom Tugendhat
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is exactly the commitment we got from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. We need to look hard at the various forms of treatment, and to encourage the NHS and NICE to look further into the many areas that offer hope for some. It is sadly not the hope for all that we sometimes read about in the papers, but these areas could possibly be the future for so many.
The House is united and strong today, and I hope we will be able to urge, encourage and persuade the Government to push forward with greater research, greater investment and greater support. Most of all, the House has spoken as one in celebrating the families, the love, the courage, the determination and the strength that have supported so many through this extraordinarily difficult time.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for her terrific work in securing this debate, which provides us with the opportunity to raise incredibly moving individual cases. The hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) is no longer in the Chamber, but many of us also feel tearful, unaided by pregnancy. We raise these individual cases so that we can build the lessons learned into policy.
We are inspired by the courage and determination shown in these cases. I was lobbied by Sonia Kean—she is not my constituent, but she is lobbying terrifically hard—and she has been through this experience with her son, who had to tackle cancer again after it returned. She is working hard on behalf of a range of families to further this debate.
These debates are good because we are able to draw on the experience of colleagues such as the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey). They also give us an opportunity to thank people, and we have heard about the many charities that are working so hard. We should thank them on the record.
It is not often done in this place, but I thank the hon. Members for St Ives (Derek Thomas) and for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft) for the work of the all-party parliamentary group on brain tumours and its inquiry on research. Its report will be significant in influencing the flow of not only research but the funding behind it, too.
I agree with the hon. Member for Gosport that we need a mission-based approach, one element of which is research, but I want to put another proposal on the table. Many people working in different areas of cancer are arguing for greater investment in research, and they have been given confidence by the way in which research has enabled us to tackle covid by bringing together the pharmaceutical companies, the research bodies, Ministers and others. There might be an opportunity for a summit of pharmaceutical companies, research bodies and others to give a new impetus to developing the research we need to tackle childhood cancers. If we can do it on covid, we can also advance to a much higher plateau on childhood cancer through such an initiative.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)
I say a big “thank you” to my fellow Hampshire MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), for securing this important debate. I back her children’s cancer mission.
I saw the local news about Sophie Fairall. Her family faced a sad and difficult condition with dignity and courage, and I know the House will join me in wishing Charlotte, Gareth and Sophie’s sisters Lucy and Amelia well. I pay tribute to their campaign to improve outcomes for all children who have cancer.
It is every parent’s worst nightmare to hear that a life-threatening disease may affect their child, and cancer strikes horror into every heart. Children go downhill very fast with any illness, and the rapidness of cell division means cancer spreads faster in younger people. As we have heard, every year 1,800 children get a cancer diagnosis, and the biggest childhood cancer, leukaemia, accounts for about 30%.
Treatment is constantly improving. For instance, when I was at school in the 1970s, a classmate, Alison Brownlow, got leukaemia and sadly died at the age of 17. Ironically, her favourite song before her diagnosis was “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks. I think of her every time I hear that song, although she did not enjoy many seasons and was always desperate to return to school. Just over 30% of children survived leukaemia in the 1970s, but things improved fast; in the 1990s, my cousin, Suzanne Adamson, had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia when she was 10 but she has gone on to have a wonderful life, with a second child on the way. So there are some good outcomes and the leukaemia survival rates in the 1990s were at 80%. Cancer survival rates overall are now at 84%, but there is still room for improvement, as is shown by the death of Sophie.
One of my constituents, Alison Carson-Blake, wrote to me about her son Jake, who was just eight years old when he was diagnosed with stage 4 bulky Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His mother wrote:
“He had lost so much weight, looked yellow and was not eating. He was out of breath and got tired so easily. They never considered cancer and even as sick as he was, neither did I”.
Alison had to physically beg the doctors to look at Jake, as they would not give him a face-to-face appointment because of covid. Jake had cancer all over his body but is now is cancer free. There you have it: no one thinks that it will happen to their child, and it is rare; so rare that GPs do not get enough training in childhood cancer. The campaign would like to raise awareness for parents to recognise the signs of cancer in the same way that we know about meningitis. I back this campaign to have a quicker diagnosis, so that better outcomes can be achieved. A national campaign on the signs and symptoms of childhood cancer will help, as well as better training for GPs and nurses, alongside more funding for research. I once again pay tribute to Sophie’s family and to all those who are working so hard to make sure that cancers are curable for all ages, but particularly children.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
First, let me thank the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for setting the scene so very well, and all right hon. and hon. Members who have made fantastic contributions here today. I share her concerns, as we all do. I am the father of three strapping boys and I have five grandchildren, and our worst fear is that something like this may come along. As politicians in this House, we have a duty to put in place a system that can ensure a quick diagnosis; the availability of testing; the availability of treatment and staff; and the best possible set-up to aid the child in their fight against cancer. I commend all the charities in this area, particularly CLIC Sargent, which does tremendous work in my constituency. I am ever minded of the survey carried out by the all-party group on children, teenagers, and young adults with cancer. It surveyed young people, parents and healthcare professionals, with 56% suggesting that better training for GPs on cancer in children and young people would make the biggest single improvement. I would like to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that. Research has also referred to clinical depression and anxiety among young people, with those with multiple GP consultations before diagnosis becoming clinically anxious. Again, I would like to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that and how we can deal with it more quickly. Having functioning GP services as the first line of defence in health is essential for outcomes in childhood cancer.
I agree with the Teenage Cancer Trust’s recommendation that the 10-year cancer plan should also commit to achieving access rates to clinical trials of 50% by 2025, as has been highlighted by others. The plan should look further than 2025—it should also look towards 2032. Again, I would like to hear the Minister’s thoughts on how we can achieve that. Clinical trials can significantly improve cancer outcomes for teenagers and young adults, but young people with cancer are currently not getting an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from them. A recent trial for patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia showed that young people’s survival rates improved by 18% through involvement in this clinical trial. Given that success in clinical trials, perhaps we should give more opportunity to young people to participate in them. Trial availability is the major determinant of participation. If there are no trials available or existing for young cancer patients, there is no possibility of inclusion. Where trials do exist, there are often barriers to accessing them, such as arbitrary age eligibility criteria. What can be done to ensure that those who can and wish to be part of those trials can be part of them? There is also no data publicly available to show progress towards the commitment of the 50% by 2025, and again I look to the Minister for help on that.
The issue is clear: we need more support and more access to clinical trials if we are to win this battle against childhood cancer. There is no more worthy battle that we must fight and must win, and we look forward very much to the Minister’s response.
Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)
A huge thank you to my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for securing this debate. It is such an important debate and, as she said in her opening remarks, the number of young children who suffer with cancer is truly, truly dreadful.
This is a very important debate to me from a personal point of view, because I have friends—not just constituents, but friends—who lost a son to cancer in the last couple of years. I have spoken about Kevin and Julie Pitcher before. Their son, Benny Pitcher, lost his battle with cancer after a long and very courageous fight in my constituency. Some will remember that he was only six years old. What makes that even more pertinent for me is that I have a six-year-old as well. I can still recall, as Benny journeyed from his home to his final resting place, people lining the streets and his small coffin as it made its way past mourners. I can say, Mr Speaker, that I do not think I will ever, ever witness grief quite like that in my community.
Benny’s cancer was an aggressive type of childhood cancer that forms in the brainstem, called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. At present, there is still a 0% chance of fighting that cancer and being able to survive. In over 50 years, we have made little progress in changing that. I find that just astonishing. If we can find a cure for covid-19 within nine months, why on earth have we not improved the life chances of children with childhood cancers in 50 years? Cancer continues to be the leading cause of death by disease in young children and young people. It is clear from every speech we have heard today that more must be done. It is essential that we drive more research into the biology of cancers if we are to stand any chance whatever of eradicating them.
I want to sum up by making a very important point about the families of young children who suffer with cancer. We have heard a lot today about those families having a proper emotional support network around them. Kevin, Benny’s father, is an inspiration to all those who meet him in North Norfolk. He alone has raised thousands upon thousands of pounds for children’s charities, so that other parents do not have to suffer quite as much as the Pitcher family did. Together, we are in the process of setting up a charity called Benny’s Battalion to help those families. I want to say on the record today that Benny’s name and his memory will never die—far from it. It is on days like this that it lives on.
Jill Mortimer (Hartlepool) (Con)
Sadly, I too know the devastating effect that childhood cancer has on families. My cousin Rebecca died, aged four, after an agonising battle with leukaemia. In those days, the treatment options for leukaemia were in their very early stages and Becky was one of the first children to undergo experimental radiation therapy. The side-effects of that early treatment are too gruesome to share with the House. Although survival rates for childhood cancer are better now than they were in the early ’70s, the side-effects wrought on children by radiation treatments and chemotherapy 50 years on remain agonising, as we have heard from across the House today. That is why more research is desperately needed.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for securing this important debate. She spoke about Sophie Fairall and why it is so important that we make the simple changes that Sophie wanted to make hospital stays more bearable. She also spoke about how important it is that health professionals are able to detect childhood cancer early and that symptoms are not dismissed as something less severe. That is another vital reason why we must all work hard in this place to ensure that GPs start seeing more patients face to face again instead of telephone triaging, which has become all too prevalent through and beyond covid.
Sophie, like my cousin Becky, was a brave and strong little girl. They both should have grown into powerful, beautiful and amazing women. We should honour their legacy by taking bold measures in this House to improve treatments and outcomes for children suffering with cancer. One of my constituents, Amy, recently wrote to me about her daughter Isabellah. Isabellah was diagnosed with the same form of rare cancer as Sophie and Ebony, about whom my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft) spoke so eloquently. Recently, Isabellah was one of the lucky ones: she received the brilliant news that she was no longer showing any sign of the disease. I pay tribute to the bravery of Isabellah and her mother Amy, who continues to fight to raise awareness of this terrible disease.
Although child cancer is often described as rare, the death of four children per week is four children too many. For Becky, Sophie, Ebony, Isabellah and countless other children, let us work together to beat child cancer and ensure that no family has to endure the ripples of loss that permeate through the years through too many families like ours.
Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
I, too, am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for bringing this debate to the Floor of the House. It is clearly a debate so close to so many hearts across this House and, indeed, throughout the nations of the UK. I am also grateful to the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for outlining so well her wishes in this policy area and for leading for us on a subject that unfortunately does not receive the full attention that we all clearly believe it deserves. I thank her for telling us the story of little Sophie.
We have heard so many heart-wrenching contributions to the debate on behalf of constituents the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. The right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) spoke about the problems in finding donors for the treatment of patients from non-white communities and the issues his own son faced. He also spoke of the very real fear of cancers returning after a period of time and the impact of that on families.
My hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Ms Qaisar) spoke so well about the short but beautiful life on earth of little Rayhan, who was sadly taken from us far too soon. I do not know what else I can say apart from: shine on up there, little Rayhan.
My hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) informed us so well of the tragedy faced by her former constituent Daniel and his family’s grief after the loss of their lovely boy. She also told us about the strength of little River and her family as she tackles her cancer with such conviction each and every day.
Every year in Scotland, approximately 180 children under the age of 16 and 200 teenagers and young adults between the ages of 16 and 25 are diagnosed with a form of cancer. More than 5,000 children and young people have survived a diagnosis of cancer in the past two decades—a momentous and encouraging increase on previous statistics. The data on cancer outcomes is encouraging and has been achieved through excellent investment and commitment in clinical research, which is critical in achieving a high rate of cure results for childhood cancers.
Sadly and painfully, though, there are still around 41 deaths each year from child cancers, and cancer remains the leading cause of disease-related death in children and young people in Scotland. I am sure that all right hon. and hon. Members in the Chamber will agree that any loss of life to such an illness is tragic, but when the life is of one so young, it hits home so tragically for us all. I say that as the father of a 13-year-old child.
Importantly, across the House we all understand that child cancer does not simply affect the child but has momentous consequences for entire families. We have heard so eloquently from Members from all parties about the impacts. The child’s parents suffer so much in the process of seeing their beautiful child go through long hours and days of diagnoses and painful and invasive treatments. That is why NHS boards in Scotland are working closely with the cancer community to deliver the national cancer recovery plan, which will ensure the improvement of care for child cancer patients in line with their individual needs.
Cancers in children are classified differently from cancers in adults, and most of the data published is more suited to the treatment of adult cancers. We in Scotland have recognised the potential consequences of that, which is why NHS Scotland has started to publish annual data to support the appropriate recording of childhood-related cancers. This has ensured that Scotland completes cancer diagnoses to a much higher degree of precision than was previously possible. As a result, NHS Scotland has had the ability to contribute to innovative treatments and to international research projects, thereby helping to maximise treatment and cures for those at the highest risk.
Throughout the covid-19 pandemic, cancer has remained a priority for the Scottish Government, who are focused on ensuring that patients are diagnosed and treated as quickly as possible. We heard from the hon. Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) about just how problematic that has been in some cases throughout the United Kingdom.
Scotland currently has 76 general practitioners per 100,000 citizens. The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) spoke about GP provision and how important and impactful it can be in the early detection and prevention of cancers. We believe that it has undoubtedly helped to improve the early detection of cancer in Scotland, and I am sure that right hon. and hon. Members will agree that GP provision—or indeed a lack of it—can be hugely impactful in the wider healthcare arena.
We have also heard about how investment in new facilities, improved treatment options and earlier detection are all necessary, but it is vital that research into alternative cancer treatments continues and expands.
Finally, as we have heard from across the House, the key aspects are funding vital services in the fight against cancers, and driving forward the research programmes that we all hope will one day discover the cure.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I sincerely thank the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) for securing the debate, for all the work that she does to raise awareness of childhood cancer outcomes, and for the powerful way she spoke.
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), who spoke with personal experience; my hon. Friends the Members for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and for Leeds East (Richard Burgon); and my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). I also thank the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and the hon. Members for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft), for Delyn (Rob Roberts), for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne), for St Ives (Derek Thomas), for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond), for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker), for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer), for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Airdrie and Shotts (Ms Qaisar), for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald), and for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey), as well as the SNP spokesperson, the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar).
I think we all agree and speak with one voice today. This is Parliament at its best. We do not often give ourselves a good name outside of this building, but I think today we have done our constituents and those who send us here thoroughly proud. This is what Parliament does and does well.
I pay tribute to Sophie Fairall and her mum Charlotte, constituents of the hon. Member for Gosport. The bravery, kindness and determination that Sophie showed during her treatment are an inspiration to us all. There is nothing worse and more senselessly tragic than a child being diagnosed with cancer. For many people, that does not even bear thinking about, but the fact is that it needs to be thought about. It needs to be a focus for politicians and policy makers from across the political spectrum. Only by doing that can we give young people and their families the support that they need, and work towards tackling this cruel disease.
As has been noted, although defined as rare, cancer remains the most common cause of childhood death outside infancy and the most common disease-related cause of death in teenagers and young adults. There are several different cancers that children can be diagnosed with; the most common are acute leukaemias and cancers of the brain and spinal cord. Rarer cancers include retinoblastoma or muscle and bone cancers. Different cancers require different treatments, and it is important that access to care reflects that.
This debate is specifically about cancer outcomes, of which there are many. We have all heard utterly heartbreaking stories of children who have lost their lives to cancer—a tragedy that is truly beyond measure—but there are also stories of families and children who have been placed under extraordinary pressures and who have struggled to navigate the confusing and often frightening world of treatment. It is our duty in this House to ensure that the Government do everything they can to support children and their families living through that ordeal.
There has been some positive cross-party collaboration on this issue, and I am grateful that the Lords amendments to the Health and Care Bill relating to cancer outcomes objectives were agreed and that the Government worked constructively with Members of both Houses to achieve that. There have also been positive steps taken with regard to principal treatment centres for children’s cancer and paediatric oncology shared care units.
However, there is so much more we need to do. There are still too many reports of parents being forced to seek alternative care abroad, of poor experiences for patients and their families and of poor quality of life. Worryingly, there are also reports that referrals to principal treatment centres are only occurring in about half of all cases, despite that being contrary to NICE guidance.
As the Teenage Cancer Trust notes, the experiences of young people with cancer can be affected from the very start of their cancer journey until well after treatment has finished. We therefore need to ensure that there is sufficient mental, physical and emotional support in place to help young people through this exceptionally difficult time. I would be grateful if, in her response, the Minister could set out what plans there are to enhance wellbeing support for children and young people diagnosed with cancer, as well as for those who are recovering.
I am incredibly concerned that spiralling waiting lists could lead to missed or delayed cancer diagnoses and thus to worse health outcomes. Early diagnosis is key to improving survival chances and allows for early intervention and treatment. What steps are the Government taking to address that concern? Will the Minister commit to doing more to raising awareness among the general public of how to spot early signs of potential childhood cancers?
There are also issues with research, and I will raise a few key points that I hope the Minister will respond to in her speech. In its cancer services recovery plan, the Government committed to working with the National Institute for Health Research to support the recovery of cancer clinical trials, including for children and young people, by the summer of 2021. Can the Minister update the House on progress on that commitment? Furthermore, given the funding challenges that charities are facing, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, can she outline what steps the Government will be taking to assist the cancer research sector in its recovery?
Improving childhood cancer outcomes and quality of life must be a priority for any Government. The Labour party is committed to ensuring that our research workforce has the expertise needed to improve childhood cancer outcomes. That work could come alongside training and retraining the staff our NHS needs, as well as developing a proper workforce strategy that gives our health service the tools to provide all young patients with timely care. Furthermore, our pledge to place a qualified mental health professional in every school would ensure that young people living with cancer had the holistic support they so deserve.
In conclusion, I once again pay tribute to the incredible bravery of the campaigners, family members and young cancer patients who work so tirelessly to raise awareness and improve childhood cancer outcomes. I know I speak for the whole House when I say that it is my sincere hope that this debate and the contributions that we have heard on both sides of the Chamber today not only raise awareness of childhood cancer, but facilitate further action from the Government to improve outcomes and access to treatment. This is Parliament at its best.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maria Caulfield)
I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing this debate. We talk often about cancer in this place, whether at oral questions, in Westminster Hall or in Backbench Business debates, but rarely do we talk about childhood cancers. As we have heard today, it is crucial that we talk about them, and that we listen and learn from the experience of Sophie and the campaigns she started, which her family are continuing.
There have been many contributions, and I will list as many as I can. We heard from the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), who shared his son’s experience. My hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft) shared the experience of her constituent Laura, whose daughter Ebony was affected. The hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Ms Qaisar) told Rayhan’s story. The hon. Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts) shared Jordan’s story. My hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann) contacted me ahead of the debate to talk about his constituent Talan. The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) mentioned Jake. The hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) told us the story of Ben, who sadly died. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) talked about Georgia. The hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) mentioned River and their experience.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) told us George’s story. We heard about Ruby from the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) and about Alice, who is doing well, thankfully, from my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott). We heard about Elsa from the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) and Liam from my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat). My right hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) contacted me ahead of the debate to tell me about his constituent Catherine Beaumont and her nephew Oliver, who sadly died last year.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) about Julie. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) told us about her own personal experience but also that of her constituent Alison’s son Jake. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) talked about Benny and my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer) talked about Isabellah.
Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)
I think the common thread in all those stories was families who lost a loved one and still wanted to make a difference for families in future, the same as my constituent Laura MacQueen, who sadly had to endure the loss of her daughter Jess at the age of nine to a rare form of cancer. It was heartbreaking hearing her story, but what she is doing now is continuing to call for more investment and research into childhood cancers. I hope the Minister will hear that loud and clear.
Maria Caulfield
I think the names that we have read out this afternoon show that, while cancer in children only accounts for 1% of cancer cases, if you are in that 1%, it does not feel very rare at all. I thank all hon. and right hon. Members for sharing the stories of their constituents.
That means, as has been pointed out, that GPs will only see one or two cases of childhood cancer over the course of their career. These can be difficult cancers to spot because some of the symptoms reflect other illnesses and other conditions. NICE guidelines are trying to support GPs. The NG12 guidelines underpin cancer referrals. They set out detailed guidelines for GPs on the symptoms of cancer in children and recommend very urgent referrals that mean an appointment within 48 hours for children presenting with a wide range of potential cancer symptoms, from unexplained lumps to bruising or bleeding. The guidance also recognises the knowledge and insight that parents have, as it sets out that GPs should consider referrals for children where their parents are thinking that their child is not well or there is just something not quite right with them. That referral should happen when parents are concerned, even if the symptoms are most likely to have a benign cause.
Maria Caulfield
I will not, if my hon. Friend does not mind, because we do not have a huge amount of time.
NICE regularly reviews and updates these guidelines on suspected cancers. It urges GPs to think of cancers sooner and lower the referral threshold for tests, and ultimately catch cancer sooner, which does not always save lives but can make a difference if a cancer is diagnosed earlier.
To help GPs to identify signs and symptoms of these childhood cancers, online education programmes such as Gateway C are available, but also face-to-face education sessions have now resumed, including seminars offered by providers such as Cancer Research UK, and primary networks are establishing cancer clinical lead groups to share latest research and good practice.
The rarity of cancers in children, as the hon. Member for North Antrim pointed out, means that it is harder to diagnose outside a specialist setting, and many of the symptoms can mimic other illnesses. For example, diagnosing brain cancer in children is particularly challenging because it often presents in a similar way to epilepsy, and sarcoma symptoms can often start with limb pain, which is often a common complaint in children. It is therefore crucial that children up and down the country have access to specialist services in cancer care, which are not necessarily provided in most hospitals, where traditionally cancer services are arranged by cancer type. Children’s cancer services need to be contained in a small number of specialist units, which we refer to as principal treatment centres, or PTCs. Each child with a suspected cancer should be referred directly to a PTC, which will make the diagnosis and direct provision of treatment. In England, we have 14 of these centres. They manage care through the multi-disciplinary teams and drive diagnosis, treatment and, crucially, as we have heard from many Members, research participation.
As well as diagnosing the condition, the centres are expert in offering psychosocial support, helping children to continue their education and helping, as Sophie campaigned for, to provide specialist play facilities seven days a week. Sophie’s complaint was that those were only provided for five days a week. It is important that we hear from children and young people who receive a cancer diagnosis. I personally thank charities such as Young Lives vs Cancer and the Teenage Cancer Trust, which last year put together guidance for young people in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland discussing having a visitor and a hand to hold when having cancer treatment. That is useful guidance, and it has been distributed by the NHS to all our cancer alliances in England.
I will touch on the issues that Sophie in particular was campaigning on. Food was a big bugbear of hers. I think she described it as “disgusting” in some of the reports I read. We know that food is important for all patients, but particularly for children, because nutritious food is a way of aiding patients’ recovery. It is difficult in hospital. I know from my experience as a nurse that we always serve food at 7, 12 and 6, and if someone is hungry in between, it is often very difficult to get any food at all. We are working extremely hard to improve hospital food following the publication of the independent review in October 2020. The review made a suite of recommendations across several areas, including nutrition and hydration. The three-year plan, “Great Food, Good Health”, led by NHS England, is under way to implement the recommendations from that review. I hope that Sophie and her family will be pleased we are making some progress with that, because I fully recognise the complaints she made from her experience.
I will touch on research, because it came up so often in hon. and right hon. Members’ contributions. It is important that we improve not only treatment, but its side effects. We have heard from many Members that childhood cancers can have a very successful outcome in terms of survival, but often the impact of those treatments can have a lifelong effect for those with cancer and their families.
I reassure Members that research is taking place. Since 2019, the NHS has been offering whole genome sequencing to all children with cancer to enable more comprehensive and precise diagnosis and access to more personalised treatments that will reduce the number of young people experiencing long-term symptoms from their treatment. There has been a lot of progress on the treatment of childhood cancers, with the majority of children now surviving, but for certain childhood conditions, such as rhabdomyosarcoma, that is not yet the case. Research is crucial to how we deal with it in the long term.
The NIHR, which funds research across the board in the NHS, is funding childhood cancer research across its whole remit, from early translational research right through to clinical research and social care research. I am concerned by the case raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe of researchers in her constituency finding it difficult to access those funds and go through the application process. I am happy to meet her and the researchers to see whether we can unlock some of those jams.
There is support for research into rhabdomyosarcoma at the Royal Marsden biomedical research centre—I declare an interest, as I still work as a nurse at the Royal Marsden—the Royal Marsden clinical research facility and the Great Ormond Street biomedical research centre. We are making some great inroads in funding research into not only cancer treatments, but the effects of treatments.
There is so much more I would like to say to answer Members’ questions, but due to time I simply reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport that the 10-year cancer strategy that the Secretary of State has just announced will tackle many of the issues she has raised. The call for evidence recently closed, but it is a great opportunity to put forward the case for childhood cancers, and I am happy to meet her after the debate to see whether we can push her case forward.
Dame Caroline Dinenage
I thank all hon. Members from both sides of the House who have supported this debate. In some cases, they have shared their own experiences and, in other cases, they have shared the incredibly sad and touching stories of their constituents. Other hon. Members wanted to be here to raise their own cases, including my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), who wanted to talk about Abbie’s Sparkle Foundation.
The stories have been incredibly difficult to listen to, but as hard as they are to hear, they are infinitely harder to go through. Families up and down the country who have been supporting children with cancer go through that every single day. I would like this debate to be a tribute to those children. The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) said that we have to be the voice of the voiceless, which is what we are all here for. It is not enough to pay tribute or say that we have listened. Actions speak louder than words.
The Government’s 10-year plan for cancer is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move the dial on children’s cancer outcomes. It is a chance to shine a spotlight on this often devalued and much neglected area of medical research. The Minister talked about the research that is ongoing, but it is nowhere near the research that is going on in many other forms of cancer. It is a Cinderella and a backwater of research, which is not good enough.
The 10-year plan is a chance to introduce the mission on childhood cancer, which could really make a difference and save lives in future. It is a chance to introduce Sophie’s mission, Rayhan’s mission, Ebony’s mission, River’s mission, Alice’s mission—a mission for every single child whom we have heard about today and all the others yet to come. We have to stop failing children like this.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered childhood cancer outcomes.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
We will pause momentarily while hon. Members leave the Chamber.
Ukraine
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Elizabeth Truss)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the situation in Ukraine.
Putin’s unprovoked, illegal war has now entered its third month. Russian forces failed in their initial war aims—they failed to take Kyiv and they have suffered heavy losses—but Ukraine now faces a renewed offensive in the east and south, and we are seeing appalling atrocities in Mariupol, Odesa and beyond. We must double down in our response.
So far, Putin’s planning has been riddled with misconceptions and miscalculations. He was wrong about Ukraine’s strength and determination. We must prove him wrong again in his expectations of our stamina and commitment. Our aim remains clear: Putin must lose in Ukraine and we will do everything that we can to ensure that.
We know that Putin’s ambitions do not stop at Ukraine. I am in constant contact with allies and partners to urge more action. I made the case to NATO and G7 Foreign Ministers earlier this month and in every exchange I have had with my counterparts around the world. Since those meetings, we have seen action in three areas.
First, we are stepping up our lethal aid. The UK has led this effort. We have supplied 6,000 anti-tank weapons and 120 armoured fighting vehicles, as well as ammunition and other weapons. We are helping other countries to deliver equipment by providing logistics support. We are also backfilling third countries’ stocks—for example, by offering to deploy British Challenger 2 tanks to Poland.
We are training Ukrainian troops to use the new equipment, and our allies are stepping up too. For too long there was a false distinction between defensive and offensive weapons. It became an excuse for some to drag their feet. That time has now passed. NATO allies are clear that we are delivering heavy weapons to Ukraine. That is what the Ukrainians need to halt the latest Russian initiative and regain control of their territory.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I thank the Foreign Secretary for the work that she and many other senior Ministers are doing. Does she recognise that one of the key conversations now is about the move to NATO-calibre 155 mm artillery, so that we can match the 152 mm that is being used in the east and the south against cities such as Kharkiv, Odesa and Mykolaiv?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend is right. We have been leading on providing that equipment. My hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces has informed me that the US has provided 200,000 rounds, and I know that we are working very hard to corral allies around the world to make sure that Ukraine has the equipment it needs.
Secondly, we are also relentlessly ramping up our economic action to choke off the funding for Putin’s war effort. The UK is leading the way: we have sanctioned more individuals and more organisations than any other nation. So far, we have designated over 1,500 individuals and entities, including more than 100 oligarchs with assets worth over £198 billion.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I think the Government are to be strongly commended for all the economic sanctions work they are doing, but how can that prove effective as long as Germany is pumping billions of euros into the Russian economy week in, week out for oil and gas?
Elizabeth Truss
My right hon. Friend is right that it is absolutely crucial that we cut off Russian funding from hydrocarbons. That is currently accounting for a third of the Russian economy, so it is a target of the United Kingdom to get others to follow our lead. We are ending all imports of coal, oil and gas by the end of 2022, and we want to see a timetable for others to do the same. It will only be when we cut off that supply of money from hydrocarbons that Putin will no longer have the funding he needs to supply his war machine.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The Foreign Secretary is right to encourage the freezing of assets both by ourselves and by others, but what will be the conditions for unfreezing those assets? Does she agree with me that all the billions owned by the kleptocrats and oligarchs ought to be turned to good purpose in due course, because we are going to need a Marshall plan eventually to rebuild Ukraine and undo the mess as best we can that the killer Putin has imposed?
Elizabeth Truss
I do agree with my right hon. Friend. We are looking at what we can do in the long term with those assets, and I am working very closely with the Treasury on that. We have also put asset freezes on 18 major Russian banks, and we would like to see other countries follow us. We have barred over 3 million Russian companies from raising money on our capital markets.
What has been very important in all of these efforts is that they have been closely co-ordinated across the G7, with the EU and with other partners around the world, including the Singaporeans, the Australians and the South Koreans. We have also taken decisive action on trade. We have cut Russia off from World Trade Organisation terms. We have banned high-tech exports and we have announced a ban on all new outward investment into Russia.
However, we cannot stop here; we have to keep increasing the pressure. As was asked about earlier, we do need to stop the imports of Russian hydrocarbons, and we need a new wave of sanctions. We are working on that with our partners to make further progress and put further pressure on the Putin regime. There are some people who say that the west cannot afford this, but we simply cannot afford not to do it, because if we do not end Putin’s war in Ukraine and we do not see Putin lose, we will see even worse consequences for the whole of European security.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, and her clear commitment, which the House endorses and supports. It is important to have sanctions and armaments in place, and for there to be accountability for the atrocities that the Russians have carried out. We have all heard the stories—they are hard to take in and listen to: ladies abused at levels that are hard to understand, children shot, homes bombed, and pregnant women killed. There has to be a system of accountability, and every one of those Russian soldiers who carried out those atrocities, and every one of their leaders and those above them, right up to Putin himself, must be held accountable. I know the Secretary of State is committed to that, but can we have it on the record today?
Elizabeth Truss
I am absolutely committed to ensuring that all those appalling acts, and all the perpetrators, are held to account and I will be saying a bit more about that.
We have been resolute in our diplomatic response, and we are reopening our embassy in Kyiv. I thank our ambassador, Melinda Simmons, and her team for their courage and action. We are isolating Putin on the world stage. The United Kingdom led the diplomatic push to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, and we are using our presidency of the United Nations Security Council to expose Russia’s war crimes, and the appalling rape and sexual violence that we have seen used systematically in Ukraine. We gave President Zelensky a platform to detail the abhorrent crimes that have been committed by Putin’s forces, and we have launched the Murad code to set a global standard for evidence on sexual violence. We are working with 141 countries that voted to condemn Russia in the UN General Assembly, to toughen our stance.
Questions have been asked about what the future looks like, and the first thing that has to happen is for Putin to lose in Ukraine and fully withdraw the troops. We have to see the perpetrators held to account for the war crimes they have committed, and we must ensure that not only is Ukraine’s future security protected, but that Russian aggression of this nature can never happen again.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I support everything that the right hon. Lady has said about what the ultimate aim has to be. Is she concerned about what now appears to be Russia’s strategy, which is effectively to landlock Ukraine by pushing along the southern coast towards Transnistria in Moldova? That could drag Moldova into this conflict as well.
Elizabeth Truss
The hon. Gentleman highlights a very real risk, which is why it is right that we and our allies are stepping up our provision of weaponry to Ukraine, and putting extra support into Moldova. We are making sure that Ukraine is able to defend itself in future, but also that other vulnerable states are able to defend themselves against Russian aggression. In reality, at present the Russians simply are not serious about negotiations. Their claims of humanitarian corridors have proved to be false and lead either to Russia, or have been appallingly booby trapped against the civilian population. In the eventuality that Russia withdraws and Putin loses in Ukraine, any eventual settlement would need to secure both Ukrainian and European security, and that must be backed up by international enforcement—both economic enforcement and security enforcement. We know that Russia simply cannot be trusted to follow through on agreements it has signed up to, so there has to be full enforcement of any settlement that is eventually reached.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
The Foreign Secretary is making an important point about the anxiety that this is creating across Europe, particularly in eastern Europe. As she knows, Finland and Sweden are reportedly seeking to join NATO in response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and there is clearly great anxiety in that part of the world. Can she provide any further detail on what she is doing to reassure our democratic partners in Finland and Sweden that the UK will stand with them against Russian aggression?
Elizabeth Truss
We stand with Finland and Sweden. I recently met both countries’ Foreign Ministers at our NATO meeting in Brussels, and we would very much support their applications, but joining NATO is obviously a sovereign decision for Finland and Sweden to make. The result of Putin’s aggression, having claimed that he wanted less NATO, is that he is seeing more NATO. He has seen NATO united and more countries wanting to join it because of his appalling aggression in Ukraine.
While the war continues, we also need to ensure that we are supporting the Ukrainian people. We have supplied £220 million of funding, we are helping refugees and we are delivering food, medicine and other essentials. We are also helping to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat. Our overall package of humanitarian, economic and military support is worth $2 billion. Today, I can confirm that two convoys of more than 40 fire engines have arrived in Ukraine, packed with rescue equipment, and we are supplying 22 more ambulances to Ukraine, equipped with paramedic kits and medical grab bags.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
The Foreign Secretary is helpfully outlining the help and support going to people in Ukraine, but I want to mention the difficulties of those trying to flee Ukraine who are running into our visas and immigration system. My constituent is trying to sponsor a mother and daughter from Kherson who would not leave that city even as the situation deteriorated. They have been left waiting three weeks for a visa. When we pressed the UK Visas and Immigration team, it could not even give us a timeframe, despite our highlighting the imminent danger to their lives. The situation in Kherson is now so dangerous that they cannot join their family in the UK due to a lack of humanitarian corridors. In this case, it is clear that Government bureaucracy and Home Office incompetence is getting in the way, and it is putting lives at risk. Will the Government speed up their visa process so that our constituents’ generosity actually results in safety for those fleeing the Russian invasion?
Elizabeth Truss
I know that the Home Office is working hard to speed up the visa process, and we are now seeing more visas come through, but I will be happy to raise the case that the hon. Member mentions directly with the Home Secretary.
As well as supporting Ukraine, it is also important that we support the other countries that are affected by Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. We have seen an increase in food prices and are seeing an increase in energy prices. At the spring meetings, the UK helped to secure the World Bank’s largest ever financial commitment to low-income countries to help them deal with the issues of food security and energy prices. We are also supporting Ukraine by removing all tariffs on Ukrainian imports into the United Kingdom, and we hope that other countries will follow suit to help Ukraine to continue to secure the funding that it needs.
Throughout the crisis, the generosity of the British people has been incredible. They have donated more than £300,000,000 to the Disasters Emergency Committee and we have had the largest ever UK Government aid match of £25 million. Across the country, we have all seen Ukrainian flags flying in people’s gardens, the incredible Ukrainian community centres and the huge support for Ukraine among the British public. The British people are standing with Ukraine, and we are prepared for the long haul.
Looking to the future, when the war is finally over, we will continue to support a strong, sovereign Ukraine. We will help bolster its security against future threats. To that end, we are working on a joint commission with Poland to ensure that Ukraine has the means to defend itself in the longer term, including with NATO-standard weapons. We will also help Ukraine to rebuild. I am determined to work with the United States, the EU and other partners on a new Marshall plan for the country. We need to see a landmark international effort to rebuild Ukraine’s towns and cities, regenerate its industries and secure its freedom. We will also ensure that Putin and his regime are held to account for their crimes in Ukraine.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
I am sure that the whole country and whole House are behind what the Foreign Secretary has said so far. One of the biggest changes since this dreadful war started has been President Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, followed by Russia, had a commitment to “no first use”, but that appears, certainly in statement, to have changed. What is the Government’s response to that and does she believe that a change is needed in the integrated review?
Elizabeth Truss
The integrated review made it very clear that Russia was the No. 1 threat that we were concerned about, and it reflected that. President Putin and his regime are making these threats because they are not succeeding in Ukraine. It is very important that we focus on continuing to support the Ukrainians in their fight for their freedom and self-determination and that we are not distracted and put off our course by the threats from the Russian regime. That is what we continue to do.
I was talking about ensuring that Putin is held accountable for the appalling war crimes. We led calls at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe for an independent investigation. It reported “credible evidence” of torture, rape, the killing of civilians and the forced deportation of over half a million people—scenes that we thought had been consigned to history.
We referred Russia to the International Criminal Court; the referral is now backed by 40 states. We are providing funding to the court and we have appointed Sir Howard Morrison to support the Ukrainian prosecutor general in her investigations. This House can be assured that we will do whatever it takes to bring the perpetrators to justice, either through the ICC process or other processes, if required. We will not rest until these perpetrators are brought to justice for these appalling war crimes.
The repulsive behaviour of Putin and his forces only strengthens our resolve to stand with Ukraine. This is a battle for Ukraine’s freedom and sovereignty and for the very principles of self-determination and the rule of law. Ukraine must triumph, and we will not relent in our efforts until it does.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Putin’s war is now two months old and it has already backfired. Ukrainians have resisted heroically. They have paid a great price but they remain undefeated and undaunted, with President Zelensky the embodiment of their courage. NATO has been united in its support and has shown more focus than ever since the cold war.
Tougher sanctions have been agreed by a broad range of countries, but this is no time to be complacent. The appalling truth is that Putin could still win in Ukraine. He continues to commit war crimes, and the longer that this war goes on, the more atrocities are revealed. There appears to be, frankly, no end to his aggression in sight. As the Secretary of State said, in that light, I welcome the decision by Melinda Simmons, the UK ambassador, to return to Ukraine. Having met her, I know that she would have been reluctant to leave in the first place. It is really good that she and her staff are back in the country.
We are deeply concerned about the reports from Moldova today. This looks worryingly like the familiar Putin playbook of fabricated grievances and concocted attacks that have been used in the past as a pretext for aggression. Will the Secretary of State address those worrying reports and restate our united support for Moldova’s sovereignty and territorial integrity? Putin must not be able to spread this damaging war beyond Ukraine.
We now need a plan to sustain opposition to Putin’s war, keep his criminal regime isolated globally and force him to pull out of Ukraine. That means maintaining the strength of our military, economic, diplomatic and humanitarian assistance, and it means working with our NATO allies to continue to supply Ukraine’s army with lethal weapons.
The Opposition welcome the 5,000 anti-tank missiles and 100 anti-air missiles that the Defence Secretary announced yesterday, but that is not the full amount. I would be grateful to know what the Secretary of State can tell us about the total number of weapons provided to Ukraine by NATO allies so far. Can she confirm whether the UK has started production of replacement next-generation light anti-tank weapons and Starstreak missiles?
It is vital that the Government address gaps in the UK’s sanctions regime. Will the Secretary of State back Labour’s call for a new US-style law to target those who act as proxies for sanctioned individuals and organisations? Will she finally fix the 50% rule, which allows a company to avoid sanctions if 49% is owned by one sanctioned individual and 49% is owned by another?
We also need a longer-term strategy to deal with the indirect consequences of this war, which could go on for months or, sadly, years. In their integrated review, the Government outlined their strategic focus, describing it as an Indo-Pacific tilt. Does the Secretary of State agree that the deprioritisation of European security at this moment was a mistake? As war ravages parts of our continent, we need to put past Brexit divisions behind us, stop seeking rows with our European partners and explore new ways to rebuild relations with European allies by exploring ideas such as a new UK-EU security pact.
Dr Julian Lewis
I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s generally consensual approach, but the fact is that if we entered into a new military or security relationship with Europe but without the United States, we would be fatally undermining the deterrent power of NATO. Putin would like nothing more. Will the right hon. Gentleman please be more careful in his recommendations? That is my advice.
Mr Lammy
I am grateful for the remarks of the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He is quite right that this is not in the absence of the United States; it is simply about underlining the fact that with France as the biggest defence ally within the European Union and with us, there is a key transatlantic relationship that the Europeans are talking about and that we have to be part of. We have to be in the room. I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman agrees with me on that point.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
The shadow Secretary of State is entirely correct; I suspect that when my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) gets to his feet, he will agree with what the shadow Secretary of State has just said. The two things that will rewrite the Euro-Atlantic security architecture are the upcoming strategic review that NATO will publish at the end of June in Madrid and the EU’s strategic compass, which brings something else to the table: not hard military power—the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) is right—but resilience, crisis management, sanctions, trade, energy security and much else. The European Union is a big tank that can take a while to move, but when it moves, my gosh, we notice it. The shadow Secretary of State is right that London and the European Union should have closer security arrangements in future.
Mr Lammy
I am grateful for what the hon. Gentleman says. Just to underline the point, he will recognise that the decision by Germany totally alters the picture of defence in Europe over the next decade. We can sit on the sidelines and allow a conversation between France and Berlin, or we can be part of that conversation. It must be vital to our own industry that we are part of the conversation.
Dr Julian Lewis
Very much in the spirit of consensus, I will entirely concede the right hon. Gentleman’s point if he believes that the effect of our being part of that conversation would be to help stop Germany paying for Russia’s war effort, as unfortunately it is at the moment.
Mr Lammy
The right hon. Gentleman has framed his point in a certain way, and I am reluctant to go down that path. When I went to Berlin with the shadow Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), it was very clear that—particularly because of the key relationship that Russia had had with East Berlin—the withdrawal to which all the Germans we met were committed must of necessity be faced. I think some of language and rhetoric we are hearing is unhelpful to our German partners in this endeavour.
Putin wants to frame this confrontation as being between the west and Russia, but that hides the true nature of the divide caused by Putin’s war. It is a clash between imperialism and self-determination, between international law and the law of the jungle, between hope and fear. If a sovereign United Nations member state can be carved up with minimal consequences, all nations are threatened, and that is why growing the anti-Putin coalition is so vital. We have already had some success in that regard: 141 countries condemned Russia in the United Nations, and Russia was rightly booted off the UN Human Rights Council. I know that the Secretary of State led on that from the front.
Russia’s outright supporters are small in number—a gang of dictators with no respect for human freedom or human rights—but a much larger group have sat on the fence, abstaining on Putin’s monstrous act of aggression, and while 141 of the world’s nearly 200 countries have condemned Russia, in population terms the world is split much closer to 50:50. China has given political support to Moscow, even if it has formally abstained. However, the group of abstentions is much larger, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa and many others. Isolating Russia is a diplomatic priority. That is why it was so wrong that the Prime Minister failed even to raise the issue of India’s neutrality on Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in his recent meeting with Prime Minister Modi. As I asked her earlier, will the Foreign Secretary commit herself to doing so now?
One of the most damaging consequences of this war —the Secretary of State touched on this briefly—is the soaring price of food across the world, which risks a humanitarian catastrophe. If we are to build the widest possible coalition against this war, we must ensure that its costs do not threaten the most vulnerable countries in the world, and that means dealing with rocketing food prices. Before Putin’s illegal invasion, Ukraine was the bread basket of Europe: along with Russia, it accounted for 30% of the global wheat supply, 20% of corn, and more than 70% of sunflower oil. In fact, 12% of all calories traded in the world come from the two nations.
However, to defend themselves from Putin’s assault, Ukraine’s farmers have had to take up arms rather than pull up crops, and their tractors have towed away tanks rather than grain. The ports that they had used to ship their goods to a hungry world are under occupation or siege, and now some of their fields are littered with mines. Food prices rose to their highest ever level in March, up a third on this time last year. Maize and wheat posted month-on-month increases of nearly 20%. Meanwhile, the horn of Africa is facing a worsening drought which the UN says will put 20 million people at risk. Many countries in north Africa and the middle east are also vulnerable because they import more than 50% of their cereal crops. Lebanon is already facing huge economic difficulties and political instability.
Soaring food prices and shortages could cause a humanitarian catastrophe, but there is also the risk that countries and their publics will blame the sanctions for these price spikes rather than Putin’s bloody war, with a gradual unravelling of opposition to the invasion. That is why we need to put food security at the heart of our strategy. Does the Foreign Secretary agree with Labour that Britain should work with the UN to organise an emergency global food summit to put it at the very top of the international agenda? We need to secure commitments for action. The summit can be a focus for collaboration with major producers to increase supplies and meet growing needs. Some major agricultural producers, including India, may be in a position to produce more and to ease pressure on prices. We should be planning for the consequences of this war lasting for months and possibly years, and looking at how to manage new planting seasons for crucial crops.
We need to help the populations most at risk, and the UK and our global partners must help to meet the cost. Developing countries face a toxic cocktail of massive debts driven by the pandemic, rising interest rates and now soaring prices, in particular for food. The president of the World Bank has warned of an impending human catastrophe. Last week, the International Monetary Fund held its spring meeting in Washington and the announcements made there were welcome but they do not yet meet the scale of the challenge ahead. Can I ask the Foreign Secretary what further steps the UK will take with international partners and through institutions such the IMF and the World Bank to prepare for this economic crisis?
The Government said that they merged the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office to bring together diplomacy and development. This is a clear test of how that works in reality. The interconnections between Putin’s illegal war, soaring food prices and the vulnerability of the world’s poorest are clear, so why are the Government not yet connecting the dots? The mismanagement of the merger has so far left the combined Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office as less than the sum of its parts, leaking expertise and draining civil servants of morale, and the short-sighted cuts to aid have left the UK little room to respond to new emergencies. This contradicts the generosity shown by the British people and works against our own national interests, so when will the Conservative Government finally step up?
Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that we are still awaiting the Government’s long-awaited international development strategy that is needed to deal with all these issues of food shortages and healthcare? We have still had no sight of it, yet it is an integral part of bringing these things together.
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend is completely right. As the world recovers from a pandemic that the global south is still in the midst of, and as the world faces rising food prices and rising inflation, it is extraordinary that we heard the Secretary of State say that we would have to wait until the spring. If one went outside, one might think it was the beginning of summer. Where is the strategy? We need to see it.
The latest figures suggest that the UK has issued 70,000 visas for those displaced and fleeing Ukraine. The Secretary of State will know—she will no doubt have got this from the emails coming into her own constituency postbag—that there are still thousands of families saying that they want to offer a home who are still waiting to be connected by her colleague the Home Secretary. The rhetoric is not meeting the ambition of the British people.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making an excellent point. Like many colleagues, I have been approached by British people trying to help refugees. They are desperately trying to get them into this country and to safety. In one awful case, two large families are sharing a single room in Poland, with no money. Everything is ready for almost every member of the party to come to the UK. One piece of the documentation is lacking, and that is holding up the whole group. They are suffering terribly as a result. Please can the Foreign Secretary refer this matter on to her colleagues? I thank my right hon. Friend again for raising this point.
Barbara Keeley
My right hon. Friend heard me raise the plight of a mother and daughter who are waiting to flee Kherson. They will not leave and go to Poland until their visas are sorted out, even though it is so dangerous there and despite the offer of sponsorship. Does he agree that, although it is heart-warming to see the response of the people of the UK, we do not want to see it wasted? Does he agree that we must see emergency protection visas for those fleeing Ukraine who want to reach the UK, with the biometrics and security checks done en route?
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. How is it that the biometric process has held up the humanitarian effort? It feels as if there is a constant concern about security, but we know that the vast majority of those fleeing are women and children. As I said, this undermines our reputation globally.
More than two months on from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this war has entered a new stage. What Ukraine needs now is no longer old, spare weapons from the Soviet era but new NATO weapons to prepare for Putin’s new fronts. We have to recognise that this war will now endure for months, possibly years. Now is the time for long-term thinking about how European security must be strengthened. Now is the time for the Conservatives finally to act on the recommendations of the Russia report. Now is the time for the Conservatives finally to stop their cuts to the armed services.
Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, although it is clear on the Order Paper that the Foreign Secretary and her Department will be responding to this debate, the relevant documents include petitions relating to visas and it would be helpful if a Home Office Minister joined the debate to hear Members’ concerns?
Mr Lammy
The hon. Lady makes her point incredibly well. We want a joined-up Government in this global emergency.
Now is the time to protect the most vulnerable from the cost of Putin’s war, whether they are the vulnerable fleeing Ukraine or the vulnerable in the global south who have to be part of the coalition helping us stand up to this Russian aggression. Now is the time to rethink the already outdated integrated review. Now is the time to make Britain, our allies and partners secure.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I will not put a time limit on the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but I know he will be mindful of the heavy demand to contribute to this time-limited debate.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will be entirely mindful of the time, because I agree with many of the points that have already been made. However, it is worth making a few subsequent points.
In many ways, the first stage of this war—or the latest stage of this war because, of course, the first stage started many years ago—is coming to a conclusion. That conclusion is the end of the direct assault on Kyiv and the focusing of Russian military efforts in the south and east. We are therefore seeing a very different kind of conflict in the south. We are seeing a much more focused attempt by Russia to unite with the areas it already occupies in Moldova—the so-called Transnistria—and we are already seeing a much more acute effort by Russian forces to drive a wedge along the Black sea coast.
We are not seeing very much more Russian success, because the extraordinary courage of the Ukrainian people in the north is mirrored in the south, but we must repeat the points about how we move from this stage to a stage that leads us to victory. The Foreign Secretary and the Minister for the Armed Forces, who is sitting with her on the Front Bench, have already set out various elements of military support. We have already talked about introducing various elements of artillery and offensive weaponry to make sure that not only are the Russians stopped but that the occupied areas are liberated. We know the cost of that occupation, because the rape of Bucha will stand in the annals of history, like so many tragedies and horrors of humanity in years past. Sadly, as many of my Russian friends have said, the name of Russia will be dirt for generations because of the violence done in those communities and the abuses done to those innocents. So how do we move this forward?
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)
Reports that post-mortem examinations have found evidence that women are being raped before being executed by automatic guns are incredibly concerning and indicative of war crimes. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the international community must be doing everything in its power to protect women and girls left behind?
Tom Tugendhat
There is no question but that what we are seeing too often, sadly, not just in Bucha, but in many other areas, including Kharkiv and Sumy, are war crimes. They are crimes against humanity in some cases as well. The sexual violence used against women and girls is truly horrific, and it is clearly not incidental but deliberate; it is clearly an ordered attack—an absolutely vile one.
Let us look at what we need to do. We need to move from the current phase into what this is going to be, which is a campaign, in the sense that it is now going to last. I am afraid that we do not see an easy resolution, a sudden ending of this conflict, peace breaking out and liberation being achieved. Instead, we see a grinding push back of those Russian forces and the need for all of us to be able to sustain this operation to push back the Russians. That will not be achieved if we rely on ex-Soviet equipment—on the stocks left behind at the end of the cold war and the fall of the iron curtain. We need to look at a Finlandisation of Ukraine; we need to be assisting it with the full conversion of its military to a NATO standard, which we can sustain, because we have the weapons, the industry and the factories that can then supply Ukraine. We have the ability to do that because we have the mass and the firepower to sustain the Ukrainians. But we can do that only if we make a deliberate effort and choice to change from where we are now to a proper campaign footing. But this is not just about Ukraine. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary have spoken a little about how this is fundamentally not just a battle for Ukraine; it is a battle for all the world and, very particularly, it is a battle for the UK.
Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)
Were Russia to be allowed to succeed, would Moldova not go next, with Georgia after that? Is it not therefore crucial, in the western interest, that we make sure that there is no success for Putin?
Tom Tugendhat
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that this is one of those domino moments where we can hold the advance and prevent the next one from falling, or we can watch a series of them going down.
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend spoke of victory. I wonder what he thought victory looked like. Given that it is unlikely that Putin is going to capitulate, how do we provide an off ramp for him to secure some sort of peace? Does it mean, for example, insisting that he gets out of Crimea? Does it mean insisting that he gets out of Donbas? Does it mean providing a guarantee that we will not entertain Ukraine’s membership of the European Union or NATO?
Tom Tugendhat
My right hon. Friend knows extremely well that we have no say either on anybody’s membership of the EU or on how the Ukrainian Government decide to assert their sovereignty over their sovereign territory. That is a matter for European Union members, of which we are not one, and for the Ukrainian people, of whom we are not some. So it is essential that we leave that to them to decide. On the NATO question, again I would argue that free countries and free peoples can associate freely with whoever they like. They can choose to make alliances or not to make alliances as they wish. We exercised that sovereignty only a few years ago in changing an alliance position, in changing a relationship with a large bloc, and it is for the Ukrainian people to have the same right and sovereignty to make those choices. It is not for me to tell them how to do it, and I am sure nobody in this House would make that choice for them. I did not actually use the word “victory”, my right hon. Friend did, but I am very happy to address it, because what he is touching on is: where does this end up? That is a very difficult question to answer. However this ends up, Putin already could, if he chose, sell this as victory at home. He could easily turn around and, using his propaganda machine, say that the dysfunction and disturbance he has caused in Ukraine—undermining the west, the disruption to our lives and the incredible violence he has brought to the people in Ukraine—has already, as he would put it, ended its move to the west. He could claim that as victory. The fact that he chooses not to do so should not mean that it is up to us to construct a story for him to lie to his own people. It is up to him to construct his own dishonesty. It is up to him to deceive his own people. It is not up to us to help him to do it.
Our job is to stand by those free people who are showing remarkable courage under the extraordinary leadership of President Zelensky. What is up to us is to decide where our line is. Today, for the people of the United Kingdom, we should be very clear—I am very glad that the Government are—that the people of Ukraine are on the frontline of freedom. What they are doing is defending fundamentally not just our interests in defending the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of alliance and the sovereignty that we pride ourselves on so much on in our own country; they are also defending the rule of law and the freedom of trade and commercial agreement that defends fundamentally our economy, our people and our interests.
This is the final stage—forgive me, I have taken a little longer than I hoped—that we need to be looking at. Three great revolutions have happened in the past few years: Brexit, covid and the Ukrainian war. Each has pointed to the need for us to have greater resilience. Each has taught us the absolute imperative for us to look at our own country and see what lessons need to be learned here at home. The lessons on resilience are clear. They are about being able to produce and manufacture the essential items we need, whether personal protective equipment or weaponry, here at home. They are about the essential need to be able to support our own domestic agricultural economy, whether that is growing more of our own food or producing more of our own fertiliser. They are about the need to make sure that our economy, our country, is resilient—through education, economic output, manufacturing and agriculture—and reliant on itself as much as possible and with partners we can rely on and trust. That is a lesson the three revolutions have taught us and it is about time we learnt it. The very clear lesson from Ukraine is that we may not get a fourth lesson. The fourth lesson could come in a way that surprises us all and leaves us all exposed.
It is said that it is only when the tide goes out that we know who has been swimming naked. Let us hope the tide does not go out too soon.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Before I call the SNP spokesperson, everyone will have noticed that a lot of people want to contribute to the debate. I will introduce a time limit and it will probably be seven minutes.
Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I always remember the maxim that nobody ever criticises a speech for being too short. I commend it to the House.
I am glad to lead for the SNP on this important debate and I am glad that thus far there has been a broad note of consensus across the House on this really important issue. The SNP stands part of the international coalition in defence of Ukraine’s independence and the international rule of law. We have a very clear vision for Scotland’s best future, but there are times in life when we need to work together and focus on what unites. I am glad that the global coalition has come to the aid of the people of Ukraine in their heroic fight against this injustice.
I have had hundreds, if not thousands, of emails from people across Stirling. As I have been travelling across Stirling district, an area slightly bigger than Luxembourg, I have seen hundreds of Ukrainian flags in farms, houses, cars and windows. There is a huge sentiment domestically in support of the people of Ukraine and I am glad to give voice to that from the people of Stirling. I am also glad that we are working together in those aims today.
I will focus my remarks on four heads: military aid, sanctions, refugees and the future, a rather hazy concept on this and on other issues. On military aid, we supported the provision of materiel into Ukraine. Operation Orbital was a success. We support the provision of more aid into Ukraine militarily and assisting others to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) will have more comments on those logistical points.
In the light of the invasion of Ukraine, we have seen that EU and NATO’s roles and presence in the world have evolved at lightspeed, particularly in the case of the EU. I take the points made by the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), but from our perspective it is vital that we see a new UK-EU comprehensive defence and intelligence treaty that formalises the co-operation that is already under way. That would not be in opposition to or undermine NATO—I am pro-NATO and believe that Scotland’s defence, now and in future, will be NATO-based—but the EU is evolving at lightspeed. PESCO—permanent structured co-operation—is growing arms and legs, and it is important that the UK is part of that discussion. We are going to see NATO’s strategic concept, and the EU’s strategic compass is of clear and present relevance to the people of these islands, now and in future. I urge the UK to be close to those discussions.
On sanctions, I would congratulate the Government on getting there. We are not there yet, and it was a patchy start as we saw the global community starting from different points, but we are getting there. I would be grateful to hear a continued assurance that if an individual or organisation is sanctioned by one member of the G7, the EU or the US, they will be sanctioned everywhere else as well. I would also like to hear about more efforts to bring the wider international community in on those sanctions. I think particularly of the UK overseas territories, because a number of loopholes are accidentally being allowed to develop. We need to be vigilant to the fact that they will be exploited by people who know how to exploit loopholes.
I ask the really quite basic question: what is the current value of the assets that the UK authorities have frozen? It must surely be a considerable number. I echo the calls that have been made not just to freeze but to sequestrate those assets, because they are ill-gotten gains, and to put them towards the Marshall fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine that we need to see. I know that discussions on that are under way, but there is a big source of funds before us that should be used urgently to those aims. We would also like to see considerably more complementarity in respect of where those moneys are going to come from.
The biggest area of disagreement between the SNP and the UK Government is on refugees. We believe the UK should have emulated—I hope it still might emulate—what the EU did in waiving visa restrictions for three years. That was a generous, big-hearted offer that was also pragmatic and workable. We are dealing with a war situation: the last thing that people need is new sets of paperwork to get themselves round. Instead of a visa waiver, the Home Office developed a new and complex system of bureaucracy that is simply not working. It is failing. There is not a Member of this House who does not have live cases of Ukrainians who are trying to get to the UK for sanctuary, and not one of us has not had needless bureaucracy tripping them up.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I have many constituents who are finding the situation incredibly frustrating, including Rachel Smith, who has been trying to get people over here. She applied to the scheme more than a month ago but has heard nothing and has basically been told, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.” Does my hon. Friend agree that that is completely unacceptable to people who are fleeing a war zone?
Alyn Smith
I certainly do. I pay warm tribute to my hon. Friend for her work on asylum seekers in general, not just those from Ukraine. We have created in the UK a needless bureaucracy. The EU showed us what should have been done; the UK has done it wrong. We regret the decision that was taken. We will work within the system, but we think it could have been better.
The idea that MPs somehow have privileged access to the system is assuredly not the experience of my office. I pay tribute to a number of people throughout Stirling who have been pushing hard on this issue. In particular, I pay tribute to Trevor Geraghty from Stronachlachar, who is the chair of Strathard Community Council and has done a great deal to make Ukrainians feel welcome. I urge the Foreign Secretary and those on the Treasury Bench to take the issue up with the Home Secretary. The system is not working—it is failing—and a lot of people who rely on us are not getting the support that they need. The process needs to be properly resourced and properly done.
If I look to the future, I think of a number of points in, frankly, no particular order. It is now clear that NATO membership is rising strongly up the agenda for Finland and Sweden. I am glad to hear that the UK supports that move; we certainly do, too, while acknowledging that it is entirely a decision for the peoples of Finland and Sweden.
There is a risk of escalation to other fronts. I echo the point made by the Labour spokesperson, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), about the risks in Moldova. A desperate Kremlin will use other fronts to try to foment discord, dissent and danger. I think particularly of Moldova, Bosnia and the caucuses. We need to be very alive to the prospect of that risk.
On accountability, I have called for, and support, the efforts that the UK is making to support the Ukrainian public prosecutor and the International Criminal Court in investigating war crimes and holding war criminals to account, but I have called for the publication of a specific document on all the ways in which that is being done, because I think that would be useful for us in holding those efforts to account and urging for more.
I would like to see the UK adopt an atrocity-prevention strategy, which I have also called for. I think Ukraine underlines the need for that to be brought through into the Foreign Office’s work, and I urge for that to be taken more seriously. Although the UK is updating policies, the integrated review is now badly behind the times. We need to see it refreshed, and the House needs to be involved in those discussions, because the premises upon which it was written have been upended—the UK is not alone in that—and we should all intellectually and honestly accept that.
On food prices, the implications of the war in Ukraine on an already perilously stretched global food supply chain are significant. I am particularly worried about that when it comes to the developing world, but food security should be far higher up our domestic agenda than it is. In fact, for domestic food production across these islands—however we define “domestic”—the situation has got far worse than better under this Government’s watch. We need complementarity across Government policies. Domestic food policy is being undermined by trade policies, which could undercut our farmers and make us even more dependent on food imports than we are at present. That is a deeply dangerous place for the UK to be, and I urge greater coherence on that point.
There are a number of implications from the war in Ukraine. Although there is a cross-party, united front in facing down the aggression from the Kremlin, there are a number of points for us to think deeply and honestly about in the long term. The SNP will be part of that discussion.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
In earlier debates on 9 and 15 March, I set out my analysis—for what it is worth—of the nature of Putinism in the context of post-communist Russia, and I do not propose to try the patience of the House by repeating all that now. I will just say once again that the great country of Russia is in the grip of a sick, cynical psychopath who is himself firmly in the grip of small-man syndrome. Thus, he waves his shiny new intercontinental ballistic missiles at the world as if it had not been the case for the last half century that if Russia had wished to destroy the west, or if the west had wished to destroy Russia, either could have done that within the lifetime of a day.
What we have to look at more specifically are the political and military forces at work. I do not propose to dwell on the issue of the EU and its aspirations for a combined military voice, whether alongside, apart from or instead of NATO. All I say to the House today is what I have said for many years: without the United States and its military presence and power, there is no security for Europe, and I include the United Kingdom in that concept of Europe.
Once upon a time, it seemed crazy to suggest that the Kremlin archives would ever be opened, but at the end of the first cold war they were, and who knows, one day they may be opened again. I venture to suggest that when that time comes, it will be seen that one of the key factors that weighed heavily in Putin’s decision to do this monstrous thing of invading and raping the country of Ukraine was the way in which a new and apparently weak United States President betrayed the mission in Afghanistan—leaving not even in an orderly way, but in a disorderly way under the arbitrary pressure of a symbolic deadline. That, I am sure, sent a signal to Putin that he would never have a better chance than now to flex his military muscles.
There are the military means of opposing this invasion and the economic means of opposing it. I must say to the House that, while I praise all the efforts being made on sanctions, sanctions will not affect the outcome of this war unless and until Germany stops paying billions of euros to Russia to fund it. By all means let us go on with sanctions, but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that they can possibly be decisive under the present economic flow of wealth from Europe into Russia.
I want to make a point that I have not made before in these debates: this is clearly a David versus Goliath contest. People will nod at that and say, “Well, that’s a bit obvious.”, but I suggest that right hon. and hon. Members remind themselves why and how it was that David beat Goliath. Goliath was armed with all the might and the conventional weapons, but David was armed with a slingshot—a simple weapon that nevertheless proved more than a match for the traditional might of Goliath.
I suggest to the House that that is why, in most areas of the war it has been trying to wage, Russia has not been doing very well. Our Defence team can take a lot of credit for that, in terms of what they have supplied to Ukraine. Ukraine has been supplied with slingshots, in the form of missiles, that have meant that Russian aircraft are not safe in the skies, Russian tanks are not safe on land and Russian ships, as we have seen, are not safe in the Black sea.
However, there is one shot left in Goliath’s locker: the cruel, ruthless bombardment, from an apparently safe distance, by artillery, of Ukrainian cities. I am not quite satisfied yet with the answer we are getting on the question how we should be helping Ukraine to counter that. Matching artillery piece for artillery piece is not the answer, any more than matching tank for tank or aircraft for aircraft. We need to see a smart system of eliminating Russian artillery, in the same way that its other heavy equipment has been eliminated.
Bob Seely
On that point, targeted missiles of the kind we have seen launched at tanks at short range are an answer, but the argument in favour of moving to NATO calibre 155 is that, all things considered—of course shells come in different specifications—it offers slightly longer range. By using longer range, the Ukrainians can stay out of Russian 152 range and target them with their 155s, potentially forcing a change in Russian tactics. There is benefit in moving to NATO calibre as well as in directed missiles.
Dr Lewis
I do not dispute that at all, but we must remember that Russian artillery has Ukrainian cities to aim at, whereas Ukrainian artillery would only be aiming, presumably, at Russian artillery. That may be the best answer there can be, but I would have thought that some of the more modern, smarter systems such as suicide drones might be a more effective response.
That leads to my final point. When people say, “What does victory look like?”, it is not so much a question of victory over Putin as of showing Putin that, unless he desists from this, he will end up much worse off than if he gives up. What has happened so far is that his troops have paid a price that has not shown commensurate gains—his aircraft similarly, his tanks similarly and his ships similarly—so all he has left is this method of artillery. We want the Russians to think that every time they fire an artillery round, their artillery piece is going to be destroyed. We have a very capable Defence Minister doing the wind-up—I am delighted to see him nodding—and that is my one point that I wish to see addressed, because if we can show Goliath that all his weapons are useless and that we can supply the slingshots, perhaps Goliath will decide that it is better to stay away from the battlefield.
Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)
The war in Ukraine has entered its third month, with no end in sight. We all see the tragic scenes on our screens at night: innocent women and children being gunned down, targeted as they queue for bread and shelter from bombs, unable to escape Putin’s attacks; the war crimes, with, unfortunately, women and girls being raped and murdered, sometimes in front of their children; the indiscriminate attacks; Russian rockets striking railway stations; and dead bodies left in the street, people shot as they attempted to flee.
We stand with our NATO allies in providing military, economic, diplomatic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine as it defends itself from this illegal and unethical invasion, but this Conservative Government need to move faster and harder on both economic and diplomatic sanctions against Putin’s regime. Too often, we have lagged behind the EU and the US, while promised measures have yet to be implemented. We urgently need to act against those who are the proxies for sanctions—individuals and organisations.
For years, the Tories have cosied up to Russian oligarchs, allowing their dirty money to pollute our economy, our politics and our institutions. There is no excuse. Why have the Government still not acted on the recommendations of the Russia report, or fixed Companies House, which allows oligarchs to shield their ill-gotten gains? Instead of strategically seeking to fill the gap of Russian energy, our Prime Minister looks to new authoritarians from which to buy oil. This is short-termist, to say the least, and ill-judged. Fossil fuel empowers the worst sorts of dictators. We need to urgently invest in a clean energy strategy and seek to look at how we address the food shortages and escalation in food prices across the world, which a clean energy strategy can also do.
While we open our doors to millions of frightened and fleeing Ukrainian refugees, many neighbouring countries wonder if they will be next, terrified as the history books are replayed, with the tales told to them of the second world war still imprinted firmly on their memories. We must not be on the wrong side of history here. I am incredibly proud that Wales is a nation of sanctuary for refugees and a super-sponsor of those fleeing Ukraine. I am especially proud of so many of my constituents in Cardiff North who have signed up to the Homes for Ukraine scheme and are sponsoring families in desperate need of safety and stability. But I am deeply ashamed at the incompetence of this Tory Government and their Home Office in putting Ukrainian lives in danger when they are still living on the frontlines of Putin’s missiles.
Margaret Ferrier
I personally have had two constituents contact me in just the past two days about situations where only some members of a family have been granted a visa to come to the UK. As such, the family have found themselves stranded in an unfamiliar country without the means to support themselves. Does the hon. Member agree that the Home Office whistleblower’s concerns are disturbing and must be addressed immediately?
Anna McMorrin
Absolutely. It is incompetence, and I have seen the same incompetence with the lost applications of families that my constituents are sponsoring. Sarah, for example, is sponsoring a Ukrainian family with a severely disabled son. They are unable to flee to a refugee camp and outside Ukraine because of their son’s needs. They are stuck living with the daily horrors and the sirens. They are putting their lives on the line and waiting for visas that the Home Office lost. A constituent in Old St Mellons sponsored a mother and a baby, but an error meant that only the mother was granted a visa.
I speak to families desperate for help, and frankly I am furious at how difficult this Government are making it for vulnerable families, women and children to seek sanctuary when they have been forced to leave their homes, their loved ones, their brothers and their husbands—everything they know and love, they have left behind. We are facing the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war, yet the UK’s response stands in stark contrast to that of our European neighbours. We are refusing to match the EU’s decision to offer Ukrainians sanctuary and instead are offering a limited scheme that seeks to match families and individuals online like some twisted dating app. That is what I am hearing from my constituents. When I intervene to try to help those families and my constituents who have sponsored them, the response I get from Home Office officials is to email me back, asking me to stop contacting them. I am sure many of my colleagues have received that very same response.
Last week, I asked the Prime Minister if his 1,000th day would be his last. He lost his temper and told me that he was leading the way in standing up to Putin, but all I see are warm words and empty soundbites, and a Prime Minister more desperate to save his own skin than the lives of Ukrainians. As a world leader, the UK needs to be using its influence to bring about greater international support for Ukraine and set an example in welcoming refugees fleeing Putin’s heinous crimes, but the Prime Minister and his Government are at the moment failing in that task.
We are at a turning point in history—a turning point for our generation and our children. This war will touch every part of our humanity if it is not stopped and if we do not do all we can to prevent as much human suffering as possible. My constituents stand ready to support the Ukrainian people in need—why won’t this Government? Please, let us not be on the wrong side of history.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
What a pleasure it is to take part in this debate, but what a pity that we are forced to have it. There is a grinding inevitability about where we are going with Mr Putin’s war. It is clearly going to escalate, and we need to be prepared for that. It is also a time to take stock of what Mr Putin has achieved, because no doubt those around him have been doing the same. One of the things that Putin wanted to do was to deny Ukraine’s statehood. Well, states are built out of conflict very often. Their founding mythologies often emerge from conflict. What a fine job Putin has done in forging a state in eastern Europe, if it did not exist already, because this conflict has given Ukrainians a sense of added statehood and of nation, and my word should they be proud of themselves.
Putin wanted to contain NATO. Well, that has gone well, hasn’t it? Sweden and Finland are applying for membership and Germany is at long last spending more than 2% of its GDP on defence and galvanising the alliance. Putin no doubt thought that it was an opportunity to display the might of Russia’s military. Well, that has gone well, hasn’t it? There are 15,000 dead without NATO having fired a single shot; a swathe has been taken through Russia’s starred officers; and there has been a decimation of its materiel and the sinking of the flagship Moskva.
As a cold war warrior, I have to ask why we were quaking in our boots all those years. Where is the threat of those Russian tanks sweeping across the central plains of Europe? My word, at this rate, they would struggle to wheeze their way through the Smolensk gate, let alone the Suwalki gap.
Why has Ukraine confounded our expectations? One reason is that it has something that Russia does not, which is what we pompously talked about in staff courses as the moral component of warfare. Ukraine has it; Russia has not. As Napoleon said,
“The moral is to the physical as three to one.”
He should jolly well know, and the people of Russia should know too, as a country with an acute sense of its own history.
The moral component has three elements: motivation, leadership and sound management. Together, they produce the will to fight, as we have seen graphically displayed in Ukraine. They are all contained, happily, within UK doctrine, which is why our armed forces are so good. The moral component is sadly lacking in a country that treats its own as dirt. People should not let the pompous goose-stepping theatre of 9 May fool them. From the sinking of the Kursk two decades ago to the destruction of the Moskva and its crew, the Kremlin has shown a cynical disregard for its people and their people.
Russia’s non-commissioned officer cadre is not a middle management cadre that we would recognise in our armed forces. The fixers, the doers, the cajolers, the junior leaders, the men who get things done—they are largely absent from Russia’s armed forces, which is part of the reason we have seen the destruction of the Russian army and its divisions. We should feel for Russia’s private soldiers, who are directionless, demoralised and disoriented. Bonaparte was correct: I would swap three Russian squaddies for a single Ukrainian any day.
None of that is necessarily good news, however, because a cornered animal lashes out. My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) did not mention Goliath’s ultimate cosh—the thing that he has hidden behind his back. Russia’s Comical Ali, Sergei Lavrov, hints at nuclear escalation and we must steel ourselves for that. That he has even hinted at it shows how bad things are in the Kremlin.
The key, of course, is China, which could switch off this barbarism in a heartbeat. Where will Beijing stand when the Geiger counters start clicking over way beyond eastern Europe? Its soft power, regional and global ambitions, and attempts to present a more positive image to the global community have all taken a severe knock. Its supposed neutrality is not being borne out by its actions, but coercing, cajoling or bullying it is unlikely to be helpful.
Turkey has been doing its best, but it needs a great power to broker some sort of deal or off ramp, given that we are unlikely to be favoured with the Kremlin’s capitulation. Putin’s use of a low-yield nuclear weapon to awaken the Chinese dragon may just be what is needed in this scenario, but it may equally be his greatest misstep and the beginning of the end for him. All that then will be left will be for him to join his fellow mass killers Hitler and Stalin in the annals of infamy, and for his cronies to crawl away under whichever stones they can find, awaiting judgment and retribution from the world’s civilised communities. Slava Ukraini.
Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
As I said when I intervened on the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) earlier, although the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was identified as the responding Department, the debate is linked to two petitions related to visa issues. I am bitterly disappointed that we have not been joined by a Home Office Minister. I will now have to speak into the ether and send the Hansard transcript to the Refugees Minister, bringing the total number of letters that I will have sent unanswered to three.
I will talk about a number of cases in my constituency, and then put some questions on the record. I hope that the Minister may be able to answer them, but if not, that he will pass them on to the Home Office. I have a number of cases to do with the Homes for Ukraine scheme; quite frankly, the scheme is in a complete and utter mess.
A Ukrainian mother with two daughters applied five weeks ago. My team went to the MP hub in Portcullis House and asked if all the necessary documents were there. We were told that they were and there were no issues. Four days later, we were told that one of the daughters had a passport that had expired and it was no longer acceptable. Her father, still in Ukraine, had to go to the Ukrainian passport office—in the middle of a war—to pick up a new passport. His daughter’s application remains outstanding, despite his having sent a photograph of that passport to his wife two weeks ago.
The next example is of a mother, a father and a baby boy. The baby boy was too young to get a passport before he had to leave home. We were advised that it was possible to get the permission to travel document without that passport. Three weeks after being told that, we are now being told they need a new passport for that child.
The third case is of a mother and two daughters whose application was submitted. Three weeks later, they have been told they now have to attend a visa application centre to submit their biometrics. The passport had been attached to the online application, but it had been attached to the wrong section. They have to go and fill in the forms again, because it was attached to the wrong box on the form.
In the case of another of my families—a mother and two daughters—the daughters both had expired passports and they were told they had to get passport extensions, so they did. When they went on to the Homes for Ukraine forum online, they could not upload the new extended passports because they had already uploaded the expired passports, so they uploaded them into the travel and residency section. My constituent, who is trying to help this family, phoned the Ukraine Home Office helpline three times to ask if this was okay, and was told three different things: on the first call, that the family should travel three hours for a biometrics appointment; on the second call, that nothing further was required; and on the third call, that the new application would need to be submitted a week later. My team went to the Portcullis House hub and asked what the real answer was, and we were told the documents were on file and nothing more was needed. They have now suddenly been told, once again, that they have to go to a biometrics appointment.
When we have mothers and children or mothers and babies fleeing war on our continent, it is absolutely heart-breaking, frustrating and angering that the response of the Home Office is “Computer says no”, but that is what we are facing. I recognise that the Foreign Secretary said earlier that she would take up the specific case raised by the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), but we all have cases—we have so many cases. I have given just a few examples, and I have many more. The system is not working, and we would like to know what will be improved.
I have a number of policy-related questions to put on the record. I have discovered that a number of applications between 18 and 25 March remain outstanding, even though applications put in after 25 March have been processed and approved. It would be good if the Government explained in what order applications are processed and why later applications are being processed when there is a window within which a number of applications appear to have disappeared into the ether.
Secondly, why are there delays, often of up to seven or 10 days, between visas being approved and permission to travel documents being sent? I tabled a named day question last week, asking the Home Office to provide an explanation for that delay. I should have received the answer this evening, but I received a holding response. Thirdly, why is the online system so clunky that my constituents, and the families they are trying to bring to safe harbour, cannot even change an email address or home address, or something along those lines? I have a constituent who is upsizing and moving to a larger flat so that he can bring in a family from Ukraine. He cannot update his home address, and he has been told that he has to start the application process all over again. The system is absurd!
I have been in touch with my local council, which also has questions. It is being given the numbers of families who are applying through the Homes for Ukraine scheme, but not the numbers of people coming under the Ukraine family scheme. It cannot get that information, so it does not know how many people to expect. It asks whether funding will be provided to local authorities to support Ukrainians who have come under the family scheme. No funding has been provided, yet those people can access benefits, health and education. The council also wants to know—it is still awaiting guidance on the matching process under the Homes for Ukraine scheme—what happens if the sponsor and Ukrainian family relationship fails.
Alison Thewliss
Does the hon. Lady agree it is important that councils know who is coming so that they can plan their services accordingly? For example, tutors in English as an additional language might be required in schools.
Daisy Cooper
The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and it is critical that local councils know how to plan their services.
The final point from our local council was that refuges apparently cannot swap from the Ukraine family scheme to the Homes for Ukraine scheme if the accommodation does not work. I have put a lot of questions on the record, and I sincerely hope that the Government have listened. I have already sent two letters to the refugees Minister, and tomorrow I will send a third. I am bitterly disappointed, as my constituents will be, that we do not have a Minister from the Home Office to respond to the debate. I am begging the Government: please listen to these concerns, and please, please fix the system.
Robert Largan (High Peak) (Con)
The invasion of Ukraine is a despicable act by a desperate criminal regime, and how we respond now will determine the strength of our democracy and collective security for decades to come. We have a strategic imperative and moral duty to act. The people of Ukraine are putting up a fearsome resistance that is nothing short of inspiring. Sixty-two days on, Russian forces have been repelled from the north of the country, and are now confined to waging their war to the south and east of Ukraine. It is estimated that some 2,000 Russian armoured vehicles, 60 aircraft, and two key naval assets have been either destroyed or captured, with around 15,000 Russian personnel reportedly killed, all as a result of Vladimir Putin’s arrogance.
I am proud of the decisive action that the UK has taken to help Ukrainians defend their freedom and their homeland. The support provided is too extensive to detail in full today, but it is worth reinforcing that the UK has been leading efforts to co-ordinate an international response to Russian aggression since 2015, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Under Operation Orbital, our armed forces trained more than 22,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and the UK has led the world in being the first country to send defensive weapons to Ukraine, despite the resistance of many at the time. The UK has also provided key logistical support to help Ukraine even the odds in its struggle to maintain its freedom. I pay tribute to the Royal Air Force, who have worked relentlessly to help supply Ukraine with the vital equipment that it needs. I hope that many of our friends and allies will do more to follow suit.
Last week, a report published by the German newspaper Bild found that, disappointingly, Olaf Scholz’s office had vetoed more than two thirds of deliveries that the German Chancellor had previously promised. By contrast, in High Peak, I have been struck by the number of local people who have stepped up to offer their support in any way that they can. In particular, I thank Mike Chandler at Chapel-en-le-Frith Parish Council who, along with Whaley Bridge Town Council and others, has been leading the way in co-ordinating local efforts to reach out and support Ukrainians arriving in the UK and the households who are kindly hosting them. I also want to highlight local charities, including Little Cherubs and Buxton Baby Bank, as well as organisations such as Homes for Ukraine High Peak, the firefighters at Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service and others who have been doing such amazing work to help. We have seen many local businesses step up, too, including Lomas Distribution in Buxton, which sent a lorryload of essentials to Ukraine.
Back in February, together with a number of Conservative colleagues, I wrote to the Prime Minister to call on the Government to provide a flexible, pragmatic and compassionate policy for Ukrainians seeking temporary refuge in the UK. Our country has a long and proud history of taking in people in need and supporting the most vulnerable during their darkest hour. I am glad that the Government have listened. So far, more than 70,000 visas have been issued to Ukrainians. As a testament to the generous spirit of the people of High Peak, my office and I have been inundated with inquiries from constituents who are sponsoring visas for those fleeing the conflict. I am working as hard as I can to help resolve any applications that are still outstanding with the Home Office.
I remain concerned, however, about the life chances of Ukrainian children and their access to a good education when they arrive in the UK. We need a joined-up approach across Government and local authorities so that Ukrainian children have the best possible chance of rebuilding their life. A key part of that task must be identifying Ukrainian translators from among those arriving in the UK and putting their language skills to good effect as quickly as possible. We also need to keep in mind that many Ukrainians coming to the UK will be deeply traumatised by their experiences, so access to mental health support is essential.
I am proud of how High Peak and the UK have responded to the crisis, but it is essential that we maintain our resolve and support for the people of Ukraine. Russia is betting that the world will tire of the conflict and that international unity will fragment as the weeks turn to months. We must not let that happen. We are already hearing some voices—including, sadly, some in this House—trying to put pressure on Ukraine to negotiate a settlement with Moscow. That decision can be taken only by the sovereign Ukrainian people themselves. In reality, some of those calls for peace are actually calls for the Ukrainians simply to surrender and give Putin what he wants. The last couple of months have exposed some of those voices for what they really are, and it heartens me to see them so isolated, with many who only recently were echoing Kremlin propaganda scrambling to reposition themselves on the right side of history. Time will be their judge and ours.
Our job is to support Ukrainians in their fight to defend their freedom and their homeland. It has never been more important that we stay united and stand up for what is right.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate, and it is an honour to follow the contributions of so many right hon. and hon. Members.
I want to start by quoting the words of my constituent who grew up in Ukraine:
“I could never have imagined that in 20 years it would be a land at war—at war with its closest neighbour. It is too easy to think that these things will not happen to you. They can, and they do. And right now, they are happening just three hours’ flight away from where you and I live.”
In the past two months, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we have all seen the horror day after day on our TV and social media, with not just bombs but atrocities, abuse and rape. As one of my constituents told me, in war, it is always the women who bear the brunt of the abuse.
Our constituents have opened up their homes for newly arriving Ukrainian families. Students and staff at Chiswick School in my constituency filled and sent off the school van with donated clothes, blankets and other essentials. Children of Ukrainian and Russian heritage at the school worked together on the project. Polish Radio London, which is based in Isleworth, also organised donations, along with countless other businesses, residents and community groups.
In Ukraine’s darkest hour, people locally have shown amazing support. Although the FCDO and the MOD have done the right thing nationally in providing support for Ukraine, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, we need joined-up government. In many senses, we have had it, but the Home Office is failing to ensure that vulnerable Ukrainians and their families can arrive promptly in the UK. That is in stark contrast to the open welcome that has been offered by virtually every other European country.
More than 5 million people have already fled Ukraine. I have heard a number of heartbreaking stories from constituents about the choices that Ukrainians have had to make about whether to leave, including one whose family had to stay because their mother was bed-bound and they could not bear to leave her. However, the journeys of those who have made the heartbreaking choice to leave and seek refuge here have too often been unnecessarily difficult.
My London borough of Hounslow has a proud tradition of supporting and welcoming refugees, but even before Russia’s invasion, I was seeing problem after problem with the Home Office. Routine cases had long delays, my caseworkers could not get basic information from the Home Office and there were inconsistent decisions, as the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) described, with many people living in limbo as they wait. We remember the chaos as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, with many UK citizens, those who had worked for the UK and those who had worked for human rights in Afghanistan failed by our Government. Many are still waiting.
I say that because the Home Office will claim that the Ukraine situation was unexpected, yet there are long-running problems in the Home Office. Sadly, the thousands of Ukrainians waiting for visas and their expectant hosts have seen those failings at first hand. I have been contacted by constituents who are sponsoring Ukrainians sheltering in train stations in Poland after having crossed the border. I am also aware of cases in which Ukrainians have returned home because they had nowhere to wait and could not wait any longer.
However, this is not just about delays; the scheme has fundamental gaps, which I worry will cause a serious problem. One such gap was that Ukrainians in the UK on tier 2 visas were unable to sponsor their family members to arrive under the first scheme. That deliberate move by the Government meant that one of my constituents had to wait weeks for the Homes for Ukraine scheme to open. With 5 million people fleeing Ukraine, many of whom have family living here—Hounslow is the third most populous borough for Ukrainians—why would the Government put those blocks in place and make arbitrary, inconsistent decisions that often split families up further?
Another gap is the UK Government’s failure to play a matching role under the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Instead, refugees were left in a wild west sponsor scheme, where they had to search on Facebook for people running the Homes for Ukraine scheme. The Times had a harrowing but depressingly predictable article about how Ukrainian women were being targeted by men in the UK who would offer them accommodation in exchange for sex. That is disgusting and vile. The Government should have played a role in matching refugees directly with sponsors in the UK, or used a reputable non-governmental organisation to do that.
The other contradiction relates to accommodation. The Homes for Ukraine scheme does not apply to fleeing Ukrainians joining family members who have come here through the family scheme. If their sponsoring relative lives in a one-bedroom flat, as my constituent does, and has no room for another adult and two or three children, the Ukrainian family members coming here have to declare themselves homeless. They have just fled war and our first act is to ask them to go to the housing department and declare themselves homeless; is that really what our Government intended when they set up Homes for Ukraine, from which such families are excluded?
Those are only a few of the issues that I have seen. They have all come from the same fundamental problem in the Home Office: a culture led by a mix of organisational failure and cynicism. Frankly, the Home Secretary has failed to fix the mess of her Department, and refugees arriving from Ukraine and their hosts and sponsors have had to bear the burden.
In this country, we have a history of accepting refugees at their time of need. That history goes back to the 50,000 Huguenots, and further. I hope that the Government will act, and act urgently, to ensure that this is a moment that lends itself to the historic tradition of doing the right thing and welcoming those in need.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in today’s debate and to follow so many right hon. and hon. Members. From the blitz on Kharkiv to the siege of Mariupol, the war in Ukraine and the hideous atrocities of the Putin regime have shone a light on the remarkable courage of the Ukrainian people. I want to tell the House about one such person in East Surrey.
My constituent Tanya watched with disbelief as Russian precision-guided missiles first flew into Kyivan residential tower blocks. She is a single mother of two children who moved to East Surrey from Ukraine a number of years ago, but her elderly mother Vira remained in Kyiv: owing to old age, she was no longer able to fly, and she had recently suffered a stroke, so she could not walk more than a few metres without help.
As we have seen so many times from the Ukrainians in recent months, however, Tanya did not balk at the challenge. She left her children with friends and drove 1,500 miles to the edge of her war-torn country to pick her mother up. Thanks to the Home Office’s help, she got her back here safely. It is a story of remarkable courage, but as we have heard today, the capacity for remarkable courage is not unusual for the people of Ukraine. If we are being honest with ourselves, I think we all hope that we have the kind of bravery that they have shown, but we all hope that we will never need it. I am so proud of Tanya and all she has done to protect her family.
I was also very proud on the day President Zelensky said that our Prime Minister had been an example to the world. I was proud that he highlighted Britain as Ukraine’s “most sincere friend”. I am proud that this was the first country in Europe that provided lethal aid and that it has been working with the Ukrainian people since 2015, backed by successive Defence Secretaries who have supported Operation Orbital and the British armed forces training the Ukrainian army. I am proud that this country has now granted safety to more than 30,000 Ukrainians fleeing the most awful brutality.
While our allies talk about Britain’s leadership, there are those in this country who always want to do us down. However, I believe we can and should take pride in the British response, which we can see in all our constituencies: in East Surrey, we have people like Lee Pearce in Woldingham, Alex and Charles Severn in Dormansland and Shashi Fernando in Caterham on the Hill. I have been bowled over by the kindness and generosity of spirit that my constituents in East Surrey have shown in welcoming people into their homes.
I put on the record my thanks to Jack Powell in my team for all the determination and energy that he has shown in working with local families. I also thank all the people who work in the Ukrainian hub in Portcullis House; I know that they have heard a lot from us.
This is only the beginning. It is clear that the relative safety and security that I have lived through is no longer something that we can take for granted. Britain is one of the only countries that has met its NATO duty to spend 2% on defence every single year since the target was created in 2006. That is important, because we know that defence procurement needs a long lead time. For example, our own aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, were first conceived in the early 2000s, while the House’s decision to renew Trident in 2016 will be realised in 2030.
Government Members know that we cannot wait until war has broken out to invest in defence. However, some countries in Europe that have benefited enormously from the economy of Europe have not lived up to their responsibility to the security of Europe. Now is the time for a reinvigorated NATO to be supported by a renewed commitment. I welcome all the moves from our allies, but it is crucial that they be maintained in peacetime, as we have done here in Britain.
There is clearly a growing threat from authoritarian states to our values in the free world. I noticed that an Opposition Member questioned our recent decision to have a tilt towards the Indo-Pacific, but I say moderately that part of the reason for Putin’s actions is that Russia has been emboldened by its relationship with China. The moves that we have made—seeking dialogue partnership with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, acceding to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership and working with AUKUS, which is a brilliant relationship—all feed into global security. I urge hon. Members not to be too narrow-minded.
President Kennedy said that democracy was not perfect, but in the free world we did not have to build a wall to keep our people in. However, countries that are increasingly hostile actors no longer need an actual wall. They have created digital walls through the use of disinformation and the nationalisation and state policing of the internet, which has created many intranets excluding news and views that are contrary to those that they wish to promote. Those are digital walls, and we in the House should be very concerned about them, along with the many other developments with which we are dealing in order to promote security around the world.
Let me finally say this. All people have a right to freedom and democracy, including the 44 million people in Ukraine. That is not a western philosophy; it is the foundation of humanity.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho). Much of what she said was, of course, right. There were parts of it with which I did not agree, and we may return to those later, but what she said about the generosity of the public was entirely correct. That is reflected from Surrey to the south side of Glasgow, as Members would expect and, indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss)—who is sitting beside me—knows.
Let me start with where I think the Government have got it right. I think they have got it especially right in terms of military support. We hear from President Zelensky that “weapons, weapons, weapons” are what will help him and his people to win this war, and Ukraine winning the war is actually what matters. It is fair to say that the Government have been leading on that front, and the hon. Member for East Surrey can indeed take some pride in the fact that that is recognised by the President and the Government of Ukraine. The official Opposition—together with me, as my party’s defence spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) as our foreign affairs spokesperson, and indeed the First Minister of Scotland—have been on the same page, along with our leader here at Westminster, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). Weapons, weapons, weapons are what will help Ukraine to defeat Russia on its territory.
There is a growing mood in Ukraine, a wish not just to push back against the aggression that we have seen from the current wave of the conflict. I have noticed a couple of references to the war having started in February this year, but of course it did not; it started in 2014.
Bob Seely
The hon. Gentleman is making a good case about when the war started, but there is another good case for suggesting—given the hybrid, integrated approach to warfare that Russia has in its doctrine—that it started in about 2004 or 2005, after the orange revolution, although the violent and paramilitary aspects became more visible after 2014.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald
My fellow member of the Foreign Affairs Committee is most learned in these affairs, and I completely agree with everything that he has just said. What we will see, not just in Ukraine but around the western world, is an intensification of those other elements of the Russian warfare doctrine, such as cyber disinformation and the use of private military contractors.
Ukraine
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Stewart Malcolm McDonald
As I was saying, there is now a growing mood in Ukraine in favour of not just pushing back against the aggression that we have seen in the current wave of the conflict, but regaining the parts of its territory that were illegally annexed—stolen—by the Russian Federation in years going back to 2014. That is a most honourable and noble cause. Quite correctly, this Government and Governments before them have never recognised the illegal annexation and occupation of Crimea and the Donbas region.
So the Government have been good on weapons, and on economic support for Ukraine. The sanctions got off to a slow start—sometimes legitimately, I think it is fair to say—but we are getting there, and that is good. The Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), was right to say that sanctions would not help us in this conflict but we should be implementing them none the less.
However, one big subject has been coming up in respect of where the Government can do better. I challenge the assertion by the hon. Member for East Surrey that this is somehow talking the Government down, but I want them to do better on refugees. I am sure that the hon. Lady does as well, along with other Members on both sides of the House.
Who can look at the scenes in Mariupol, in Bucha or in Kharkiv where babies are wearing poly-bags as nappies and children have spent all of this war underground, 40-plus days at a time, essentially buried alive under their country by the regime in Russia and its armed forces—who can see those scenes and not want a better refugee system? We need to move as fast as the war in supplying weapons—I welcome the new contact group announced by the US Defence Secretary on that front—and we need to move as fast as the war to help people to get out of it. That is easy for us to say, standing here in this room among the green Benches, but it is not always easy to deliver. I accept that, but where the Government do have power, it is rather unfortunate that it is the Home Office that gets to exercise it, because the Home Office has never seen a problem it did not want to make worse. That is about the only thing it succeeds in. However, the Government do have the power to fix this, and we should have matched the offer of other European Union member states. I do not say that to make a Brexit leave/remain point; I say it because I think it matches not just the speed of the war but the level of ambition and generosity that all our constituents expect us to show.
The Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey), will know that disinformation is one of my hobby horses. In terms of where this situation now goes geopolitically, I welcome the fact that the disinformation networks, particularly the Russian broadcast networks, have been so beautifully dismantled, not just in this country but across Europe, but we are seeing the Russia-China axis getting together—I suppose the hon. Member for East Surrey is right in that sense—and China using its disinformation networks to help Russia to get its propaganda message out where it otherwise could not previously do. That is something to keep an eye on.
Our own Euro-Atlantic area needs to be the focus. The integrated review is now out of date. There are some things in it that the Government can reasonably sustain, but fundamentally, it needs to be rewritten. I have never agreed with the Indo-Pacific tilt. I entirely accept the hon. Member for East Surrey’s point that there are important partnerships to be developed there, but the Euro-Atlantic area is where we find ourselves on the map, and no amount of Brexit, the global Britain project or whatever is going to change that. Europe is our fundamental area. I would argue, as a Scottish MP, that the high north and northern Europe is a fundamental area of operation for the United Kingdom. Indeed, it would be even if I achieved my constitutional project.
I am conscious that we are not even three months into this wave of the war, but as this all starts to land, having been shaken by Moscow, we need to think about how the Euro-Atlantic architecture is being rewritten. The twin pillars of security for these islands are NATO and the European Union, and although the UK is not part of the European Union, it remains an important security, intelligence-sharing and resilience partner. The strategic compass published by the European Union member states in March and the upcoming Madrid strategic concept from NATO member states in June will be fundamental to rewriting that architecture for a generation.
Of course NATO is the cornerstone of the hard military power; nobody seeks to deny that. I am a supporter of NATO. I have a slightly different iteration from my good friend the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee on the nuclear deterrent, but I get that it is the principal hard military cornerstone of Euro-Atlantic defence. But whether Members like it or not, the European Union is a serious and ambitious actor in resilience, crisis management, energy policy, trade and much else, and it is absolutely sensible to suggest that a comprehensive treaty between the UK and the European Union on these affairs should take place, however unrealistic that might be. Under this particular Government, we are not going to get it anytime soon, but I will bet any amount of money—if that is not against the “Erskine May” rules on what happens on the Floor of the House—that we will get there eventually, under this Government or perhaps another Government in the future. As that architecture is redrawn, as we do everything we can to help Ukraine and as we all marshal our ambition to ensure that Ukraine has a free and prosperous future with its sovereignty and integrity intact, let us all meet the moment with ambition, but let us do it not harbouring our own old-fashioned views of the world but recognising the moment that we find ourselves in now.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I thank the Foreign Secretary for her leadership and for her comments in opening the debate. It is sad that some Opposition Members are so keen to criticise and attack that they disregard the economic, military and humanitarian support coming from our country. It is clear that the Ukrainian people, President Zelensky and his team trust the Prime Minister, the UK Government and our people to deliver the support and equipment they need. I particularly thank our armed forces personnel, who spent many months training the Ukrainian army long before the Ukraine conflict was on everyone’s lips.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
The hon. Lady, like me, is relatively new to this place. Was she as surprised and disappointed as I was to read in the weekend press that previous Defence Secretaries such as Michael Fallon pushed for armaments and support to be given to Ukraine, only to be turned down?
Siobhan Baillie
The history leading into any conflict will be pored over, and there will be various different accounts. We have to deal with the here and now. Having spoken to the parliamentarians who recently came over from Ukraine, I know they have faith in what this country is doing. We will learn on our feet as we go.
The people of Stroud care deeply about this issue. I receive emails all the time asking me to advocate for more equipment and more lethal aid, and to make sure we are doing whatever we can to support Ukraine. The majority of the public understand the complexities and the essential need to work with NATO, rather than trying to go it alone, despite the emotional pull to do more and more. Stroud very much wants to see Russia defeated and President Putin stopped in his tracks. We give respect to the Ukrainian forces that are keeping up the fight.
I will focus my remarks on the local work for Ukrainian families. The Minister for the Armed Forces and the Minister for Europe and North America are sitting on the Front Bench, and they are very aware that the fighters being brave for Ukraine need to know that their loved ones are supported and have safe sanctuary in the UK, or in whichever country they choose.
The schemes we have put in place are very important. We have already settled 88 guests across 43 properties in Gloucestershire, and many more people have put themselves forward to host families. My office is handling 55 applications, and over the last week we have had 27 confirmations that visas and permission to travel letters have been sent out. My website has an awful lot of information for anyone listening to this debate, and I give credit to organisations such as the Help for Ukraine Support Hub down in Dursley and Stroud’s Ukraine refugee community support network, which are doing a lot of organising.
It is right to raise concerns in this place where we see problems with procedures and schemes, but the Homes for Ukraine scheme has never been done before anywhere in the world. As we know, the Home Office is already stretched with various schemes to look after families from Afghanistan and Hong Kong, on top of all its day-to-day business. I am the first to criticise, sometimes but not always constructively, when I see problems, but I believe the public understand that, although we want to go faster, we have to be cautious on safeguarding. We have to get this right, and we have to make sure that children and women, in particular, are not at risk of trafficking.
I have permission to speak on behalf of the “team Gloucestershire” MPs, all six of us, on two key points for the Ukrainian refugees who hope to come to our county. First, I want to see fast work to organise a rematching programme for when placements through the host-matching programme break down for whatever reason. The second is the sharing of data between councils, particularly on the families scheme and on registering issues that arise with safeguarding cases and hosts.
I completely understand that there is a lot of focus on the original match scheme, but the rematching of willing sponsors with refugees is a vital part of the puzzle. We know that there will situations where relationships with hosts will break down, no matter how much effort is put in on both sides. There will also be situations where councils have to reject homes that are not considered right to host refugees, for whatever reason, and, more importantly, where safeguarding concerns are identified. We know that we all have hundreds of families in our constituencies who wish to take part—that is particularly the case in Stroud and Gloucestershire, because people have put their hands up quickly—so it makes no sense that the option available to families if a relationship breaks down or if there is a problem with the host is that they end up in a homelessness situation. I would like us to find a way to use that good will and the option for refugees and councils to rematch on a formal basis, not informally, so that we have all of the Government safeguarding and co-ordination put in place. I hope that the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is able to achieve that soon.
Similarly, I hope we can tighten up data sharing, as that will be necessary for safeguarding and for ensuring that the schemes are efficient. In a local case, a 23-year-old female guest was coming to Gloucestershire, but the shared bedroom with a male sponsor was found to be unsuitable, and he had also made an inappropriate comment about the guest during a visit by the property team. Obviously, red flags were going up there, but there is no way to stop that match; the visa was issued. When spoken to, the guest said that the person was their boyfriend, but they have since moved on to another family and there is no way to track them. These are issues of safeguarding. We are talking about a vulnerable lone female. As I have said, we cannot stop the visas, and the guests are not deemed vulnerable under the legal definition as they are adults with no mental illness or disability, so councils cannot intervene. We cannot stop the original sponsors going on to rematch again, because there is no way of registering that there is a red flag for that host.
I am not going to be a negative ninny—I completely understand the complexities—but there are changes we can make to improve these schemes. I have been having wonderful conversations with people in Stroud. In my village of Frampton on Severn, everything starts with a WhatsApp group and there is a fantastic one looking after people who want to host or refugees who are coming. I want this scheme to work. I want it to be a strong pillar of our help for Ukraine, alongside the UK’s efforts from the MOD, Foreign Office and Home Office. It will bring comfort to those brave Ukrainian men and women fighting on the frontline to know that there are good, strong refugee schemes coming into this country. I look forward to working with all Ministers on a cross-departmental basis to achieve that. The world is dangerous, or it feels dangerous to us, but it is absolutely horrendous for quite a lot of people living in Ukraine right now.
Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), who raises a number of valuable issues about utilising the good will of the British public, working with local councils and the importance of data sharing for security and safeguarding.
I want to focus my remarks on highlighting a case, just as many right hon. and hon. Members have done. My constituent Kat Karpenko now lives in Vauxhall, but she was born and raised in Ukraine. Kat’s elderly parents are doctors and they lived in Irpin before Russia’s barbaric war began two months ago. Like many other Ukrainians, Kat’s parents refused to leave, and they volunteered at their local hospital. Devastatingly, it was bombed by Russian forces, as was their home. As a result, Kat’s parents were forced to flee their home, along with her disabled nephew, who needs medical check-ups and attention.
Let there be no mistaking that the bombing of the hospital and the burning of homes in Irpin are accidental. Let there be no mistaking that the horrific scenes coming out of Mariupol are accidental. Let there be no mistaking that the massacre in Bucha was accidental. We all know that these are the tactics of tyrants. The targeting of civilians is part of a fear tactic: to scare people not just in the cities targeted across Ukraine, but across the entire lands that Putin seeks to influence and control. Part of the fear is uncertainty: uncertainty that they will never be able to return to their home; uncertainty that they may never see their neighbours and close friends again; and uncertainty that they will spend months if not years as a refugee with nowhere to call home.
The humane treatment of refugees by the UK is not just a matter of compassion; it is a vital weapon against the fear tactics of Russia. I am proud that people in Vauxhall have stepped up with that humanitarian support. They have stepped up to that challenge with their enthusiasm for the Homes for Ukraine scheme. I am proud of my council, Lambeth, for the support programmes it has provided for the Ukrainian people in our area.
However, many Ukrainian refugees are still struggling to reach our country. In the early days of March, Kat’s parents travelled to Paris to apply for a visa as part of the Ukraine family scheme. Yet despite submitting their passports and biometric data for the visa and Kat’s nephew’s medical needs, Kat’s family are still unable to enter the UK and are moving from temporary accommodation to temporary accommodation. UK staff at the visa centre in Paris said it would take a matter of five days for the paperwork to be processed and their asylum granted. After almost six weeks, Kat’s parents and her nephew are still waiting.
The Ukrainian people are showing great courage and strength in the face of the appalling Russian onslaught. We need to support them, including by giving sanctuary to those fleeing war in Europe, as we have in past generations. No one from the Home Office is present, but I hope the Minister is listening. How much more additional support can we provide to Home Office officials? We know they are understaffed. Staff members from across the House who have contacted Home Office officials have in some instances received replies saying that they cannot help us. We cannot let down my constituents such as Kat, and so many others across the country. I hope that in his response the Minister will outline what more we can provide to boost military support and to support refugees and get them safely to the UK.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. I must reduce the time limit to six minutes.
Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow other hon. Members in this debate. The whole House has shown that we are united in our support for Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin’s barbaric crimes are shocking and incomprehensible. His actions in Mariupol, Bucha and beyond suggest clear evidence of war crimes against the Ukrainian people. As Putin’s military aggression continues against the people of Ukraine, with reports involving civilians of murders, enforced disappearances, deportations, imprisonment, torture, rape and the desecration of corpses, there is a strong case for saying that Putin’s actions have gone well beyond war crimes and that we must explore recent reports of what could amount to a genocide of the Ukrainian people. I will support any attempts to hold this barbaric leader accountable for those despicable crimes.
The United Kingdom has shown Putin that we will not stand for his actions. We have made clear our unequivocal support for the Ukrainian people. We have led the way, in the G7 and beyond, in standing up to Putin’s aggression. We were the first country to start sending ammunition to Ukraine. The Government have played a key role in organising the donation and delivery of military equipment, with the Ukrainian military now equipped with hundreds of thousands of UK-supplied military equipment. We have just heard the Foreign Secretary announce that a further 6,000 anti-tank weapons will be provided, and over 10,000 missiles have been provided, all amounting to the provision of approximately £450 million-worth of military equipment.
My thanks go to the Secretary of State for Defence, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister for their efforts. I was proud that our Prime Minister was the first G7 leader to visit President Zelensky personally in Kyiv. I was delighted that on that visit the Prime Minister announced another package of support for the Ukrainian army that will include armoured vehicles and anti-ship weaponry. It is clear that we are leading the way internationally to support the brave Ukrainian troops who are protecting their country and their democracy.
Let me touch on the other issues surrounding the invasion, which relate to food security. Ukraine is one of the world’s bread baskets. We have seen agricultural production there decline, which will pose a huge threat to global food security. Reports suggest that the 2022 grain harvest is likely to be 20% lower than it was in 2021 because of reduced sowing and yields following the invasion. Ukraine is the world’s fourth largest producer and exporter of agricultural goods. The reduced supply of grain will cause a global increase in its price that will inevitably have an effect not only here but in some of the most deprived parts of the globe. It all comes down to resilience: we must make sure that we have our own domestic food-production agenda to ensure our food security and increase our self-sufficiency above its current level of 63%.
At a local level, I am proud that so many people throughout my constituency of Keighley and Ilkley are showing their support for the Ukrainian people. The Keighley Ukrainian association and the Good Shepherd Centre have worked together to gather donations from near and far to send to those fleeing war in Ukraine. Thanks to their hard work, more than 40 tonnes of donations were assembled and sent a month or so ago. The amazing volunteers from Keighley have driven it all to the Polish border with Ukraine. That shows the incredible efforts of my constituents.
I pay tribute to the organisation Ilkley and Surrounds Support for Ukrainian Evacuees, which is led by Caroline Hyde from Ilkley, whom I met recently. This fantastic group is working incredibly hard at a local level to ensure that the right support is provided to the refugees who make it to Ilkley and the wider area of my constituency. In a short amount of time, the volunteers have created a great network of communications channels in my constituency to ensure that refugees have the right support to get into education settings and that healthcare settings are as supportive as possible.
The Home Office is getting through a huge amount of visa applications, but personally I still have 11 outstanding cases that I raise with the Home Office repetitively, on a daily basis—I was at the hub in Portcullis House again only yesterday. I urge the Home Office to look into those 11 outstanding cases so that we can ensure they are progressed as quickly as possible.
The Ukrainian people have shown incredible courage in the light of the poisonous actions of President Putin. Putin must fail. The Ukrainian people need and deserve our full support. I am proud that in Keighley and Ilkley and across the United Kingdom we continue to give them that support. We will not stop doing so until Putin is defeated.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) and I concur with much of what he said in his powerful speech.
Like Members from throughout the Chamber, I have been contacted by a large number of constituents who have opened up their hearts and made their homes available to refugees fleeing this horrendous war inflicted on them by Russia and Putin. Having been matched with Ukrainian guests, some of my constituents, such as Charlotte in Weaver Vale, are left waiting for weeks and weeks to hear about the arrival of visas for the people they want to shelter and provide refuge to. They are wondering what the best thing is to do. Some are currently funding guests who are staying in other countries such as Romania or Poland while they wait for their visas to be approved. Some genuinely worry, as hon. Members across the House have today, that vulnerable women and children—they are largely women and children—will be forced to head back into a war zone if they are not given that support soon.
A number of members of my team and I have made representations at the hub in Portcullis House, at the Home Office and to Ministers, but it has been like knitting fog. The bureaucracy of the system does not match the urgency of the situation. Women and children are fleeing for their lives—fleeing bombs, missiles and bullets. Horrendously, they are also fleeing sexual violence, which unfortunately we see reports about in the media from day to day.
I have a number of questions about the homes for Ukraine and family sponsorship programmes. They arise from experiences of hosts who have contacted me, from the work that I and my team have been doing, and from Cheshire West and Chester Council—in particular, Councillor Sam Dixon, who, as my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) knows, has done excellent work with Ukrainian refugees.
The concerns centre on both the time it is taking for visas to come through—that point has been echoed right across the Chamber—and other parts of the matching process. As the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) rightly said, it is not clear what local authorities should do when things break down—when sponsors pull out of the scheme, for example, but are still matched with guests in the system. That risks guests arriving and presenting as homeless because, after fleeing war, they have nowhere to go. The last figure I had from the Local Government Association was that 147 people had presented as homeless. I want to put my request to the Home Office, through the Minister, on the record: will it provide an update, with those numbers, about what further support will be provided?
Similarly, if guests do not take up the offer but are still matched on the system, willing sponsors can be rematched with new guests. Also, to speed up the process, local authorities want to be able to perform pre-checks on potential sponsors who have registered, before they are matched with guests. Hon. and right hon. Members across the House have made a strong point about the need to ensure that safeguarding is hardwired into the system. Cheshire West and Chester Council and Halton Borough Council—another council that covers my patch—have raised concerns with me about what to do if sponsors do not pass checks. Further Home Office guidance is certainly needed.
Finally, both councils in my patch have raised questions about the lack of funding that people coming through the family sponsor scheme receive. Indeed, there is no funding at all for local authorities, despite the pressures on schools and GP surgeries, and the need for wraparound services. Many of the people involved, of course, have experienced horrendous things in war-torn Ukraine. That financial assistance is desperately needed. Another question that I would like the Minister to feed back to Home Office Ministers, who are not on the Front Bench today, is about the need to step up and provide additional support for people—the majority, actually—coming through that other route.
We urgently need clarity on all these points. Ultimately, the issues are creating unnecessary bureaucracy; we must ensure that people arrive here swiftly and safely. Look, the generous people of Britain have stepped up—they have opened their hearts and homes. At the moment, that generosity is not replicated by the Government.
Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I start by praising the Prime Minister and commending the Government. The Prime Minister showed huge courage in going to Ukraine as he did, within range of artillery. That is exactly the sort of leadership we would expect from our Prime Minister and he showed it in abundance.
I also praise and commend the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian armed forces, who are doing the most remarkable job, in hell—the pictures we see of men, women and children being slaughtered make uncomfortable viewing, to put it mildly. However, let us not fool ourselves that we here in the west are safe. The bombs may not be falling in our countries, but Russian troops are bludgeoning all that we in the west hold dear: freedom, democracy and the right to live in peace.
Ukraine must not become the west’s sacrificial goat—after devouring it, goodness knows where the beast will go next. To that extent, NATO must gear up. I have huge praise for my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces personally, because he has done a tremendous job, but I am delighted that he is in his place, because the next part of my speech refers to some correspondence he and I have had. He might grimace at that point, but I shall plough on.
The UK is a significant and respected member of NATO, but we must gear up too. The best way to deter war is to prepare for one. While there are plans to modernise our armed forces, it will take too long to equip fully our men and women in the event that, God forbid, we face a war with Russia. Let us not beat about the bush: the west stands on a perilous cliff edge. As one of my colleagues said, the world order has changed, certainly for many years to come.
As a former soldier, I am appalled and shocked that we are due to reduce our Army by 10,000 and that, in the face of this clear and present danger, Ministers are not prepared to reverse what I am afraid I call a reckless decision to neuter our Army to a large degree. It is not just me saying that, but the outgoing head of the Army, He agrees, as do many distinguished former senior officers. Even now, battalions are woefully below strength.
The integrated review was right in many ways. I have the great honour and privilege of sitting on the Defence Committee, where we looked at it in great detail, and in many ways the Government got it right. What they unfortunately got wrong was putting the money into the right elements to ensure that the integrated review was actually worth the paper it was written on. I believe the integrated review did not take into account the fact that now in 2022 we could face a threat of a conventional war with a very well-equipped enemy.
What frustrates me and many others is that there seems to be no sense of urgency from the Government or the Ministry of Defence to take that into account and potentially to reverse some decisions that will be irreversible. We cannot just pluck battalions, aircraft and ships out of thin air, although I accept the Navy is being heavily invested in. I hope the meeting of Defence Ministers will see a flurry of military activity in both production and further deployment.
United we stand, divided we fall. Freedom is the most precious gift we could ever be given. Sometimes, as we have found in our history, we have had to fight for it. That takes resolve, investment and courage. The Ukrainians are showing that, and showing us what can be done. We are rightly doing all we can to help, but this war must be a wake-up call to the west. I hope never to hear the words, “If only we had learned from history” as once again our brave armed forces are sent to war ill prepared for it.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I thank your predecessor in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me permission to be absent from the Chamber for a short period to attend a long-standing constituency engagement online.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an unprovoked and unjustified outrage—a grotesque violation of international law and a brutal attack on democracy. We all stand united with President Zelensky, with Ukrainians who are resisting Putin’s violence and with our NATO allies in opposition to this horror. Since the first images of the invasion appeared on our television screens, my constituents in Dulwich and West Norwood have been desperate to do what they can to help. I pay tribute to the many individuals and organisations across my constituency who have been mobilising support, fundraising and donating what they can to help refugees, and the hundreds who have offered their homes as a place of sanctuary.
But instead of leading the way, supporting and encouraging those who wish to help, the bureaucratic undertow of the Home Office is holding back the generosity of my constituents. I appreciate that the Ministers on the Treasury Bench are not from the Home Office, but I hope that they will convey to their colleagues that the problems are very serious. Constituents are contacting me daily about the problems they are experiencing in their efforts to provide sanctuary to Ukrainian refugees. My fantastic team are working flat out to support them, but the situation is dire. We continue to experience excessive delays. Cases take at least three weeks to be processed from the date that biometrics are submitted. Refugees who do not have a valid passport must first travel to a visa application centre in a third country before they can begin the application process.
This is creating particular problems for families with very young children. The travel bans during the covid-19 pandemic have meant that many families had not applied for passports for their children prior to the invasion. That means that some of the most vulnerable families are waiting weeks after the parents’ visas have been processed while they work out how to get their children to an in-person appointment in a third country. We are encountering frequent errors—applications going missing or technical errors meaning that the application process has to be started all over again. The communication and consistency of communication is terrible. The form and the process are very confusing. My office has seen several examples of parents listing children as part of their own application because it was not clear that they needed to submit separate applications.
In several cases, some family members have received an acknowledgement from the Home Office while other members of the same family have not. When my team have raised this with officials, they have been told that it is “hit and miss”. They were also told that no decision-making staff were on duty at the Home Office over the Easter bank holiday weekend so no applications were progressed during that time. The same official also said to one of my constituents that the Home Office was deliberately approving some family members and not others in a cynical bid to improve its statistics without actually increasing the numbers of people arriving in the UK. I hope that the Minister will be able to answer that allegation because, if true, it is very shocking indeed. There is chaos in relation to unaccompanied children, who are among the most vulnerable refugees, with visas being issued and then revoked, calling into question the Home Office’s approach to safeguarding.
In the meantime, the performance of the Home Office in all other areas outside of Ukraine has collapsed. My caseworkers tell me that it is literally impossible for them to get a response on visa applications or other Home Office issues for non-Ukrainians. The crisis in Ukraine has again laid bare that the Home Office is not fit for purpose and is in need of root-and-branch reform. In the meantime, it is the most vulnerable and traumatised women and children fleeing war who are suffering. They need much better than this. The Government must urgently get a grip.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I thank everyone on the Island who has been offering to take in Ukrainian refugees and helping out in any way with the aid effort, particularly Victoria Dunford in East Cowes, whose MAD-Aid charity has done wonderful work in Moldova and is now helping thousands of Ukrainian refugees in that part of the world.
Having served for a chunk of the past 10 years or so in the Army, I agree very strongly with what my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) said about his—justified—concerns about the size of the armed forces. There has been an ongoing debate about whether we go for mass and whether our enemy of the future will be a state or non-state actor, and the simple answer is that an armed force needs to be able to do both. We need resilience, mass and redundancy, and we do not have that. Our armed forces have been stripped back to the bone in part to justify cyber and all these new tools of warfare, but that does not excuse not being able to fight state-on-state conflict, as my hon. Friend says.
Indeed, as the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) was talking about earlier, we know that Russia has an integrated doctrine. In 2004, in the first stage of the Ukrainian war, Russia was using the tools of politics, oligarchs, power, information, warfare and economic warfare, along with espionage, assassination, blackmail and other things that the Russians have been doing for generations. That did not work, narrowly. From 2014, they moved to paramilitary violence, and that did not work either. Indeed, it brought the Ukrainian nation together almost more than any other event since 1991. Finally, since February, as we have seen tragically, Russia has gone for effectively full-scale conventional war. However, over the past 20 years, it has traced and used almost every tool of state power.
The Russians still believe in hybrid warfare, although in this stage of the war they are trying to achieve their political objectives using largely conventional means, which thus far is failing in sorts, but I am worried that a moral victory is not an absolute victory or a military victory, and they have got a significant chunk of Ukrainian territory. They have their land corridor. We will support our Ukrainian friends in the peace negotiations, but we know that the Russians will not give up what they physically hold at the time of those peace negotiations. At some point before any potential peace negotiations, the Ukrainians will have to take back that land.
When I was in Odesa and Mykolaiv the week before last, I was talking to the southern commander. For some of his regiments, he literally does not have a single armoured personnel carrier. He does not have a single infantry fighting vehicle to give to his units. He has three times as many men and women as he needs. He has almost none of the kit. Justifiably, all that kit is going via Kyiv, via the central Government—as is right—to the east. If there was the ability to be supported with enough kit and enough military equipment, the Ukrainians could open up a second front, and that would be of extreme importance, because they could potentially easily encircle and retake Kherson and move up to Berdiansk, destroying the Russian land corridor.
I worry about a few things in the coming months. I worry about the lack of kit, as I have just said. I know the Minister has the same list as we all do, but Ukraine still needs air defence, the infantry fighting vehicles and the artillery, hence the debate about 155 mm as opposed to different systems. I also worry that if Putin is victorious, we will live with nuclear blackmail for at least another decade or two. Moldova undoubtedly will be next, and then northern Kazakhstan, and then Russian-speaking chunks of the Baltic republics, so it does not stop at Ukraine, although it is the largest of those entities by far.
If Putin is not victorious, there will come a series of decision points in the next few months over whether the Russians wish to escalate up to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and I will be very relieved if we get to the end of this war without the use of nuclear weapons, because although much of what the Russians say about nuclear weapons is bluff, some of it is not. If Crimea was threatened, or if their seized land in Donbas was threatened, or if this whole enterprise of the war was threatened, there would be decision points coming up where the Russians would take that decision whether to use nuclear weapons.
On that point, I was talking to Fiona Hill this afternoon—Trump’s former Russia expert—and we were both concerned, as people who have been following the Russia and Ukraine for many years now, by the lack of thinking through of issues and of wargaming problems. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that at a NATO level, but also at a UK Government level, we are thinking through all potential scenarios in the coming weeks, months and potentially years ahead.
It is worth pointing out that this war has been proved wrong in almost every assessment. Putin terribly underestimated the Ukrainian reaction. The Ukrainians themselves did not believe the war would start for at least another six months. Germany believed it could prostate itself without any harm to the European order, and almost all nations failed to arm to deter this invasion. I worry that if we keep getting those assessments wrong, catastrophe awaits. We need to do the right thing, but we need to be assured in what we are doing.
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
Labour stands unshakeably with our NATO allies in providing military, economic, diplomatic and humanit-arian assistance to Ukraine as it defends itself from Putin’s criminal invasion. Our country has a proud and long tradition of standing up to dictators and tyrants. Our country believes in the rule of law, freedom and democracy, and we must stand with all those who share those values. We must stand with the people of Ukraine in their fight, because their fight must also be our fight.
As we have heard, there are concerns about what has happened, but there has also been praise. The Government have got some things right, but they have also got some things wrong. As a constructive Opposition, we have supported them where they have got things right and we have posed challenge to them with alternatives and solutions where we think improvements can be made.
As we have also heard, hon. Members desire the Government to go further on economic and diplomatic sanctions against Putin’s barbarous regime. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), in his opening remarks, said, we need to close the sanctions gap. It has happened slowly, but there is much more to do. The technical requests that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) made about the 50% rule and about tracking down intermediaries are important questions to which the Minister should respond. We need a US-style law to act against those proxies for sanctioned individuals and businesses.
It is important that there is no hiding place for dirty Russian money in Britain, but the truth is that there have been plenty of hiding places for far too long. There has been far too much cosying up to Russian oligarchs, which has allowed that dirty money to pollute our economy, our politics and our institutions. That must end. Those concerns have been cross-party in this debate and in many others, many of which have been led by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. We need to ensure, however, that the full recommendations of the Russia report are implemented, that Companies House is properly fixed so that oligarchs cannot shield their ill-gotten gains, and that we make progress to ensure that the dirty Russian money that is languishing in our property markets and financial system is truly gotten rid of once and for all.
It has been 61 days since Vladimir Putin launched his barbaric and criminal invasion of Ukraine, and there has been continued cross-party condemnation of it. Anyone watching this debate must know that our message is united: whatever party of the United Kingdom we represent, we stand with the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression. We must ensure that the events that we have seen in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kherson and many other Ukrainian towns, villages and cities are not repeated and are properly investigated. There should be no doubt that war crimes are being committed. They should be investigated and those responsible should be tried at The Hague, with a special tribunal to prosecute Putin himself.
Labour backs the provision of lethal assistance to our Ukrainian friends. We support the reinforcement of our NATO allies along NATO’s eastern flank and we have told Ministers that we stand ready to offer support should they wish to revisit defence spending and strategy. We have heard from the hon. Members for South Dorset (Richard Drax) and for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), and from many Opposition Members, that now is not the time to cut our armed forces further. Now is the time to look again at the integrated review and to ensure that we have the capabilities and the strategy that we need. I suspect that the Minister has sympathy for that view, although he may not be able to voice it from the Dispatch Box.
I echo the praise in the debate for the armed forces, especially for our RAF, which is providing logistical support for the provision of weapons to our friends in Ukraine. That support for our armed forces is cross-party and timely.
Reports have broken during this debate that Russia has cut off the gas to Poland. That is a serious and dangerous escalation that illustrates the desperation of the Kremlin and the urgent need for Europe to move away from its reliance on Russian oil and gas. Britain stands with Poland, and it is important that we state that Putin must not be able to win, whatever desperate tactic he throws at this situation.
There have been concerns in this debate about what the future looks like, but there has been cross-party support for many of the measures the Government have introduced so far, especially on weapons, as the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) mentioned. However, we now need a clear strategy for what comes next, with potentially attacks on Odesa, Russian concentration on a land corridor along the Black sea, the risk of escalation—deliberate escalation—in Moldova and Transnistria, and the threats in the Caucasus, Bosnia and the Baltic states. That needs a clear plan from Ministers, and one that can be resourced, scrutinised and supported, because there is cross-party support for this.
However, there are also holes and concerns that we must address. Throughout this debate, Members on both sides of the House—the hon. Members for Stirling (Alyn Smith) and for Keighley (Robbie Moore) and others—have raised the issue of food security. We do need to make sure that food security is part of our national security. It has been for decades, but in the past few years we have forgotten that. We must make sure that we make food security part of our national security not just for our country, but for our allies and friends abroad.
Hunger, rising prices and shop shelves going empty are a reality not just in the horn of Africa, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary said, but in supermarkets from Plymouth to Scotland. Food security matters, and I am afraid I do not believe that the Government are taking this seriously enough. We need to have a food security strategy published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but it needs to be not a UK or England-only strategy, but one that takes into account the international context. I agree with the hon. Member for Keighley that we need to grow more food here. I think it is a good argument and I wish him luck in promoting it because, sadly, I am not yet convinced that the Government share that view. We need to make that case calmly and coolly not just because of prices and carbon, but because of national security.
There have been a number of very good speeches from both sides of the House during this debate, and I am proud to have sat through all of them and heard them. There is strong support for our Ukrainian friends, and sympathy and empathy for the Ukrainian people, but there have also been concerns about the broken refugee system that we have seen. Like “Knitting fog” was how my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) described it.
The bureaucracy that has been created in the Home Office does not match the urgency of the situation. Far too many of our constituents are not getting the support they need to provide a safe sanctuary for Ukrainians and Ukrainian families fleeing this war. That was raised by Members on both sides of the House. It is a shame that no Home Office Minister was here to hear the debate, and I think the call from the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) is a good one. I hope the Minister will add to his to-do list making sure that the concerns raised in this debate are properly passed on.
The Government have made shamefully slow progress in providing sanctuary for Ukrainian refugees. The reality is that an already stretched Home Office needs to go further, but going further means removing the impediments, bureaucracy and delay in what is happening. Our members of staff are not just spending hours on the phone to the Home Office trying to get answers; we can now see them queuing around Portcullis House on the parliamentary estate. Each member of staff waiting there represents one, two or three Ukrainian families—perhaps more—and it is a visible reminder of the failure of the Home Office to get to grips with this situation. It should not take Members of Parliament to raise issues for a system to work properly, and I encourage the Government to look again at this, because our values are at stake here.
Anna McMorrin
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I just want to emphasise the point I also made in my speech. I am sure my hon. Friend would agree—and I think the Foreign Secretary needs to hear this—that the families here welcoming and wanting to welcome Ukrainian families into their homes are only able to match with Ukrainian families struggling to flee from war through Facebook groups, which is a shocking attempt at managing this situation.
Luke Pollard
My hon. Friend makes a very good point.
The hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) mentioned a tilt to the Indo-Pacific, but we must first get our own backyard in order. That means securing the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, our friends on the European continent, the high north and the Arctic. Once we have secured our own backyard, a tilt to the Indo-Pacific may be possible, but we must ensure that support is here first of all. The British people expect our nation to be a force for good in the world, as does each and every Member of this House. There is still more progress to be made in providing sanctuary to those fleeing war, and ensuring that our strategy is clear for the future. We must revisit the integrated review and stop the cuts to our armed forces. We must ensure that our commitment to our friends in eastern Europe is strong and unwavering, and that we are going further to support those fleeing war and the horrors inflicted on Ukraine by Putin. We stand in solidarity with Ukraine.
The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)
I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their well-informed and wide-ranging contributions to today’s debate. It is right that the House continues to show its full support for President Zelensky, and while there has been disagreement, so too has there broadly been overwhelming consensus that the UK is on the right side of this, that we stand with Ukraine, and that we will continue to support Ukraine in pursuit of the outcome it desires.
The Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister, and Government colleagues have been clear from the beginning that Putin must fail in his endeavours in Ukraine, and increasingly other countries around Europe and the world are saying the same. That consensus is welcome. It will, of course, catch Russia’s attention, and no doubt it will continue to sabre rattle as a consequence. That international resolve is not something that President Putin and his cronies expected, and it is far more powerful than any individual sanctions regime or any amount of military support that the entire world has come together—mostly—to say that this is the wrong route forward.
We are now in day 62 of President Putin’s illegal and barbaric invasion of Ukraine, and the next three weeks will be crucial in determining the outcome of the invasion. Having largely failed in all his initial objectives, Putin has now directed that Russia focus on securing control of Donbas and connecting a land bridge from Russia to Crimea in the south. Ahead of their annual 9 May victory day celebrations, it is likely that Putin’s forces will ramp up their operations in a bid to secure some kind of victory that he can celebrate with a parade in Red Square.
Therefore, the onus is on the international community to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs urgently to defend itself by preventing Russian bombardments from the air and sea, as well as repelling armoured columns on land. As the Prime Minister confirmed to President Zelensky by phone last week, we are constantly providing more defensive weaponry to assist the Ukrainian resistance. The United Kingdom was the first European country to supply lethal aid to Ukraine, and the total amount we have spent on military support is now more than £450 million and rising every day—indeed, I had to delay the departure of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary from the Chamber, and I was grateful that she allowed me to go and sign off yet more support that will be shipped over the next couple of days.
This week alone we have delivered Wolfhound armoured vehicles, which provide increased protection for essential supplies, as well as 1,360 anti-structure weapons. We have also delivered a further 843 anti-tank missiles, on top of the 5,000 sent since the war began. They have been used to repel convoys of tanks to devastating effect. We have donated 167 anti-air missiles, including our Starstreak high velocity anti-air missiles, the fastest in the world at some 2,000 miles per hour. They have also made a crucial difference in helping Ukrainian armed forces to protect their people from aerial assault. As the Defence Secretary announced yesterday, we will be gifting a small number of armoured Stormer vehicles—those are Starstreak launchers on top of a combat vehicle reconnaissance (tracked) armoured chassis— which will further enhance Ukraine’s short-range anti-air capabilities. I see today that at Ramstein the Germans have offered a similar capability, which is very welcome.
When the Defence Secretary made his statement to Parliament yesterday, he mentioned that in 2020 we had agreed in principle to develop and sell a maritime variant of the Brimstone missile. Recently, Ukraine has been asking for longer-range ground attack missiles and the Government have been exploring whether Brimstone stocks could be released for such purposes. At the time of the Defence Secretary’s statement, we had expected that he would have been able to return to the House in a few weeks to confirm that that capability was ready for departure, but, such is the speed with which our technicians are now working and so effective is the partnership with industry that I am pleased to say that that has been moved forward. It is necessary to inform the House that we will be providing Brimstone in the next few weeks, probably while the House is prorogued ahead of the Queen’s Speech. That remains very much in line with our principle of evolving our support to Ukraine as the conflict evolves and its capability requirements change.
James Heappey
My hon. Friend asks that question having had a visit to Ukraine, and I think he has his suspicions that it is not. We are offering all the advisory support that we can on the Ukrainians’ logistics effort. For what it is worth, I think that they are doing an extraordinarily good job in a challenging operational environment with a huge amount of matériel flowing into Ukraine. Broadly, stuff is getting into the hands of frontline troops, but clearly, as with any army in any conflict, the logistics effort could always be better and we are seeking to support Ukraine in achieving that.
To ensure that the equipment provided is as effective as possible, we must also train Ukrainian troops in its use. That is why Ukrainian troops are currently on Salisbury Plain learning how to use 120 armoured fighting vehicles that they will be taking back with them to the frontline. We are also scoping options to begin navy-to-navy training ahead of the delivery of a counter-mines capability to the Ukrainian navy later in the year.
During the recess, the Minister for Defence Procurement and I hosted Ukraine’s deputy Minister Volodymyr Havrylov alongside Ukrainian generals on Salisbury Plain to look at the equipment that might be part of the next phase of our support to Ukraine. They were pleased with what they saw and we are now working with industry to deliver those capabilities. At the same time, we are still delivering, as hon. Members would expect, nearly 100,000 sets of rations, 10 pallets of medical equipment, 3,000 pieces of body armour, nearly 8,000 helmets and 3,000 pairs of boots. This week, another 4,000 night-vision devices will also be sent to Ukraine.
Our support does not stop there. The Ukrainians are most easily able to absorb former Warsaw pact kit, so we have been speaking to colleagues around eastern Europe and far further afield to encourage them to give up that kit with a commitment to backfilling from UK industry or indeed UK inventory where required. The reply has been hugely heartening.
Dr Murrison
Does backfilling mean UK personnel driving the kit? It is highly technical and will require a great deal of training if Poles, for example, will man it up.
James Heappey
Yes, in the round. That is certainly the case in Poland. Tonight, I am off to Poland to talk through the detail of it, but, as the Prime Minister announced at the weekend, the plan is to put a mission-ready British cavalry squadron into Poland to backfill some of the capability that Poland hopes to provide to Ukraine.
There were a number of excellent contributions to the debate, among which were some questions that I can answer relatively quickly. The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) asked whether we are in the process of rearming, given the amount of NLAWs that we have handed across. We are, and that is through a combination of new orders and getting hold of new batteries to refurbish NLAWs that are out of date to backfill those that we have handed over to the Ukrainians.
Many colleagues mentioned food security and energy security, both of which are levers that Russia has held over Europe for too long. I will come back to that in my concluding remarks. My hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, was absolutely right to point out that the pandemic, Ukraine and Brexit have shown that there is a requirement to reconsider sovereignty and what resilience is required to be truly sovereign.
Many Opposition Members made points about the process for bringing Ukrainian refugees to the UK. As they so asked, I will ensure that my Home Office colleagues read Hansard in full and come back to those Members as they are able.
My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) said that we require the slingshot so that David can fell Goliath once again. He mentioned the missiles that have been provided. He is absolutely right that the radars that enable counter-battery fire are the missing piece of the jigsaw—we are on it.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) made a wonderfully compassionate speech about support for refugees. My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) rightly pointed to the war crimes and the requirement to hold the Russians to account for what they are doing.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), with whom I have spoken often about this matter, reflected on whether our posture in the British armed forces is the right one as we go forward—indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) made the same point. As the Defence Secretary has always said, we are threat-based in our decision making. We have learned so far that we are on broadly the right track, but nobody in the MOD is too proud to admit that if the situation changes and the threat has changed, we will consider that as and when the time comes.
In the 90 seconds that remain in this debate, I will quickly reflect that if Putin thought that this was a moment to fracture the west, he has ended up with something very different. NATO is renewed and reinvigorated in its purpose and it has reinforced its eastern flank to reassure our allies there. Today, 40 nations came together at Ramstein air base in Germany, where a US-led conference led to an incredible doubling down of international resolve, in which the US has committed to re-arm and assist Ukraine in a transition to NATO calibres—that is really quite a moment—which the rest of the western countries there agreed to support.
Everybody is clear that Russia must fail. Why? Because the geopolitics of the Euro-Atlantic need to be different in the next 20 years from the way they have been in the past 20 years. That means ending the energy dependency and sorting out food security and the supply chain dependency. It also means standing up against the bullying, and it is time to stand up for some respect for sovereignty and a belief in freedom. Putin’s hubris has caused immeasurable cost to the Russian armed forces. Zelensky’s heroic leadership has brought Ukraine to a place where I think they can win. The UK, the US and our allies around the world will make sure that that is the case.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the situation in Ukraine.
Business of the House (Today) (No. 2)
Ordered,
That, at this day’s sitting, the Speaker shall not adjourn the House until any Messages from the Lords relating to the Nationality and Borders Bill shall have been received and disposed of.—(Mark Spencer.)
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Under the order that the House just passed, I may not adjourn the House until any further message from the Lords relating to the Nationality and Borders Bill has been received. The House must accordingly be suspended. I will suspend it until 9.45 pm at the earliest and arrange for the Division bells to be sounded a few minutes before the sitting is resumed to warn colleagues that we are about to resume. For the convenience of the House, I repeat that the Division bells will not be sounded before 9.45 pm.
Nationality and Borders Bill
Tuesday 26th April 2022
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Nationality and Borders Act 2022 View all Nationality and Borders Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 152-I Marshalled list for Consideration of Commons Reasons - (27 Apr 2022)
22:28 - The House divided: - Ayes: 296 / Noes: 206 - Question accordingly agreed to.
22:42 - The House divided: - Ayes: 299 / Noes: 205 - Question accordingly agreed to.
22:57 - The House divided: - Ayes: 288 / Noes: 212 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Tom Pursglove)
I beg to move, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 5D.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
With this it will be convenient to consider:
Lords amendments 6D, 6E and 6F, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 7F and 7G, and Government motion to disagree.
Tom Pursglove
I hope that this will be the final time in these proceedings around the Nationality and Borders Bill. I will first turn to compliance with the refugee convention. All measures in this Bill are compatible with our obligations under international law. We therefore cannot accept this amendment, which would put our duty to comply with the refugee convention on the face of the Bill.
Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that the amendments on the Order Paper are very similar to the amendments that we debated only a few days ago? Will he therefore join me in saying to the other place that this elected House was given a mandate in the 2019 general election, as we were in the 2016 EU referendum, to take back control of our borders, and that it should allow this Bill to pass so that we do not have to continue this ping-pong?
Tom Pursglove
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The time has now come to get on, to pass this Bill and to make the changes that we so desperately need to shift the dynamic, to end these dangerous channel crossings and to put together an asylum system that is fit for the future and able to cope with the demand.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
I do not want to detain the House too long but, with all this talk of taking back control of our borders, why are we outsourcing that control to Rwanda?
Tom Pursglove
The hon. Gentleman’s remarks are effectively a charter for doing nothing. What is unacceptable is for people to continue putting their life in the hands of evil criminal gangs whose only regard is for turning a profit—they do not care whether people get here safely. We have a moral responsibility to stop this, and we have a moral responsibility to act, which is precisely what we will do through this Bill.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend accept my congratulations on the Patel-Pursglove plan vis-à-vis Rwanda? And will he ensure that, when people arrive here, they are on a plane as quickly as possible before some dodgy activist or fat-cat human rights lawyer can get their hands on them?
Tom Pursglove
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary should rightly take a lot of credit for getting this new world-leading partnership over the line. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) has been a passionate advocate for this approach, and I am pleased we are delivering it. I think it will make a genuine difference in acting as a deterrent and ensuring that we have global solutions to a global challenge.
In that sense, I welcome the steps that have been taken in the last few days. I hope my right hon. Friend will be reassured to know that we are working hard to make sure this is operationalised without delay and that, of course, people are on flights as quickly as possible. What we do not want at any stage—this goes back to why we need fundamental reform of the asylum system—is delay in the system. We want people to have certainty either way.
Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
I warmly join my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) in congratulating the Home Secretary and the Minister on this fantastic legislation. On the amendments we are disagreeing with, does the Minister agree that this is part of a wider package, with offshoring, push-backs and deterring people by saying there will be differential treatment, that will be brought together? It is sad that the Labour party is happy to accept the status quo, allow people to risk their life, or die in the English channel, and put money in the hands of smuggling gangs.
Tom Pursglove
I am afraid that we often hear long and convoluted explanations of why we should just accept the status quo, why we should do nothing and why all the interventions are wrong. We hear no credible alternative for putting right the problems in the system. Reform is required and is overdue. That is why we are determined to get on with delivering it.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
The Minister will recognise that, when we last debated the Bill, the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), pointed out that one alternative for dealing with the asylum backlog is investing in the current system.
The central premise of this Bill is that, as an alternative to irregular routes, there should be safe and legal routes. Aside from the specific programmes for Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong, will the Minister spell out clearly to the House what legal routes are available to asylum seekers?
Tom Pursglove
I will not repeat the many, many occasions on which I have set out on the Floor of the House and in Committee during the Bill’s passage the many and varied safe and legal routes that exist. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), the Chair of the Justice Committee, has rightly touched on the need to reform the casework situation, which is precisely what we are doing through the new plan for immigration. I encourage him to be in the right Lobby this evening to help us get on with delivering on that priority, which is one priority among a number as we reform the system.
It is simply unnecessary, inappropriate and unconstitutional for the courts to have a duty to make declarations of incompatibility in circumstances where questions of compliance have already been determined by Parliament, so we cannot accept Lords amendment 5D.
On differentiation, Lords amendments 6D to 6F would make it harder to differentiate by placing significant evidential burdens on the Secretary of State. They would also set out our existing legal obligations on the face of the Bill, such as our duties under the refugee convention and the European convention on human rights, especially the article 8 right to family life. All of this is either unnecessary or unacceptable. We therefore do not accept these amendments.
Finally, the arguments on the right to work have been well rehearsed at several points in the passage of the Bill. In principle, we are concerned about the way in which this would undercut the points-based system, which we believe is the right system for facilitating lawful migration into our country—that skills-based approach, exactly as the British people voted for in the referendum in 2016. I go back to this point: our objective is to speed up caseworking, which then, of itself, ensures that we do not need to go down the route—
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Does the excellent Minister know the majorities the other place had for sending these amendments back to us? Given the large built-in anti-Government majority in the Lords, it seems to me that they must have been quite large.
Tom Pursglove
My hon. Friend probes me on this with good reason. Off the top of my head, I believe that one of them was won by one vote, one was won by eight votes and one was won by 25 votes. So they are not particularly hefty majorities. The time has come to get on and pass this Bill. This Government’s new plan for immigration will tackle illegal migration and reform the asylum system.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
The Minister was talking about delays in casework, but those are nothing new. My seven years as an MP have been marked with delays in Home Office casework. Some constituents have been waiting now for two years—not for a decision, but for an interview. Can he explain exactly when they will get interviewed under this system because I have seen no difference at all?
Tom Pursglove
I refer the hon. Lady to the new plan for immigration and the steps we have consistently set out that we will be taking to improve the situation on caseworking. It is imperative that we do that, for two reasons.
Tom Pursglove
The hon. Lady can shout from a sedentary position, but perhaps she will listen to the answer, which is that we believe not only that it is very important that those who require sanctuary get it as quickly as possible, but that it is right that those with no right to be here are removed as soon as possible and without needless delay. That is why we are reforming the broken system. We have a Home Secretary and a ministerial team who are committed to doing just that. Again, I encourage the hon. Lady to be in the Division Lobby to support our measures tonight.
The Bill is an essential element of the plan, and the sooner it passes, the sooner we will be able to deliver the longer-term solutions we need to protect vulnerable people. I note again the lack of alternative being offered from other parts of the House. I therefore commend our Bill to the House.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
Last week, the Home Secretary told the House that our asylum system is “broken”. Yesterday, her Minister, who is sitting before us today, again stated clearly that our asylum system is “broken”. We on the Labour Benches completely agree, but what Conservative Members seem to continually miss is the fact that the Conservative party has been in power for 12 years. The problem is that they never stand up and take responsibility; they always try to blame others—the civil service, the courts and even the media. It was revealed this week that the Home Secretary banned the Financial Times, The Guardian and the Mirror from the press delegation accompanying her to Rwanda. That was a truly Orwellian move—cancel culture at its worst.
The truth is that, with every decision this Government make and every ill-conceived scheme they put in place, they make fixing our broken asylum system ever harder. The first of these failures is on the asylum waiting lists. Under this Home Secretary, the Home Office is processing 50% fewer cases than five years ago—the result: 37,000 asylum seekers languishing in expensive hotels, costing the taxpayer an eye-watering £4.7 million per day. Labour would invest to save by increasing the number of caseworkers and decision makers so that processing times and hotel bills are radically reduced. [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. Come on, let us have a bit of reasonable behaviour. I appreciate that it is late, but it is simply rude to shout to such an extent that we cannot hear the hon. Gentleman. It is not reasonable. There is nothing wrong with a bit of banter, but it should not be at such a level that I cannot hear him.
Stephen Kinnock
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
It is in this context that we are supporting Lords amendment 7F today, which would give the 60,000 asylum seekers on waiting lists the right to work, to be reviewed after two years, thereby reducing the burden on the British taxpayer and boosting the Exchequer.
Secondly, during his negotiations with the EU, the Prime Minister completely failed to replace the Dublin III regulation, which means that we can no longer return refugees to the country in the EU where they would have first sought asylum. Numbers have increased because this Conservative Government lost control of our borders by losing our long-held power to send people back.
Jonathan Gullis
The hon. Gentleman says Dublin III is about not returning people back to Europe. Does he not agree that those people—illegal economic migrants—leaving France should just be claiming asylum in France?
Stephen Kinnock
Well, of course, but they are not doing that. The reality is that if we had a returns agreement in place, which this Prime Minister completely failed to negotiate, that would be the deterrent effect that we all want to see. The deterrent effect of a returns agreement would be so much stronger than the threat of being offloaded to Rwanda, because it would mean that every small boat refugee would be returned rather than just a tiny percentage, which is the most we can hope for from the Rwanda deal.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman tell us how many of those asylum seekers who came from France were returned to France in the period before we fully left Brexit?
Stephen Kinnock
I can tell the hon. Gentleman that it will be a hell of a lot more than what will be returned under the Rwanda scheme. He knows that it is forecast that 23,000 people will seek to make that dangerous journey. The Rwanda scheme will not even scratch the surface. That is the reality. The only way to deal with this problem is through a proper removal agreement.
Only the Labour party can reset the UK’s relationship with France and the EU, and from there strike a robust removal agreement that would truly act as a deterrent against the criminal people smugglers by breaking their business model. A Labour Government would also engage with Europol and the French authorities to create effective co-operation in the pursuit and prosecution of the criminal gangs who are running the people smuggling and human trafficking, rather than the constant war of words with our European partners and allies, which is all we ever get from this headline-chasing Government. Cheap headlines are all they care about, as everybody on the Labour Benches knows.
Thirdly, absolutely none of the Government’s safe and legal routes seems to work. The Afghan citizens resettlement scheme is not even off the ground. The Syria route has been ditched. The Dubs scheme for unaccompanied children has also been cancelled. The Ukraine scheme today had a queue three hours long in Portcullis House of MPs’ staffers fighting for Ukrainians on behalf of their constituents, because the visas simply are not getting processed. Somehow, the Home Secretary has managed to turn an inspiring tale of British generosity into a bureaucratic nightmare. Labour would make safe and legal routes work, which in turn would strike another blow against the people smugglers.
Mr Bone
I have a lot of time for the shadow Minister, but he is on a really sticky wicket here. Can he just answer these two questions? Is it the Labour party’s policy that we should not take any migrants to Rwanda? Secondly, is he not then scared that by not doing that it will encourage the evil people smugglers in their work?
Stephen Kinnock
The hon. Gentleman will know that the Home Secretary’s top civil servant has said that the Rwanda scheme will not work as a deterrent and it delivers no value for money whatever for the British taxpayer. What matters is what works, and that scheme will not work.
Jacob Young
The hon. Gentleman explained to me last week that he did not support the Rwanda scheme and he has just reiterated that. I am curious to learn. What is Labour’s plan to deal with illegal immigration in the channel?
Stephen Kinnock
The hon. Gentleman has clearly not been paying attention. I set out Labour’s plan last week. I have just told him about the returns agreement and giving more resources to caseworkers and decision makers. If he would care to listen to the rest of my speech, he may not need to make another meaningless intervention.
Fourthly, in respect of the Government failures that I touched on earlier, the Bill is emblematic of the Home Secretary’s tendency to make the challenges of our asylum seeker system even harder to overcome. She claims that the Rwanda offloading plan will solve the challenges that our immigration system faces, but her Minister for Refugees dismissed the plan as impossible just a week before the announcement, saying:
“If it’s happening in the Home Office, on the same corridor that I’m in, they haven’t told me about it…I’m having difficulty enough getting them from Ukraine to our country. There’s no possibility of sending them to Rwanda.”
Up and down the country, the British people are counting the cost of this Government—£4 billion of failed or overrunning defence contracts under this Prime Minister since 2019 alone; £16 billion of covid fraud; and a £7-a-year increase on energy bills without any meaningful support whatsoever—and now British taxpayers are told that they have to foot the bill for this pie-in-the-sky Rwanda plan, which will cost at least three times the amount we currently spend on asylum seekers, and possibly even 10 times more.
Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the proposal to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda is not only extremely expensive but almost certainly ineffective? It is also inhumane. The evidence from Australia shows that offshore detention often has a massive impact on the mental health of people who are already vulnerable, and can lead to self-harm and suicide if no adequate support services are available. How can we, as a fair-minded and generous nation, stoop to this?
Stephen Kinnock
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As we know, the Australia scheme ended up costing approximately £1 million per person. The Israel scheme on which the Rwanda scheme is based failed completely, with just about every single person who was sent to Rwanda leaving the country within days and many of them trying to come back to the place from which they were sent. It is an absolute farce.
Tom Pursglove
It would be useful, for the benefit of the House and of the country more generally, if the hon. Gentleman could confirm whether an incoming Labour Government—in the eventuality that there were to be one—would cancel the Rwanda plan?
Stephen Kinnock
What I would contend—[Interruption.] I am going to tell him. What I would contend is that with the Rwanda plan the wheels are going to fall off the bus very soon, so we will not need to answer that question. It will completely fail. Rather than chasing headlines, the Minister should be doing the nitty-gritty work of negotiating a returns agreement, giving resources to caseworkers and sorting out safe and legal routes. It is about not the razzle-dazzle of Daily Mail headlines but getting the job done.
At Home Office oral questions yesterday, the Minister could not answer a single question that I asked him about the cost of the Rwanda plan. I asked him: how many refugees does he expect to send to Rwanda each year? The Prime Minister says “tens of thousands”; is that correct? What will the cost be per single refugee going to Rwanda? What will the £120 million sweetener being paid by the UK to Rwanda actually be spent on? How many asylum seekers can Rwanda’s detention centres house at any given time? Finally, given that the top civil servant at the Home Office refused to sign off on the Rwanda plan, citing concerns over value for money, when will the Minister publish a full forecast of the costs?
Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman has outlined his opposition to the Government’s proposal, but will he confirm, in answer to the Minister’s question, whether an incoming Labour Government would cancel the plan or go ahead with it?
Stephen Kinnock
We have made it absolutely clear that the plan is going to fail, as the Home Office’s top civil servant said, so the question will not arise. We will not need to deal with it; the wheels will fall off the bus. We certainly would not be spending £120 million on a press release.
The Rwanda offloading plan is not only a grotesquely expensive gimmick that is unlikely to deter people smugglers in the long-term, but deeply un-British. Dumping this challenge on a developing country 4,000 miles away, with a questionable record on human rights, raises serious concerns about whether this legislation complies with the UN refugee convention. That is why we will back Lords amendment 5D.
Another deeply un-British part of the Bill was the idea that the rubber dinghies could be pushed back out to sea. Yesterday, we witnessed the Home Secretary’s latest screeching U-turn—this time reversing a particularly unhinged part of the legislation. The Home Secretary’s pushback policy was almost completely unworkable, as she was told by the Border Force, by the French, by the Ministry of Defence and even by her own lawyers. As we learned from court documents published yesterday, she had actually agreed that pushbacks could not be applied to asylum seekers in the channel, but she tried to keep that secret so that she could keep up the bravado and tough talking. We hope that she will correct the record.
I have already pointed out—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. I want to let the House calm down for a moment. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, who is an experienced and efficient Member of this House, will know that he should not be making a general speech at this stage; this is not Second Reading. This debate is very narrow: we are discussing only the amendments that have just come back from the Lords, not general issues. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will now stick to the narrow matter before us—and so will everybody else.
Stephen Kinnock
Thank you for your wise counsel, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I have already pointed to the work and refugee convention amendments, but we also need to address differential treatment. Lords amendments 6D, 6E and 6F provide that a person can be a tier 1 refugee if they have travelled briefly through countries on their way to the UK, as somebody from Kabul or Kyiv would have to, or if they have delayed presenting themselves to the authorities for a good reason. They would also require compliance with the refugee convention and state that family unity must be taken into account. The Government should get behind the amendments. What in them can there possibly be to disagree with?
The channel crossings have been taken out of the Home Secretary’s hands and handed to the Ministry of Defence and the Royal Navy. The Ukrainian refugee scheme has been handed over to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. This Sunday, the former director general of borders and immigration called for a new immigration Department to remove responsibility from the Home Office. With her Department now effectively in special measures, will the Home Secretary not just for once do the right thing and accept the amendments today, so that we can begin to repair some of the damage done by this deeply counterproductive legislation?
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
I will not delay the House unduly; my colleagues would not want me to. I just want to make two points. The first is that the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) is right: these matters should have been addressed earlier, by successive Governments—including Labour Governments, by the way. Our immigration policy has not been planned strategically, as it might have been. The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.
The hon. Gentleman also said that the system needs to be efficient. I spoke about Edmund Burke on Second Reading; he said that the test of civil society and the policy that relates to it was justice, and that when a policy ceased to be just it was barely a policy at all. For a policy to be just, it has to be ordered, efficient and consistent. Immigration policy has struggled with order, efficiency and consistency for a very long time. On that, the hon. Gentleman was also right.
However, the hon. Gentleman is fundamentally wrong about the amendments for the following reasons. First, the Lords seem unwilling to grasp a nettle that, as he described, previous Governments have also failed the grasp. That nettle is sorting out and amending a broken system to ensure that we can continue to give safe refuge to people in desperate need, and that the system cannot be routinely and persistently gamed—by people traffickers and, actually, by economic migrants pretending to be asylum seekers. That is the fact, and we have to face it and reform the system so that we can differentiate between the two. The Government are trying to do that. It is not an easy process, but the Lords seem to me to misunderstand the Government’s intention, which is to create a consistent, ordered and effective system.
In specific terms, the amendment pertaining to the Refugee Council is unnecessary because part 2 of the Bill is already in line with the Refugee Council. I am amazed to hear the hon. Gentleman say that asylum seekers should be allowed to work. What sort of signal does that send out to legitimate migrants who have come to this country seeking to perform a role in our economy to serve this country? What sort of signal does it send out to indigenous Britons—of all types and races, by the way—who are unemployed and seeking a job, when they are told they must compete with people arriving in the country as asylum seekers? That seems to be a nonsense, yet that is what the Lords amendment suggests.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I will start by recalling that what we are debating this evening is the fate of Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans, persecuted Christians, trafficking victims and others who seek sanctuary in the United Kingdom.
A rather perplexing set of votes in the other place means that we are down to just three Lords amendments. While the remaining amendments may be small in number, however, they are huge in significance. Assuming that this place fails to do its duty by agreeing to them, I hope the other place, unlike the Minister, will do its duty by continuing to insist on them.
With the exception of some welcome provisions on nationality, we continue to believe the whole Bill should be scrapped. However, for as long as it is before us, we support amendments that seek to ensure as far as possible that the Government act in accordance with the refugee convention and allow that compliance to be considered by the courts. That means accepting their lordships’ amendments on interpretation and on restricting the offensive clauses on differentiation.
The Government have totally lost the argument. The overwhelming weight of legal opinion, as well as that of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is on our side of this argument. No one with an ounce of common sense would just accept this Government’s assurances that everything accords with the refugee convention, nor would they give up the ability to test it in court—and we certainly should not. Today, it seems that the Minister’s argument is basically that it is Parliament’s role just to declare itself in compliance with the refugee convention. Of course that is absolute nonsense.
I reiterate SNP support for the right to work for asylum seekers, and pay tribute to the Lift the Ban coalition members, including in particular the Maryhill Integration Network and many others who have campaigned with passion and integrity on this issue. This policy is the right thing to do for integration, it is right for the public purse and therefore it is right for our citizens and overwhelmingly right for asylum seekers.
The evidence against the policy remains pathetically weak to non-existent, and warm words about deciding cases within six months mean nothing when that prospect appears as remote as ever. The reality is that people are being left in limbo for years, and excluding them from the labour market for years risks effectively excluding them from work forever and undermining integration.
The Home Secretary has repeatedly told us that she is all for safe legal routes. Indeed, last week she told my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), the leader of the Plaid Cymru group in Parliament, that this Bill
“actually puts safe and legal routes into statute.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 41.]
The Home Secretary has complained on various occasions that I have not read the Bill, but I am beginning to question whether she has read her own Bill, because that is clearly utter baloney. There is not a single sentence in the Bill as it stands that puts a safe legal route into statute. On the contrary, clause 11 empowers the Secretary of State to diminish safe routes for family members. Their Lordships’ amendments give just a little bit of protection for those rights.
The final argument I want to make relates, believe it or not, to the 2019 Conservative party election manifesto. In advance of this debate, I forced myself to look at that document; indeed, I forced an unfortunate member of my staff to look at it as well. As far as we can see, the words “asylum” and “refugee” feature in that manifesto only once, and in the following terms:
“We will continue to grant asylum and support to refugees fleeing persecution, with the ultimate aim of helping them to return home if it is safe to do so.”
The manifesto also said:
“We will ensure no matter where in the world you or your family come from, your rights will be respected and you will be treated with fairness and dignity.”
This Bill not only breaches the refugee convention, but is utterly contrary to the 2019 Government manifesto. There is nothing in that manifesto about driving a coach and horses through the refugee convention. There is nothing about criminalising—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. I stopped the shadow Minister, so I have to give the same advice to the spokesman for the SNP. We are not here to talk about manifestos and general matters this evening; we are here to talk about Government motions to disagree to amendments 5D, 6D, 6E, 6F, 7F and 7G, and only that. This Bill has been properly heard in general terms. We will stick to the exact points in front of us now.
Stuart C. McDonald
The point I am trying to make, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I would be allowed, is that these amendments would bring the Government much closer to fulfilling their 2019 manifesto commitments than anything in the Bill today. The Bill rides roughshod not only over the refugee convention but over the Government’s own manifesto commitments. That is the point I am trying to make. It is an important point for this House, for the Conservative party and for this Government. It is also an important point for Members in the other place, because, yes, this is a Bill that breaches international law in egregious ways, and totally undermines the refugee convention and treats asylum seekers appallingly, but it is also, as I said, contrary to the Conservative manifesto. For that reason, if this is not the sort of Bill that the House of Lords should be using its modest powers to delay, then I really do not know what is.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
You are right, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the House is considering narrower and narrower aspects of the Bill, but despite the fact that this is the fifth time it has come to the House, still no Minister has been able to explain how the United Kingdom, which is surrounded by water, can ever be the first safe country of arrival for an undocumented asylum seeker.
The proposals in the Bill, and the Government’s determination to overturn repeated amendments of the House of Lords on this aspect, are literally inhumane. The Minister stands at the Dispatch Box and says that we fully comply with the refugee convention and therefore an amendment to put the refugee convention into the Bill is unnecessary. He is contradicting himself in his own terms. Instead the Government want to make criminals out of Eritrean human rights defenders fleeing for their lives, LGBT+ women and men from Rwanda seeking a more tolerant society in which to live, and Ukrainians who, for whatever reason, cannot get through the interminable Home Office visa processing system to reunite here with friends and families.
When the Minister winds up, can he explain whether the effect of the Bill and the agreement is that if a young Ukrainian man arrives at the UK border without documentation, he will be criminalised—or will he be sent to build a new life in Rwanda? Indeed, when an asylum seeker from Rwanda arrives here on a small boat, will they be sent back to Rwanda to seek asylum and rebuild their life? How is that possibly supposed to work? In what world could that possibly match with the provisions and duties that this country has under the terms of the refugee convention as outlined in Lords amendment 5?
It is not just the Archbishop of Canterbury who is speaking out on this—and incidentally he has every right to do so, because he is a member of the legislature as a Member of the House of the Lords—because religious leaders across the country have written to us. In amendment 7, the Lords calls once again for asylum seekers to be granted the right to work—not granted the right to work but for their right to work to be recognised, because the right to work is a fundamental human right that cannot be taken away. Using your labour to earn your keep is such a right. I echo the tribute that my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) paid to the work of the Maryhill Integration Network in this regard. Denying that opportunity to asylum seekers, along with the denial of access to public funds in some cases, is not only degrading to them but actively harmful to our own economy and to wider society.
This Bill has been of huge concern to constituents in Glasgow North who have followed it right the way through every single level of amendments that we have had from the House of Lords. Over the course of the Bill’s progress, I have had literally hundreds of messages, ultimately asking for the whole Bill to be withdrawn, but if not, then at least to try to humanise it wherever possible, as their lordships have tried to do this evening. If the Government will not listen to the House of Lords and will not listen to people in Scotland, where is the precious Union? Where is what we are supposed to be doing in working together? The Scottish Parliament is ready and willing to accept responsibility for immigration law, and the people of Scotland are ready to accept it and all the other powers that go along with being an independent country.
Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
I rise to speak in support of Lords amendments passed earlier today. It is clear that, even today, Members of the Lords have made efforts to table new text to find a route to conclude debate on this Bill. Let us remind ourselves that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the Bill undermines the 1951 refugee convention and that its policies would risk the lives and wellbeing of vulnerable people.
I wish to support, in particular, Lords amendment 5D, moved by Baroness Chakrabarti, who has worked tirelessly in her opposition in tabling significant amendments to this horrendous Bill. This amendment sets out that the provisions of this part of the Bill must be read and given effect in a way that is compatible with the refugee convention.
I express my concerns about the Bill’s compatibility with our international obligations, particularly following the announcement of the memorandum of understanding between the Home Secretary and the Rwandan Government. Senior legal representatives have commented on that agreement, including Stephanie Boyce, the president of the Law Society of England and Wales, who recently said that there are
“serious questions about whether these plans would or could comply with the UK’s promises under international treaty”.
We all know that the Government’s proposal of pushbacks of boats in the channel has been abandoned this week in the face of legal scrutiny in the courts. I put on record my thanks to the Public and Commercial Services Union—the trade union of Home Office staff, including Border Force staff—and the charities Care4Calais, Channel Rescue and Freedom from Torture for taking on this legal challenge. As PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka, a fellow Welsh person, said:
“This humiliating climbdown by the government is a stunning victory for Home Office workers and for refugees. There is little doubt that lives have been saved.”
This action has demonstrated that the Government’s bluster about a legal basis for the pushback policy was just that. Are we now meant to take at the Home Secretary’s word that the “New Plan for Immigration” and the horrendous, inhuman, unethical Rwanda policy are just as legally watertight? Forgive me if I am sceptical.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. Will the hon. Lady please stick to addressing the Lords amendments?
Beth Winter
I remain totally opposed to this Bill. These proposals are deeply—
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady is opposed to the Bill, and she was perfectly entitled to say so on Second Reading and on Third Reading, and I think she probably did, but at this point, her opposition to the Bill is of no interest to the House; we are talking about the specific amendments. Will she please stick to the specific amendments?
Beth Winter
I therefore urge Members of this House to back the Lords amendments tonight.
Tom Pursglove
With the leave of the House, I will conclude by observing that we have long debated these issues. The other place asked us to reflect, and we have, repeatedly. This House has been crystal clear. What is also crystal clear is that unlike all the other parties in this House, we have a credible plan. We stand with the vulnerable. We stand against evil people smugglers. There must be no more delay. It is now time to act, and I call on all Members of this House to back the Bill and on the other place to let it pass.
Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 5D.
Business without Debate
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
With the leave of the House, we shall take motions 11 to 14 together.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Financial Services
That the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (High-Risk Countries) (Amendment) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 393), dated 28 March 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 28 March, be approved.
Licences and Licensing
That the draft Licensing Act 2003 (Platinum Jubilee Licensing Hours) Order 2022, which was laid before this House on 21 March, be approved.
Sanctions
That the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 395), dated 29 March 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 30 March, be approved.
That the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 8) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 452), dated 13 April 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 19 April, be approved. —(Michael Tomlinson.)
Question agreed to.
Road safety
Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
Road safety is a top concern of local residents in my constituency of Batley and Spen. Speeding, reckless driving, the use of rented high-performance vehicles and dangerous pavement parking blight every town and village in the constituency, from Healey to Heckmondwike and from Birstall to Birkenshaw. Since my election last year, I have been working closely with local organisations to try to change such dangerous behaviour. However, the battle will never be won without sufficient resources to deter people and clamp down on offenders.
The petition, which was posted online and signed by people across Batley and Spen, calls on the Government to provide these much-needed resources to Kirklees Council and West Yorkshire police and to explore what laws could be introduced to make our roads safe again.
The petition reads:
The petition of residents of the constituency of Batley and Spen,
Declares that the issue of road safety within the constituency must be urgently addressed; notes that there has been a significant rise in the number of speeding offences, incidents of reckless driving throughout and inconsiderate parking in the constituency; declares that sympathy should be extended to the victims of road incidents and their families; declares that this issue has had an enormous impact in our community and demands urgent action be taken at a National, Regional and Local level to improve the safety of our local roads.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to provide dedicated resource to Kirklees Council and West Yorkshire Police to clamp down on dangerous driving and consider a review into the impact of high-performance cars rented and driven recklessly. The House of Commons should also urge the Government to explore what legislative measures should be taken to improve the safety of roads in Batley and Spen.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P002727]
Fossil Fuel Extraction
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
In this global week of advocacy for fossil fuel non-proliferation, I call on the Government to deliver on the climate leadership that was promised, while the UK still has the COP26 presidency, by helping to initiate a negotiation process on an international fossil fuel treaty to phase out fossil fuels. I will set out the context for this treaty, the idea for which originated several years ago with parliamentarians in the global south and that has now been endorsed by more than 200 worldwide. I will lay out some of the reasons why such a treaty is necessary and ask the Minister some key questions about the Government’s strategy for ending fossil fuel production.
According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the burning of coal, oil and gas accounts for around 86% of all carbon dioxide emissions in the past decade. There is global consensus that, on scientific, economic, public health, justice, moral and countless other grounds, we have to end our deadly addiction to fossil fuels, and we have to do it fast. At the Glasgow climate summit, under the UK’s ongoing COP presidency, for the first time since the original UN framework convention on climate change was negotiated in 1992, fossil fuels were finally referenced in the outcome text, albeit by committing only to a “phase down of coal”. But the fossil fuel age is well and truly over, and the only debate to be had is how quickly, successfully and fairly we act: whether we urgently transition to a zero-carbon economy or decline into climate chaos.
Sir Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Does my colleague on the Environmental Audit Committee agree that one problem we face is as a result of her colleagues in Germany forcing the closure of nuclear power plants? The Germans are burning more fossil fuel than before, and if we had a nuclear future, we would be able to have a lower carbon footprint in this country. If only Germany would follow that lead.
Caroline Lucas
I think I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. The truth is that although mistakes have certainly been made in Germany in the past, the idea that new nuclear now can help the UK get to net zero fast enough is simply misguided; it is too costly and too slow, and it simply will not get us where we need to be quickly enough. What is clear, however, is that phasing out fossil fuel production, and fast-tracking progress towards safer and more cost-effective alternatives, will require unprecedented international co-operation.
I want to begin with a quick reminder of the science and with what climate experts are saying about fossil fuel production. Last year’s United Nations Environment Programme production gap report concluded that in order to limit warming to 1.5°C, the world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by at least 6% per year between 2020 and 2030. At the moment, there is no collective means of reaching that hard scientific deadline together, of accounting for the global impacts of choices made unilaterally by individual nations on our shared planet. Yet a universal and equitable approach is critical, as the Tyndall Centre’s own production phase-out report warns. It says:
“For a 50% or better chance of 1.5°C, our analysis shows that all producer countries must peak their production immediately and begin an uninterrupted decline. Expanding production in wealthier producers would either shift poorer producers (in fact all producers) onto more steeply declining pathways with earlier end dates, or put the temperature commitments beyond reach.”
Let us be absolutely clear: the UK is one of those wealthier producers, which together produce more than a third of the world’s oil and gas. Moreover, the UK has a moral responsibility to go further and faster than the vast majority of the world, because our historic cumulative emissions are so much greater. Tyndall analysis finds that the UK must reduce our oil and gas production by 50% in six years, which equates to an 8.3% reduction year on year, and must cease it completely by 2034—and that is just for a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C once equity is factored in.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
We now have an end date to phase out diesel and petrol cars, which has forced the industry to put its mind to it and follow very quickly. People and organisations can then follow suit. If we had an end date for extracting fossil fuels, would that not concentrate minds, with people working much faster than they do now, when they think we can have business as usual?
Caroline Lucas
I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution and I completely agree with it; that is exactly what this fossil fuel treaty is all about. It is about countries setting those end dates and then working towards that reduction swiftly but in a coherent and co-ordinated fashion.
The International Energy Agency has been similarly clear that countries, including the UK, must halt all new fossil fuel exploration and development from the end of 2021 if we are to keep below the 1.5°C threshold. In its recent assessment of the climate compatibility of new UK oil and gas fields, the Climate Change Committee stressed that extra extraction of gas and oil will simply support a larger global market overall. We know that if oil and gas are produced, they are consumed, so extra oil and gas production can reasonably be assumed to result in extra global consumption. Although the CCC has not been able to quantify accurately the impact of new domestic production on global consumption, every expert is clear that the direction of travel globally has to be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. The Committee therefore recommended a presumption against exploration, explaining that
“an end to UK exploration would send a clear signal to investors and consumers that the UK is committed to the 1.5° C global temperature goal”.
When it comes to the UK’s ongoing diplomatic responsibilities as COP President to strengthen climate ambition internationally, it is clear that any domestic policies that increase the fossil fuel market undermine that ambition and open us to the accusation of gross hypocrisy. Of course, I understand that the Government have other responsibilities too and that this debate is happening in the midst of a cost of living crisis. While companies such as BP and Shell are raking in eye-watering profits, millions of households are pushed into poverty. Yet only a tiny proportion of the oil and gas industry’s total capital expenditure is going into renewables—just 1% in 2020 and still only in single figures today. I wholeheartedly support efforts to cut the UK’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels and to shield families from the effects of high global gas prices. What I do not support is the pursuit of policies that will end up exposing people to more costs in the long term.
I do not support historic decisions such as gutting energy-efficiency subsidies, effectively banning onshore wind in England and scrapping the zero-carbon homes standards, which together have actually added £2.5 billion to UK energy bills over the past decade. When we know that energy security quite literally starts at home, it is frankly shocking that the Government’s energy security strategy failed to deliver a retrofit revolution for the UK’s leaky homes. I do not support any strategy that defines winning at this critical juncture in human history in terms that literally sacrifice the future of humanity, or indeed policies like a climate checkpoint that would somehow greenlight the pumping of new North sea oil and gas when there is no global scenario in which that is compatible with keeping 1.5° alive and climate justice—a critical threshold which, let us remember again, means that every producer country must peak their production immediately and begin an uninterrupted decline.
It is very possible to reduce people’s energy bills here in the UK, cut carbon dioxide emissions, end fuel poverty, and stop oil and gas profits from filling Putin’s war chest. If we choose that, we can manage our way fairly and safely through this crisis. We can choose not to fall into knee-jerk responses that undermine our shared prosperity. Ambitious investment in insulation and heat pumps through a retrofit revolution, alongside meaningful direct financial support for struggling households, is the first step.
As the CCC states:
“The best way of reducing the UK’s future exposure to these volatile prices is to cut fossil fuel consumption on the path to Net Zero—improving energy efficiency, shifting to a renewables-based power system and electrifying end uses in transport, industry and heating. Any increases in UK extraction of oil and gas would have, at most, a marginal effect on the prices faced by UK consumers in future.”
Systemic change is the next step: ambitious, consistent and aligned with 1.5°. It is the very opposite of immediately turning off the taps now, which is not something I have ever advocated, so I hope the Minister will not repeat his Department’s regular assertions that those of us who are campaigning against new extraction are envisaging an immediate closing of the taps. We are not, and never have. In fact, many of us are fiercely calling for a just transition for offshore workers. I remind the Minister that it was MPs on the Government Benches who voted against my amendment to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, which would have helped oil and gas workers access jobs in renewable energy more easily.
Given that we are operating within the immutable reality of hard physics, it is short-term policies such as licensing more oil and gas production that increase the likelihood of being forced into unplanned shock actions. To put it another way, if we turn on more taps, as the Government’s energy security strategy suggests, it is inevitable that we will end up watching the flood waters rise on the future and be forced to take drastic action—inevitable because pumping more fossil fuels from new wells undermines our fundamental ability to keep the global temperature increase to 1.5°. Why would anyone choose that trajectory, no matter what the perceived short-term benefits, rather than take a sensible, managed global approach to fossil fuel production? Why indeed? And yet, without a fossil fuel treaty to guide us constructively through what is a life-critical mission, we risk sleepwalking into just such a scenario.
The 2021 UNEP production gap report warns that Governments currently plan to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting heating to 1.5°. The IPCC’s latest report warns that emissions from existing and currently planned fossil fuel infrastructure are higher than the pathways for 1.5° allows. No amount of political wishful thinking can magic away the science or the threat of catastrophic global heating if we do not start to act globally now to manage fossil fuel production and its phasing out. My first question to the Minister, then, is whether he will tell us whether the UK has a date by which it plans to end fossil fuel production. Does it have a coherent road map to get there?
Let me say a few words about the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. It originated in 2015 in Pacific island nations. It has been endorsed by 43 cities and sub-national Governments, from France to Costa Rica to Australia. It is backed by more than 2,700 global scientists, Nobel peace prize winners and climate leaders. It stems from the recognition that the world ultimately needs a formal process—a legal architecture—to deliver a negotiated instrument on the managed transition away from fossil fuels. Of course, that will require building political momentum both within and outside the UN community. International co-operation is vital to enable countries to reduce their mutual dependence on fossil fuels, to manage the decline of production to support workers and communities, to transition rapidly to renewable energy, and to build more diverse economies.
There are three main elements to the treaty proposal: first, to prevent the proliferation of fossil fuels, with a worldwide moratorium on the development of all new oil, gas and coal reserves so that we see an end to new exploration and production; secondly, to manage the decline of production by phasing out existing stockpiles to include the removal of production subsidies, the dismantling of unnecessary infrastructure and the shifting of support to safer and more sustainable alternatives; finally, to speed up a just and equitable transition to 100% renewables. Will the Minister tell us whether the Government disagree with any of those objectives? If they do not, is he prepared to join others in advocating globally for such a treaty?
Of course, we do not have to wait for the treaty; we can start now by scaling up domestic measures to reduce fossil fuel supply, alongside the reduction of demand. As the Minister will know, the CCC’s pathways would see the unabated consumption of gas “virtually eliminated” by 2050. The CCC recognises that, even with a significant role for carbon capture and storage, total UK gas consumption must fall by 50% by 2035 and by 75% by 2050. According to official figures, it takes on average 28 years to go from the discovery of a new oil or gas field to production, which would bring us neatly to that same date. That reinforces, yet again, the unsustainability of the granting of new exploration licences. What is more, 70% of what is left in the North sea basin is oil, not gas—and it is not even the type of oil that we use in UK refineries anyway.
The Government are fond of saying that it is better to produce gas at home than to rely on imports but, of course, it is not our gas: it belongs to private companies and will be traded on global markets to the highest bidder. Contrary to what the Government often claim, the carbon intensity of oil and gas produced in the UK is pretty average and in fact higher than that of Norwegian gas, which is our main source of imports. Ministers need to scrap the very notion of the climate checkpoint and the outdated legal duty to maximise the economic recovery of North sea oil and gas. They need to rule out once and for all the possibility of drilling at Cambo to signal clearly, right now, that Shell will not be given approval for the new Jackdaw gasfield.
Jackdaw will not lower bills or make our energy more secure, but it will produce pollution equal to half of Scotland’s annual emissions. No Government in their right mind would consider such a move, and nor would they continue to support the fossil fuel industry through tax breaks and financial support for exploration and for research and development, yet that is happening, to the tune of £12 billion a year. I know the Treasury does not consider a penny of that to be a subsidy, but New Economics Foundation analysis found that around £10 billion-worth is indeed covered by the subsidy definition used by, for example, the International Monetary Fund.
In fact, the UK’s tax regime makes it the most profitable country in the world for oil and gas companies to develop big projects. Shell alone received a £92 million tax rebate from the UK in 2021—the largest total from any country in which it operates. Yet when I have challenged Ministers previously, I have been met with arguments about how much tax the sector pays, or a refusal to recognise the definition of a subsidy that I use. I stress that that definition follows exactly the principles used by the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, the OECD and the Overseas Development Institute. It is at best quibbling and at worst dissembling.
It is deeply disappointing that the UK has consistently bowed out of G20 efforts to grapple with subsidies by refusing to take part in its peer review on the ground that the Government disagree with the definitions in use. Will the Minister reconsider that position? Whether fossil fuel companies pay tax and how countries interpret what counts as a subsidy are not the issue. The issue is whether the net effect is public money being given to fossil fuels when the world promised in the Glasgow climate pact to stop inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, bearing in mind that even the IMF says that any fossil fuel subsidies are inefficient.
Glasgow also gave us promises about coal. As the Minister will know, the UK made addressing the issue one of its four priorities at COP26, with the Prime Minister declaring that
“Glasgow sounded the death-knell for coal power.”
We are also, of course, a founding member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance. All that makes it particularly puzzling that the Government have failed to take a stand against the Aberpergwm deep coal mine in South Wales, extending its licence. That would allow it to run until 2039, extracting a further 40 million tonnes of coal and emitting up to an estimated 100 million tonnes of CO2.
Just this weekend, we have also seen the prospect of the first new deep coal mine since the 1980s rear its ugly head again. We are told that the proposed Cumbria mine is needed to provide coking coal for the steel industry until 2049, yet less than 10% of that coal is expected to be used by the UK steel industry; 85% of it is planned for export to Europe. We should be investing in green steel production instead. The CCC is clear that coking coal used in steelmaking could be displaced completely by 2035, only halfway through the mine’s proposed lifetime. The Tyndall centre says that, for developed nations such as the UK, coal production needs to fall by 50% within five years and be effectively eliminated by 2030—nine full years before Aberpergwm would cease production and 19 years ahead of when the Cumbria coal mine is projected to close.
The IEA is similarly explicit: if we want even a chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°, no new unabated coal plants, no new coal mines and no new mine extensions can be approved for development after 2021. Globally, we know that the world already plans to produce 240% more coal than is consistent with 1.5°. Some may argue that Aberpergwm is a drop in the ocean, but this is the bigger picture we need to keep in mind. Will the Minister assure us that his Government will not permit any new coal extraction in the UK?
To sum up, meeting the demands of the science has implications for where our pensions are invested and what our banks are funding. It has implications for the donations given to political parties, for the ways in which insurance companies operate, for how food is grown and produced, for how we travel and for the offsetting rules that incentivise continued extraction and use of fossil fuels.
A fossil fuels treaty would enable the necessary disentangling of our economy, our politics and every other aspect of our lives from fossil fuels. One of the stepping stones towards a treaty is setting up a global registry of fossil fuels. That could be hosted by an organisation such as UNEP and would be a comprehensive, transparent, public source of data on estimated fossil fuel reserves and production. If we want to manage fossil fuel production, we need to know what reserves are out there, and who is planning on using them. Some countries have already embraced the principles behind that approach—those that back the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance, for example. The UK could and should be next.
As I said at the beginning of this debate, we are in a week of global advocacy for the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, and I want to end by recapping the questions I have asked the Minister. First, will the Government revisit the UK’s decision not to take part in the G20 peer review of financial support for fossil fuel production? Will they instead engage meaningfully with the process, including being open to assessing the UK’s support against various definitions of subsidy? Secondly, will Ministers undertake to discuss the proposal for a global registry of fossil fuels with counterparts in countries such as Denmark, France, Sweden and Luxembourg, which seem to have successfully overcome the commercial confidentiality objections mooted by the North Sea Transition Authority? The authority should itself be required to publish its field level data on oil and gas reserves.
Thirdly, Stockholm+50 in June is a key moment to build significant political momentum around the proposal for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. Will Ministers commit to going there with the intention of helping initiate a negotiating process for a treaty to phase out fossil fuels within the UN system? Finally, have the Government set a proposed end date for oil and gas extraction and production? When will that be and is there a road map, beyond what is set out in the north sea transition deal? I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lee Rowley)
It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing it. Although she will probably be aware that we differ on some points, it is useful even at this late hour to talk about a number of the issues she has highlighted and to respond to some of the questions she has asked.
It is important to note, and I am glad the hon. Lady did at points acknowledge this to some extent, that the transition to non-fossil forms of energy will take time. While our demand for both oil and gas is already declining as we transition to other low-carbon energy sources, UK energy demand for both those fuels will continue for quite some time. That needs to be recognised, acknowledged and understood in public policy development and implementation.
If we announced right now that, from when we come back to this place tomorrow morning, our domestic oil and gas producers should shut up shop—[Interruption.] I accept the hon. Lady did not advocate that, but if we did, it would simply make the UK more reliant on foreign imports. It would not, in fact, lead to greater decarbonisation globally. Jobs would be lost and it would weaken our security of supply. Equally, there are shades of that scenario that remain true even if the hon. Lady indicates that she does not want to do it tomorrow, but at the earliest possible opportunity.
Lee Rowley
I will make some progress, if I may. That was the inference of the speech by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion at other points.
Whether we like it or not, gas at the moment is the glue that holds our electricity system together. It provides the flexibility that has underpinned our roll-out of renewable energy. That is why we consistently see 30% or 40% of our energy on many days in 2022 provided by renewables rather than by fossil fuels. While we are using progressively less gas, it remains an important fuel during the transition.
As a mature basin, which the UK continental shelf is, where some fields are at the end of their lives, production will decline. That does not necessarily mean that there will not be continued development. It is legitimate both to accept the principle of decline and still to ensure that we develop and give the opportunity to develop where we can. Some of the things we have seen in recent months would indicate that it is sensible, in a long-term phase of reducing oil and gas production, that we seek to maximise oil and gas production in or close to the United Kingdom, rather than elsewhere.
Lee Rowley
I will not give way, because I do not have a huge amount of time left.
In taking that time and accepting that time will be needed to get there, we must also have confidence in the story we have to tell as a country. We have made significant progress in the past 30 years, under Governments of all colours: emissions down 40%, the economy up by nearly 80%, renewables now making up nearly 40% of our electricity generation in 2021, up from 7%, and by far the most advanced decarbonisation of any western country.
Those are not things just to be tossed aside as if they were inconsequential. They are important indicators of the desire and intent of this Government, building on the desire and intent of previous Governments, to make progress in this important policy area. I hope they provide some indication, if not to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion and the tradition she is from, then to others who may be watching the debate, that we are serious about it and that we intend to ensure that we make good progress.
With that in mind, I turn to some of the questions the hon. Lady asked of the Government. She asked whether we would commit to any new extraction and when we would commit to a date for UK fossil fuel production finally ending. I would say gently to her that her question fundamentally misunderstands the challenges we face and what we are trying to do over the long term.
The ultimate goal is to get to a point where we are using as little fossil fuel as possible, but we are still in a transition, as the hon. Lady said, so we will need fossil fuels over the course of the 28 years she outlined. It therefore seems sensible to look at what we can extract in or near the United Kingdom. Even when we get to that 2050 date, although she did not discuss this terribly much, it is clear that we will still need fossil fuels at that point. It is a net zero; it is not an absolute zero. Even the documents that she has pointed to, such as the reports by the IEA and the Committee on Climate Change, all indicate that there will still be a requirement for oil and gas, with the relevant offsetting technologies, to be able to minimise the impact on the environment. I see the grand gestures of incredulity from those on the Opposition Benches. When the hon. Lady quotes from those documents, she should also acknowledge that within them there is a recognition that there will still be a requirement for oil and gas, and that extractive technologies to support and minimise the use of fossil fuels will mitigate their impact on the environment and on our earth over the long term.
The hon. Lady asked whether I would advocate for the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. I am afraid that I will not, because my concern, having looked at the treaty, is not with its objective—because I think most of us agree with the overall principle of where we are trying to end up, when we pull back the hyperbole, the emotion, the emoting and all the like—but with the challenges underneath it and the scrutiny that we need to place on some of these discussions, which is useful in order to understand the different approaches to this. The authors of the non-proliferation treaty, Simms and Newell, in what they wrote in 2018, are not just talking about changes and achieving this in pulling together a treaty, but saying that the treaty has underneath it a clear lowering of demand, a clear lowering of material consumption, and clear changes to people’s diets. Ultimately, there are questions of choice, individual agency and personal responsibility that the treaty is seeking to gloss over.
Ultimately, one has to choose one’s own approach. I respect and accept the hon. Lady’s approach and I am grateful for her contribution. I think we do have shared aims, but we have to agree on much of the content of this. We want to get to the same place. However, this Government are trying to put the rhetoric and the complaints aside, and to base this on the reality of how we are trying incrementally, carefully and in a sustained way to reduce our impacts on the world as a whole—to tread more lightly on the earth but also to recognise that that will take time, to acknowledge that we have great opportunities in our country to get there, and to recognise that we are in a transition rather than an extinction.
Ultimately, my concern about the hon. Lady’s speech is that it was very long on critique and very short on answers. Those who oppose have a responsibility to propose. We have a set of plans, a set of frameworks, a set of documents and a set of strategies that are seeking to get us to the end point of this and do it in a cool, calm and incremental way. I look forward to those on the Opposition Benches making such proposals some time so that we can do the same critique that has been done today, because they will not hold up to what we have been able to achieve so far, what we are doing today, and what we seek to achieve in years to come.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Industrial Training Levy (Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2022
(2 years, 7 months ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Industrial Training Levy (Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2022.
The construction industry is extremely important to our country. To put it frankly—
Alex Burghart
Let’s try again. The construction industry is obviously vital to our country because its success is the UK economy’s success. The construction sector contributes about £155 billion to the economy, which represents 9% of our gross value added. The industry is made up of about 3.1 million workers, equating to 9% of the UK’s employment.
The Government are clear that construction is integral to achieving two of our main priority objectives in our plan for growth: levelling up and reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Skills interventions will be critical to addressing current skills deficits and looking ahead to meet future construction labour market demands. However, the increased need for skills is not a challenge that the Government can address alone.
The Construction Industry Training Board was set up in 1964 and continues to play an important role by helping to shape interventions and communication to employers. I thank the CITB for working with my Department on this issue.
The draft order will enable the CITB to continue to raise and collect a levy on employers in the construction industry. The levy funds increased provision of skills for individual workers and employers in the sector. Over the coming three years, the CITB expects to raise around £505.2 million of levy funding to be invested in skills training.
Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)
As the Minister knows, the CITB has said that one of the things it will do to address the barriers to training the current workforce is develop a strategy to influence local provision to meet employers’ needs, linking to local skills improvement plans. It seems to me that if someone who wants to get into construction lives in an area where there are few construction companies, and none is involved in developing LSIPs, they may well struggle to find a relevant course. Will the Government ensure that people, particularly young people, who want to get into construction work can do so, even if opportunities in the area where they live are limited?
Alex Burghart
The hon. Lady makes an important point. Obviously, a lot of the skills work that we are putting forward is employer led. By that, we mean that we want students who are studying construction, or indeed another technical skill, at whatever level, to have the opportunity to do on-the-job training. That might be through T-levels or apprenticeships. At the moment, many colleges around the country are finding people who can offer that training, to give students the chance to step up through either a level 2 course or a T-level construction course. So although the availability of placements is to a certain extent limited by the nature of the industry in the area, it is essential that students have the chance to study on the job wherever possible. I hope that answers the hon. Lady’s question, but if she would like to come back, I am happy to respond again.
Members may recognise that small local construction firms in their constituencies say that the CITB pays out grants to cover the cost of certain construction training. Indeed, that is a significant percentage of its activity. It provides a grant system to employers to enable workers to access and operate safely on construction sites—for example, through health and safety training—to drive up skills and to incentivise training that would otherwise not take place.
Mark Eastwood (Dewsbury) (Con)
I appreciate the Minister’s comment about levelling up. One of the initiatives in the Dewsbury town board funding is a construction and skills centre. Does he agree that that could be rolled out in towns fund bids and that local councils and authorities could take that on board?
Alex Burghart
I know that my hon. Friend is championing exactly that sort of work in his area and giving us lessons that we can transpose to other areas. The new centres of excellence will be fundamental to how we build the next generation of skills in our country and create that pipeline for young people and those who are changing careers to enter the workforce with higher levels of skills. I congratulate my hon. Friend on what he is seeing in his area.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Minister rightly referred a moment ago to the nation’s skills deficit. The order effectively doubles the amount that the construction industry pays, but undoes the reduction that the Government previously put in place. We are not hostile to that, but it returns us to where we were two years ago when the deficit existed. What can he point to in the order that makes anything better? It effectively represents a continuity strategy. We have got a skills deficit, which has built up over a number of years—we can debate why that is. Are the Government doing anything to make the situation better rather than just returning us to where we were?
Alex Burghart
The hon. Gentleman asks a fair question. He rightly points out that, during covid, we reduced the burden on construction companies to help them get through the pandemic, and the order is a return to normal. However, it is only one part of the interventions we are making to create the next generation of people working in construction. I am pleased to say that apprenticeship construction starts are doing well and are above their pre-pandemic level. We are introducing new T-levels in construction and we see a real appetite for the skills bootcamps that the Government have brought in. Those short, intensive courses, which help people skill up over 12 to 18 weeks, with a guaranteed job interview at the end, are popular with potential employees, employers and, I am pleased to say, the Treasury.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
On the point the Minister just made, if this order is just bringing us back to pre-pandemic levels, it is not doing anything to fix the immigration situation we have because of Brexit. I know there is a major problem for bricklayers, for example. Will this just get us back to pre-pandemic levels, rather than making up for that shortfall that we see as a result of Brexit and this Government’s immigration policies?
Alex Burghart
As the hon. Lady will have heard me say to the hon. Member for Chesterfield, this is just one of the things we are doing. Our bootcamps are a new innovation that offer people of all ages a rapid route into employment. The construction route was very popular. It is important that the hon. Lady sees this in the round. She raises Brexit, but in my seven months in this job I have had the great pleasure of talking to further education colleges around England, and many principals have told me that there is new enthusiasm from employers to look at skills training in their areas, which did not exist before we left the EU. Lots of companies used to advertise internationally for skills as their first port of call, and people came in. They did not have to invest in training in their own areas. I am pleased to say that that is changing for the better for young people in England.
The work of the CITB will support strategic initiatives to help maintain vital skills in the industry and create a pipeline of skilled workers.
Margaret Greenwood
The Minister is being very generous. A point was raised in the other place about paragraph 10.1 of the explanatory memorandum and the small group of industry representatives that the CITB consulted to examine the current levy arrangements and how the levy should operate. The Minister there said:
“it is up to the CITB as to who it engages with.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 25 April 2022; Vol. 821, c. GC9.]
I think it is important that the CITB engages with relevant unions on the levy. Can the Minister tell me whether he has any expectation, even though it might not be prescribed in law, that the CITB will consult with the unions?
Alex Burghart
I very much hope that the CITB will engage with all relevant stakeholders.
I will try to make some headway. The remit is broader still. The CITB develops and maintains occupational standards so that employees and employers are assured training is of sufficient quality. That also means that construction skills become more readily transferable, benefiting both employees and employers. The CITB has a critical role in horizon scanning, too. It uses research and labour market intelligence to understand the skills needs of the sector and to work with industry and Government to help ensure that construction has the right skills both now and in future.
Before turning to the details of the draft order, I want to highlight that the most recent levy order—the 2021 order—was for one year, not the usual three years. As we discussed a moment ago, a 50% reduction was prescribed in that year relative to the 2018 three-year order. That was to accommodate the CITB’s decision to allow levy payers a payment holiday in response to cash-flow pressures the industry was facing during the first covid lockdown. This three-year 2022 order returns to the levy rates prescribed by the three-year 2018 order: 0.35% of the earnings paid by employers to directly employed workers, and 1.25% of contract payments for indirectly employed workers such as contractors, for those businesses that are liable to pay the levy.
The industry, having been consulted on the CITB’s delivery strategy and levy rate, supported the retention of the higher exemption and reduction thresholds for smaller employers contained in the 2021 order. To run through those very quickly, construction employers with an annual wage bill of up to £119,999 will not pay any levy, while still having full access to CITB support. It is projected that approximately 62% of all employers in the scope of the levy will be exempt from paying. Larger companies will carry the burden. Employers with a wage bill between £120,000 and £399,999 will receive a 50% reduction on their levy liability, while also receiving full access to CITB services—that covers about 14% of employers.
Mr Perkins
I understand the reason for the tapering that the Minister refers to, but has any analysis been done of whether this creates a cliff edge that disincentivises employment? There will be companies that know that the next person they take on will move them either from being a non-payer to a half-payer, of from being a half-payer to a full payer. In an industry with huge amounts of subcontract work done anyway, it would not be amazing if this was a disincentive to employment. Has any analysis of that been done, and if not does the Minister think it would be a good idea for inquiries of that kind to be made?
Alex Burghart
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; I will consult my notes while he is speaking, and perhaps return to it in my closing remarks.
The CITB has consulted the industry on these levy proposals via the consensus process, which is required under the Industrial Training Act 1982. Consensus is achieved by satisfying two requirements: both the majority of employers likely to pay the levy, and those employers who are, together, likely to pay more than half the aggregate levy raised, consider that the proposals are necessary to encourage adequate training. Both requirements were satisfied, with 66.5% of likely levy payers in the industry, who between them are likely to pay 63.2% of the aggregate levy, supportive of the CITB’s proposals.
The draft order will enable CITB to play its role in aiding employers to secure and retain a sufficient supply of highly skilled labour in the construction industry in these fast-moving times. I commend it to the Committee.
Mr Perkins
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees.
The Construction Industry Training Board has been instrumental in training the construction industry workforce since it was established in the wake of the Industrial Training Act 1964. The main reason for its creation was to address concerns about UK skills shortages at the time—an issue that seems more pressing than ever.
As Members may well be aware, since the CITB’s creation, the primary focus of the board has been to invest the money that it receives from the CITB levy in training and upskilling both the existing workforce and new entrants into the industry. It is essential, for both the construction industry and the wider UK economy, that Britain is able to attract the best new talent through the promotion of construction as an exciting and rewarding career.
I agree entirely with what the Minister said about the crucial importance of the construction industry; the fact that one of the biggest barriers to growth for the UK economy, and the construction industry in particular, is access to skilled labour; and the creation of an environment where young people feel that construction is a career that they can move into. Anyone who has sought to get any kind of building work done will know how difficult it is to attract a reliable, skilled workforce that is available, even for basic home improvements. That is even more the case within house building and other aspects of the construction sector, so this is a matter of supreme importance.
The CITB has been at the forefront of the implementation of T-levels for the construction sector, and of new frameworks for apprentices in the industry. I had the great privilege to visit both the HomeServe academy in Birmingham and the Steve Willis academy in Burgess Hill to see how apprentices in the sector are progressing and the wide range of opportunities open to those starting out in the industry. While there are a huge number of opportunities in the industry, there are still far too few people being giving opportunities to move into the sector, with HomeServe estimating that as many as 30,000 too few apprentices are coming through every year to keep pace with the growth opportunities and the retirements in what is an ageing workforce.
With the industry facing the twin challenges of an ageing workforce and the decline in migrant labour following Britain’s departure from the European Union, the role of the CITB—to make it easy for levy-paying firms to get funding for innovation and skills development —has never been more important. It has also never been more important for the Government to take a strategic view on supporting an industry that is largely based on subcontracted workers, and to recognise why we continue to have a huge skills shortage within the sector.
The Minister said a few moments ago that he has been speaking to further education colleges that have experienced many new employers getting involved in training, where previously they might have relied on migrant labour. That is great to hear. As he and the Committee will be aware, the Labour party was against the idea of Britain leaving the European Union, but is committed to making Brexit work in the best way that it can. One of the clear opportunities that exist as a result of the reduction in migrant labour—not only an opportunity, but an imperative for the UK economy—is to train up more of our own people to get into such sectors and to ensure that the route into developing a career in construction is as easy as possible. We are 100% behind that opportunity.
I have to say, however, that the Government are not strategic in developing those opportunities. There is much more that they can do. They have absolutely outsourced responsibility for skills policy to employers. Of course employers need to play a key role—they want to take these people on and need to be involved every step of the way on training—but the more the Government have put employers in the driving seat over the past 12 years, the more the skills shortages have grown. In a variety of sectors—the construction industry is no exception—we have seen a massive reduction in the number of people who are able to be trained up.
Kirsty Blackman
An awful lot of what we have talked about is focused on England, but CITB is national, over all these islands. The difference in Scotland is that we are doing some of the things that the hon. Gentleman is suggesting: we have Developing the Young Workforce, which is a partnership between the private sector and education, in an attempt to ensure that the skills that come through are those that are needed by business. DYW is now embedded in Scotland and is a good success story. I urge him and the Minister to look into what is happening with it, and to consider it as a basis for something that could go forward in England.
Mr Perkins
The hon. Lady is right that the devolved authorities in Wales and Scotland have innovated in some areas. I am conscious of some of those innovations, and am happy to learn more about them. I thank her for that invitation.
To turn to the draft order, we supported the levy rates being halved temporarily under the previous order to 0.175% on directly employed workers and 0.625% on taxable subcontractors, net of CIS—the construction industry scheme—to support businesses through the pandemic, at a time when workers were being furloughed and many works were being postponed and delayed, and when much less training was happening. It is encouraging that, as we return to some kind of normality, businesses across the sector are able to develop projects and developments, so we support the return to the previous level.
The Minister was right to say that the draft order is not the beginning and end of investment in construction skills, but a lot more needs to be done from a strategic perspective. The Government need to recognise that an industry that is largely focused on subcontracted work will often have everyone saying that training up the next generation is someone else’s responsibility. The idea that the sector will just do that itself if we get out of its way and give it the space to do so is optimistic at best, and arguably naive. That is what we have seen: not enough people are being attracted into the sector.
It is vital to ensure that the CITB is able to support such training needs over the next three years. That is why we support the return to the pre-pandemic levy rates. We need to ensure the right balance in the draft order between supporting businesses and the continued training and development of staff, while ensuring that smaller businesses are encouraged and not penalised, in particular when starting to get back on their feet post pandemic. Overall, the order largely does that, retaining the wage bill exemption threshold for the levy at £120,000. We think that that is sensible, given the challenges faced by business.
We need to ensure that there is a strong conversation between Government and the sector. The idea that it will simply take up the slack is not one that we agree with. It is important that the sector takes responsibility for ensuring that there is a strategic plan to attract the next generation, and that people at all levels and in all geographies are able to access it. My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West made a powerful point in that regard: we need to make sure that in the smaller towns and areas without a big construction industry—perhaps those that have smaller amounts of new house building going on—people are able to access those opportunities, too.
As the Minister will be aware, there is still some resentment from larger employers that they are required to pay both the CITB and apprenticeship levies. It is therefore crucial that the CITB levy adds value to businesses and the wider construction workforce and, indeed, that it is seen to do so. Having diligently read through the CITB four-year strategic plan for 2021-2025—my speech says “scanned through”, but actually I read it diligently—I know that £66.9 million is allocated for other support.
With the need to ensure that the CITB levy is value for money, and in the interest of transparency, can the Minister tell us a bit more about what “other support” actually encompasses and ensure that the sector is aware of where exactly that money is going? There is also £2 million being spent on research. Can the Minister set out what sort of projects and research will be undertaken and how that will lead to more skilled workers in the future?
I note that although construction was one of the first three T-levels launched in September 2020, T-levels do not actually muster a mention in the four-year strategic plan. Can the Minister outline how T-levels fit into the CITB’s plans for the future of the workforce, particularly in terms of building pipelines for the next generation to enter the construction sector?
Since the introduction of the construction T-level, the Department for Education has added skills bootcamps and flexi-apprenticeships for construction. The Minister spoke about bootcamps a moment ago; I would be interested to hear how many people he anticipates going on those bootcamps over the four-year period and whether he believes that they are delivering on what Government expected.
The skills shortages are profound at the moment. On that basis, I question whether unpaid traineeships, in a sector that is already understaffed, are the most attractive way of attracting new people into the sector. Has the Minister given any thought to expanding the number of apprenticeships, rather than funding traineeship opportunities?
I welcome that the Government appear to have backtracked on their proposals to defund the majority of BTECs. Will the Minister update us on the future of BTEC routes into construction and provide us with a guarantee that businesses and those who want to work in the construction sector will be able to access those qualifications in the coming years?
As Committee members will be aware, the consequences of the fire at Grenfell are still deeply felt. It is important that lessons have been learned across the building industry. However, Grenfell and its aftermath are only briefly acknowledged in the strategic plan, with a reference to post-Hackitt and energy-efficient retrofits. Can the Minister reassure the Committee that future recruits and existing workers will be trained so that a mindset of ensuring safety and building sustainability is paramount in their thoughts?
As I stated earlier, the Opposition are content for the draft order to be passed, and we hope it will yield the results the Minister and the CITB hope for. However, we once again call on the Government to take a more strategic and hands-on role to ensure that there are more people to address the skills shortage. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s responses to my questions.
Alex Burghart
I thank the Opposition for their support for the statutory instrument. I make the general point that, although the hon. Gentleman suggests that we are outsourcing skills or offloading responsibility for the skills agenda to employers in its entirety, that is not the case. We are building a really exciting partnership between central Government, employers—who will, of course, be front and centre—colleges, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and Ofqual, as well as mayoral combined authorities and upper-tier authorities.
I was privileged the other day to be present at the signing of a memorandum of understanding between a local Teesside FE college and BP on their hydrogen work. What we are seeing there is a fantastic synergy between local government, business and the people who will train the next generation of skilled employees. That is levelling up in action.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
I am glad the Minister enjoyed his trip to Teesside. However, the highlight of his visits last week would have been going to Ipswich, where he visited Suffolk New College. Does he agree that the most powerful thing is where we have brilliant further education colleges, such as Suffolk New College, working hand-in-glove with local businesses to pinpoint the skills needs in the local area?
Alex Burghart
Absolutely; how could I forget my visit to Suffolk New College in Ipswich last week? I saw a fantastic appetite for our skills agenda there. Suffolk New College is a great provider of T-levels. It works closely with employers to give students a work placement, so that they can gain skills on the job while learning the background in the classroom. I very much enjoyed my trip and hope to return to Suffolk before too long.
With reference to T-levels and BTECs, the construction T-level route that we have set up is very popular. I have been pleased to see colleges across the country taking advantage of that and giving students new opportunities, as well as employers providing work placements. With BTECs, we have been clear on our course from the start: we are shifting from BTECs to T-levels in those areas where T-levels exist, but in the areas where T-levels do not exist and there is no overlap, I would expect those BTEC courses to continue.
Mr Perkins
I am not sure if the Minister has just made an announcement, because we do not yet have the list of the courses that will not be carrying on. Is he saying that the BTEC in construction is one of those that the Government are intending to get rid of to be replaced by the T-level? That is what it sounded like. If that is not the case, can he provide an update on what he sees as the future for the BTEC in construction? He mentions that the T-level is very popular, but actually far more students are studying the BTEC at the moment. Can he clarify that matter?
Alex Burghart
We are only in our second year of T-level delivery and I am very much looking forward to seeing the first results in August. The hon. Gentleman sat through many days of debates on the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, where he heard both myself and the Secretary of State say that where BTECs and other level 3 qualifications overlap with T-levels, we expect T-levels to be the successor course—I remember a long debate we had about that issue in a Committee Room down the corridor. Obviously, in those areas where there is no T-level, there will be no overlap. I fully expect the Government to say more on that in the coming months.
It has been wonderful to serve under your chairwomanship, Ms Rees, and to find that we have cross-party agreement on the CITB statutory instrument.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Industrial Training Levy (Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2022.
Ministerial Correction
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Cabinet Office
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
PPE was needed immediately. It was obviously right to order more than was necessary—that was fundamental. At the beginning of the pandemic, nobody knew precisely how much would be needed, but we knew we needed supplies. The Government succeeded in getting domestic production, excluding gloves, up from 1% to 70%. [Official Report, 31 March 2022, Vol. 711, c. 969.]
Letter of correction from the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg):
An error has been identified in the response I gave to the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey).
The correct response should have been:
Mr Rees-Mogg
PPE was needed immediately. It was obviously right to order more than was necessary—that was fundamental. At the beginning of the pandemic, nobody knew precisely how much would be needed, but we knew we needed supplies. The Government succeeded in getting domestic production capacity, excluding gloves, up to 82% of forecast need for winter 2020.
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Smokefree 2030
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con) [R]
I beg to move,
That this House has considered progress towards the Government’s smokefree 2030 ambition.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. For those who do not know, today is my birthday. What better way to celebrate my birthday than to speak in Westminster Hall? On a personal level, it is tinged with sadness, because tomorrow is the anniversary of my mother’s death. She died from smoking—officially, it was lung and throat cancer, but I am clear that smoking killed my mother. That is one of the reasons I am so passionate about ensuring that young people do not start smoking and that those who smoke give up as quickly as they can, because the medical reality is that the lungs can recover. In fact, if smokers quit at an early enough stage, even seasoned smokers who have smoked for many years will see their lungs recover.
I thank the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Backbench Business Committee, on which I sit, for granting this debate. Originally, our intention was to focus on Javed Khan’s long-awaited review. The officers of the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health and I believed that the review’s recommendation would be published last Friday. Javed has had to delay his publication, but I hope that when we see it, it will be as radical as we believe it to be. Given the delay in publication—until the middle of May, I believe—we were left having to decide whether to proceed with this debate or wait. My view is that, given that we have the opportunity to debate this issue, and possibly even shape Javed Khan’s views and recommendations, it is better to proceed and get the answers from the Minister about where we stand on the review. I hope the Government will commit to introduce all the recommendations of Javed Khan’s review, whatever they may be, to achieve what I am sure we all in this room wish to achieve: a smokefree 2030.
The hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy)—I will call her my hon. Friend—and I have co-sponsored this debate, and I am sure she will speak on many of aspects, particularly levelling up. The Government have a bold ambition, which I strongly support—I am sure we all do—to bring the end of smoking within touching distance. But it is deeply disappointing that, three years on from that being announced in the Green Paper, we do not seem to have made much progress. There is no road map to put us on the route to success. The purpose of this debate is to remind the Minister of the urgent need to deliver the bold action that was promised in the 2019 Green Paper.
The 2030 ambition was acknowledged by everyone to be extremely challenging only three years ago. We have lost three years, so it is even more challenging now. We should be clear that if we do nothing, we will not achieve that target, so there is no time to be lost. When the ambition was announced, we had 11 years; now, there is only eight. We are nowhere near achieving our ambition, particularly for our more disadvantaged communities in society, which have the highest rates of smoking.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Member not just on jointly securing the debate but on his birthday. He talks about the harder-to-reach, socially disadvantaged communities. Does he agree that if we do not get the younger elements in particular to a smoke-free society, we will not get future generations, and the 2030 target will not be met?
Bob Blackman
I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. Clearly, people start smoking when they are young. They continue to smoke well into their later life, and it is very hard for people to give up if they have already committed to smoking cigarettes, because nicotine is the most addictive drug that we know of. Therefore, it is very hard for people to get off it once they have started, so it is far better that we prevent people from starting to smoke in the first place. At the moment, I believe that around 200 to 300 young people start smoking every day, which is why it is imperative to stop them doing so right now. Indeed, Cancer Research UK has estimated that we will have to wait until 2047 for the smoking rate in disadvantaged communities to reach 5% or less, which is the smokefree ambition.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
I wish the hon. Member a happy birthday and congratulate him on securing the debate. One of the problems that we have is that some deprived communities are in larger areas where the smoking rate has actually come down, but it has remained high within those communities. We also have a high incidence of smoking in pregnancy, which causes other tremendous problems. Does the hon. Member agree that we need specific action to help people who are pregnant to quit smoking, and that we also need to tackle the whole community at the same time?
Bob Blackman
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention and for the work that he has done on combatting smoking over many years. He raises the issue of smoking in pregnancy, which is the one target that the Government came closest to missing at the time of the last review. The target was 11%, and the Government just about achieved it. I am very clear that, for young women who are pregnant, we need to ensure that, if they smoke, they should be referred immediately to quitting services at the first meeting to discuss their pregnancy through the health service, and not just them but their partner as well. If both give up smoking, there is a strong chance that they will continue to not smoke. They need to understand the damage that they will do to their unborn child and the damage that they are doing to themselves. If we get to that point, it will improve the position no end. That is in the NHS plan, but for future years. I see no reason at all why that could not be introduced now. That is a management decision by the NHS, and I would ask my hon. Friend the Minister to encourage the NHS to do precisely that.
The all-party parliamentary group had an excellent meeting with the chairman of the independent review, Javed Khan. It was a very encouraging meeting, and we expect his recommendations to match the scale of the challenge, but unless his review is turned into a meaningful plan of action that is backed up by funding, it will not be worth the paper it is written on. We need new sources of funding, and the 2019 Green Paper recognised that we would need funding to end smoking, that there was pressure on budgets and that existing sources of funding were not sufficient. Three years and one pandemic later, the pressure on budgets in even greater. In its submission to me, the Local Government Association said that local authorities are paying some £75 million for quitting services overall. Clearly, they need additional funding to achieve what is required.
We are talking about disadvantaged communities, and levelling up is quite rightly a flagship policy for the Government, but there is no new funding to deliver on the bold ambitions set out in the levelling-up White Paper. The Institute of Fiscal Studies says that
“instead, departments will be expected to deliver on these missions from within the cash budgets set out in last autumn’s Spending Review. Departments and public service leaders might reasonably ask whether those plans match up to the scale of the government’s newfound ambition—particularly in the face of higher inflation.”
The levelling-up White Paper missions include narrowing the gap in healthy life expectancy between the local areas where it is highest and lowest by 2030, and increasing healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035. Smoking is responsible for half of the 10-year difference in life expectancy between the most and least disadvantaged in our society, so achieving the Government’s levelling-up mission on life expectancy will depend on delivering the smokefree 2030 ambition.
The Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien), has said that the Government must “floor it” when it comes to prevention and public health, but we cannot floor it unless there is gas in the tank. Gas in the tank is what we are lacking right now. Funding for public health is in a parlous state. We must face up to the fact that funding for smoking prevention has been particularly hard hit.
After the spending review was published, the Health Foundation estimated that funding for smoking cessation and tobacco control had been cut by one third since 2015. The cuts in budgets for tobacco control are the falsest of false economies. Unlike most pharmaceutical drugs, smoking cessation saves money, and with no negative side effects. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has estimated that, for every pound invested in smoking cessation services, £2.37 will be saved on treating smoking and smoking-related diseases, as well as increasing productivity.
Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
I am so pleased that the hon. Gentleman’s birthday is in this month of VApril, and I congratulate him on this debate. Does he agree that the vaping industry, which is supporting harm reduction by encouraging people to turn to vaping, should get more support, and that vaping should be part of the Government’s harm-reduction strategy? Vaping is also more economical. Encouraging people away from cigarettes to vaping would be a good step in the direction of better health.
Bob Blackman
I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. Vaping has its purpose, which is to encourage people to quit smoking and take up vaping. I am concerned that people may take up vaping and then escalate to smoking. We do not yet have medical evidence on the long-term effects of vaping on health, so I am cautious. Clearly, it is better to vape than smoke, but let us not encourage people to take up vaping as an alternative to stopping smoking completely.
The all-party group has encouraged the “polluter pays” approach. The situation is very frustrating. The Government recognised in the Green Paper three years ago that budgets are tight and new sources of funding are needed. As recommended by the all-party parliamentary group, which I chair, the Government agreed to consider the “polluter pays” approach to funding. They also acknowledged that there were precedents, and that the approach had been taken by other countries, such as France and the USA.
Only months after the consultation closed in October 2019, the pandemic struck and put the prevention strategy on the back burner. It soon became clear that an effective prevention strategy was essential to build back better from the pandemic. It is also essential to deliver on the Conservative manifesto commitments to level up, reduce inequality and increase healthy life expectancy by five years. Those commitments are baked into the levelling-up White Paper and, the Government have said, will be enshrined in statute.
On the anniversary of the Green Paper’s publication, on 22 July 2020, the all-party group held a roundtable to examine the actions needed to deliver the smokefree ambition. The then Public Health Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), and her opposite number, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), were the keynote speakers. The Minister gave her commitment that the Department would continue to explore further funding mechanisms with the Treasury, as had been promised in the Green Paper.
On 30 March, the former Public Health Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), challenged why the commitment to consider a “polluter pays” approach had not been fulfilled. The response at the Dispatch Box from the Health Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), was:
“My understanding—although my recollection may fail me, so I caveat my comment with that—is that this was initially looked at that stage, but was not proceeded with.”—[Official Report, 30 March 2022; Vol. 711, c. 867.]
My hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood might like to check his recollection. The all-party group on smoking and health, following its initial recommendations, put forward detailed proposals to Government in its June 2021 report about how a “polluter pays” levy could operate. I shared a copy of the report with Health Ministers at that time and wrote to the Secretary of State in July 2021, and again in December, asking for a meeting to discuss the levy. In September, I wrote to the Chancellor about the proposals. However, to date I have not had the courtesy of a reply to any of those letters.
If the “polluter pays” levy has been seriously looked at and a decision has been taken not to proceed, that was certainly not communicated to MPs or the all-party parliamentary group. That is precisely why officers of the APPG tabled amendments to the Health and Care Bill calling for a consultation on the levy. The amendments would not have committed the Government to going ahead, but would have ensured that they fulfilled their commitment to consider a “polluter pays” approach and that our proposals get the consideration they deserve. Our amendments were carefully considered by the other place and passed by a majority of 59—the greatest defeat the Government suffered on the Health and Care Bill. However, to the great disappointment of the APPG, the Government opted to oppose our amendments when they returned to the Commons for consideration. That leaves us without a mechanism for funding the smokefree 2030 ambition, with only eight years to go.
It appears that when the noble Lords met Ministers and Treasury officials to discuss the amendments, it was the Treasury, not the Department of Health and Social Care, that objected to the proposal to consult on a levy—not to introduce one, but to consult on the principle. The Treasury has a philosophical aversion to anything that smacks of hypothecation—raising funds to be put to specific purposes. Its preference is for funds raised to go into one big pot—the Consolidated Fund, from which all Government spending flows—that it controls and allocates, thereby giving it ultimate control. However, there are already numerous exceptions where hypothecation has been justified. One is the health and social care levy, which has just come into force. Another is the pharmaceutical pricing scheme, which the Department of Health and Social Care uses to raise funds for the NHS and provides a model for how our proposals could be implemented.
The noble Lord Stevens, formerly chief executive of the NHS, pointed out that the pharmaceutical pricing scheme was put in place by a Conservative Government in 1957 and has been sustained ever since with the support of Conservative, Labour and coalition Governments. He also said—and who could disagree?—that if it is deemed appropriate to have a form of price and profit regulation for the medicines industry, which delivers products that are essential for life saving, it is not much of a stretch to think that an equivalent mechanism might be used for an industry whose products are discretionary and life-destroying. I completely agree with him on that approach.
The Government already accept the principle that the polluter should pay to fix the damage they do. The extended producer responsibility scheme, which comes into force in 2024, is another good example. It requires producers of packaging waste to pay for its collection and recycling. Lord Greenhalgh, the Housing Minister, said:
“The reality is that we cannot keep looking to the Treasury to keep bailing everybody out—we have to get the polluter to pay.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 5 January 2022; Vol. 817, c. 566.]
I could not agree more, and that principle applies even more strongly to smoking, which, as the chief medical officer pointed out, is a deadly addiction created and marketed by companies for profit.
There were objections because we were part of the European Union, but when speaking for the Government on Report in the House of Lords, the noble Lord Howe stated:
“the tobacco industry is already required to make a significant contribution to public finances through tobacco duty, VAT and corporation tax.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 March 2022; Vol. 820, c. 297.]
However—this is the key point—tobacco companies pass on the cost of tax increases to smokers, which means that it is not the tobacco industry that contributes to the public finances but ordinary smokers, who have little choice but to buy cigarettes to maintain their deadly addiction. Indeed, when HM Treasury consulted on and rejected a levy in 2015, it was on the grounds that it would add an extra tax burden to smokers. That may have been true in 2015, but it is not the case today.
In 2015, we could not prevent tobacco manufacturers from passing the costs on to consumers because we were in the European Union. We are no longer part of the European Union, and therefore by capping tobacco prices and controlling profits, the Government can ensure that tobacco manufacturers bear the full cost of the levy, helping incentivise the industry to move out of combustible products and make smoking obsolete by 2030. I can think of few better Brexit dividends than making tobacco companies pay for the damage they do.
To quote my noble Friend and fellow APPG officer Lord Young of Cookham, speaking in the other place, our proposed levy will allow the Government to
“put the financial burden firmly where it belongs, on the polluter—the tobacco manufacturer—and not the polluted—the smoker.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 March 2022; Vol. 820, c. 290.]
The reality is that this levy could raise £700 million a year from the profits of the tobacco companies—money that could be applied to smoking cessation services.
There is public support for this measure. It has been endorsed by more than 70 health organisations, including Cancer Research UK, Asthma + Lung UK, the British Heart Foundation, the Royal College of Physicians and the Health Foundation. It is also supported by three quarters of the public, including those who voted Conservative in the 2019 election, with fewer than one in 10 being opposed to the levy. What could be better than introducing a tax that the public support?
If we want to achieve a smokefree 2030, it is vital that we tackle high rates of smoking among our most deprived communities, pregnant women and people with mental health conditions. As the Government have said, this will be “extremely challenging” and cannot be achieved on the cheap. Health Ministers in both Houses have said that they do not want to prejudge the review, and therefore could not accept amendments calling for a consultation on a levy. However, as I have said, that review will report very shortly—in the middle of next month—and the discussions I have had with the chairman of the review make it very clear that the measures he will be recommending will need investment, and will be radical.
Once Javed Khan has reported back to the Government, there will need to be serious consideration of how the funding to deliver the smokefree 2030 ambition can be found. That will need to be done in parallel with decisions about what interventions are needed, as interventions cost money and can be delivered only if the funding is found. Pressure on budgets has only worsened since 2019, with the covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on our nation’s health and on Government finances. The Government made it very clear in the spending review that there is no new money for public health, so an alternative source of funding is urgently needed. With only eight years to go before we reach 2030, the Government need to decide where that money is coming from.
The existing funds are not sufficient, and our proposals provide a new source of funding in addition to tobacco taxes. If the Government are unwilling to accept our proposals, they must come up with an alternative solution that will match the scale of their ambition. As such, my question to my hon. Friend the Minister is this: if the Javed Khan review recommends a levy, will she commit to meet with us as APPG officers and with independent experts to discuss our proposals for a “polluter pays” levy to provide the investment that is needed to deliver the Government’s smokefree ambition?
My final point is that this review also needs to look at shisha tobacco, chewing tobacco and snus. Unfortunately, those areas are completely unregulated at the moment, but are extremely damaging to people’s health. I look forward to hearing the contributions of other Members and of the Front Benchers.
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
I will call the Front Benchers at 10.40, so perhaps Back Benchers could try to limit their contributions to about six minutes.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes, and I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) many happy returns. I declare an interest as a vice-chair of the APPG on smoking and health; I hope, therefore, that I can speak for a little more than six minutes, if that is okay.
The north-east is the most disadvantaged region in England, with high rates of smoking and all the harms that it brings. However, I am proud to say that in the last five years, the fastest declines in smoking rates have been in the north-east. Credit goes to our local authorities, which prioritised tackling smoking and banded together to fund Fresh—the longest-running and most effective regional tobacco control programme in the country. However, the north-east started with much higher smoking rates than the rest of England, so we have further to go to achieve a smokefree 2030.
More than 4,000 people died prematurely from smoking in our region last year, with 20 times as many suffering disease and disability caused by smoking, yet there is also an economic cost to our already disadvantaged communities. Smoking costs the north-east £685 million in lost productivity, £125 million to the NHS and £67 million in social care costs to local authorities. We simply cannot afford this strain on our economy.
When the smokefree 2030 goal was launched nearly three years ago, the Government acknowledged the scale of the challenge, admitting that it would be extremely challenging and promised bold action to finish the job. Since then, however, the Government have sat on their hands. Rather than stepping up their efforts to achieve the smokefree 2030 ambition, the Government have failed to announce a single new policy to that effect, while the £1 billion cut to public health funding since 2015 appears to be baked in.
The Minister knows that half the difference in life expectancy between the rich and the poor is due to differences in smoking rates. The Government’s lack of action threatens our ability to achieve not just the 2030 smokefree goal, but their levelling-up mission to narrow the gap in life expectancy between areas where it is highest and lowest by 2030 and to increase healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035.
Today’s debate was originally secured to discuss the recommendations of the independent review. The fact that the review was delayed made the debate even more necessary. The Secretary of State committed, when he announced the review in February, that it would report back in April. Javed Khan said he would report back on 22 April, so we were very disappointed that the Secretary of State told Parliament last week that he hoped it would be published in May, with no commitment that that would be the case. That is just the latest of many delays and missed opportunities, which we want to put on the record.
We want a commitment from the Government that they will accept no further delays in bringing forward a plan to achieve a smokefree 2030. Let us start with the Green Paper that announced the Government’s goal of a smokefree 2030, which was launched with much fanfare in July 2019. Further proposals included considering the “polluter pays” levy, which my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East mentioned, and giving the ultimatum of making smoked tobacco obsolete by 2030. Cabinet Office guidelines say that Departments should:
“Publish responses within 12 weeks of the consultation or provide an explanation why this is not possible.”
The Green Paper consultation ended in 2019. In July 2020, on the anniversary of the Green Paper, the then public health Minister, the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), told the APPG that work was under way to publish the further proposals envisaged in the Green Paper, and that she was keen to work with us to explore whether the current regulatory framework was sufficient. Since then, we have heard nothing.
The lack of an outcome on the Green Paper was disappointing, so in November 2020, we held a debate urging the Government to commit to publishing a new and ambitious tobacco control plan. We were therefore delighted when the then Minister committed in December to publishing a new tobacco control plan in 2021. The APPG commissioned Action on Smoking and Health, working in collaboration with SPECTRUM, the academic public health research consortium, to provide us with a report setting out our recommendations and the measures that the Government needed to take to achieve their 2030 ambition. The then Minister attended the launch of our report, welcomed our recommendations and committed to publishing the plan by the end of 2021. We are understandably disappointed by the delay in its publication.
There were other opportunities that could have been seized but were not. The Government were legally required to review the impact of existing tobacco product regulations, including those on standardised packaging, health warnings, product standards and e-cigarette regulations. The regulations set out in law a deadline for the review to report by May 2021. To that end, the Government launched a consultation last January to assess whether the objectives were still appropriate and whether the regulations were fit for purpose. Those regulations predated the Government’s commitment to a smokefree 2030, and it was blindingly obvious that they needed to be strengthened to match the scale of the Government’s new goal.
Since the regulations came into force, it has been clear that there are serious loopholes. The menthol ban relies on subjective rather than objective measurements to determine whether the regulations are being adhered to. An investigation by the Express newspaper revealed that the industry has exploited that loophole in the law and that Britain’s biggest tobacco giant sold £1 billion-worth of cigarettes flavoured with menthol in the year after the ban came into force.
That was not the only loophole; although e-cigarettes can be sold to those aged 18 and above, it is completely legal to hand them out free to children. While the advertising, promotion and sponsorship of e-cigarettes are heavily regulated, packaging and labelling are not. That has allowed the use of sweet names for vaping products, with cartoon characters and garish colouring, all of which appeal to children. Those are clear gaps in the law that need to be fixed without further delay.
The consultation was well timed to feed into the Health and Care Bill. ASH and SPECTRUM provided the Government with detailed and well-evidenced proposals for a number of improvements that would strengthen regulations and fix those loopholes. When the outcome of the review was not published in May 2021, as was required, we hoped that the Health and Care Bill would contain the further proposals the Government had promised to bring forward. Imagine our disappointment when the Bill was introduced to Parliament last July. Although it included measures on prevention and public health, there was nothing on tobacco or smoking, despite the Government’s much-trumpeted smokefree 2030 ambition.
That is why, in Committee, I tabled a set of amendments for increased regulation on tobacco, based on the APPG’s recommendations. The amendments included requirements to consult on a “polluter pays” levy; introduce pack inserts containing quit information; put warnings on cigarettes; close loopholes in the existing regulations on menthol and e-cigarettes; and consult on raising the age of sale to 21—a measure that has been proven to reduce smoking rates in the population at large by 30%. That measure has also been shown to reduce inequalities, because it has the greatest impact on the poorest and most disadvantaged communities. Throughout the passage of the Bill, Ministers in both Houses have repeatedly said that the Government were sympathetic to our aims and amendments, and that they would be considered for the next tobacco control plan. However, the tobacco control plan has already been delayed by a year and still does not have a publication date.
If the Government had supported those amendments, we would now have the foundation in place for a comprehensive strategy to end smoking by 2030. Instead, the Government have chosen to reject the amendments and, yet again, to kick tobacco control into the long grass. Now we are waiting for the tobacco control plan. Before the plan can be published, we have to wait for Javed Khan’s independent review, which will be followed by a public health disparities White Paper in the spring, which will in turn be followed by the tobacco control plan. That will leave only seven years to deliver the smokefree 2030 goal.
Since evidence first emerged of the harms caused by tobacco in the 1950s, smoking has killed more than 10 million people in the UK, and it continues to kill hundreds more every day. Up to two thirds of those smokers die prematurely from their addiction. There is a crucial message around children: every day, 280 children start smoking—that is more than 280,000 since the smokefree 2030 ambition was launched. Smoking is highly addictive; two thirds will go on to become daily smokers. With that in mind, can the Minister assure us that the tobacco control plan to deliver the smokefree 2030 ambition will be published no later than three months after the independent review? Will she also assure us that the Queen’s Speech will include a commitment to bring forward legislation in the next Session to deliver regulatory measures essential to delivering the Government’s ultimatum to the industry to make smoked tobacco obsolete by 2030?
I end with a comment from the chief medical officer. He pointed out that one in five people who die from cancer will die from lung cancer, and went on,
“the reason that people like me get very concerned and upset about it is that this cancer is almost entirely caused for profit…a small number of companies make profits from the people who they have addicted in young ages and then keep addicted to something which they know will kill them.”
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
I shall now put Members, starting with Hywel Williams, on a formal time limit of six minutes.
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing this important debate and on his very persuasive speech.
I will start with some context. Hon. Members might wonder why a Welsh MP, and a Plaid one at that, is speaking in a health-related debate when health is a devolved matter. I have a long-term interest in the negative effects of smoking. Many years ago, I supported Julie Morgan, then the MP for Cardiff North, when she tried to bring in a ban on smoking in public places in Wales. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful. The Welsh Assembly was very anxious to bring in the ban at that time, which was some years before it was actually brought in in England and Wales. We had to wait.
I am no statistician, and certainly no epidemiologist—I cannot even say the word—but I did a back-of-the-envelope sum at the time and I reckoned that, because of the delay in bringing in the ban in Wales, between 15 and 20 people such as bar staff would have contracted smoking-related illnesses that would eventually killed them. That is the argument that we made at the time: the lack of devolution cost lives.
The second point to contextualise my interest in this matter is that, some years ago, I asked Alan Milburn, the then Secretary of State for Health, about nurses’ pay. His reply, which I remember distinctly, was that it was one of the abiding
“joys of my life that I am not responsible for all things Welsh”.—[Official Report, 22 January 2002; Vol. 378, c. 739.]
Actually, health was devolved, but nurses’ pay was not. The point I am making—apart from the fact that he was wrong—is that devolution is not always particularly clearcut. In the short-term, more devolution is not really the day-to-day issue; the issue is policy divergence, not devolution.
In Wales, we see that in our early adoption of the wellbeing approach to health, which is one of the landmark policies that the Welsh Labour Government have brought in, supported by my party. In some ways, this answers the point made by the hon. Member for Harrow East about there not being cash available; this is not a cash issue—it is a policy and attitudinal issue. In Wales, we have a health—not an illness—policy, but without control over illness-creating factors such as tobacco and alcohol.
Unsurprisingly, my answer is to have fuller devolution in the short term and full powers in the long term, but if I were to pursue that point now, I am sure Ms Nokes would pull me up. For now, I will just say that the Welsh Government have the goal of being smokefree by 2030, as is the case in England. The impact on public health in Wales is frightening, as it is elsewhere—smoking is the largest single cause of avoidable early death. In 2018, around 5,600 deaths in people aged 35 or over in Wales were attributable to smoking, 16.5% of all deaths in that age group. The cost to the Welsh NHS is around £300 million per year, which is, to my mind, of itself a completely persuasive point.
The aim for England to be smokefree by 2030 was announced two years before we got around to it in Wales. However, in the meantime, Wales has taken a lead on action, having published its draft strategy and delivery plan last November. Interested hon. Members from England are still waiting for England’s tobacco control plan, and I share their concern at this delay. I would also say that this is undermining the Welsh Government’s ability to achieve their own targets, because under the current devolution settlement there are many policies that Wales cannot implement. These policies include the trailed “polluter pays” levy on tobacco manufacturers to fund tobacco control. The key tobacco controls are not devolved; they are reserved. Everything from tobacco taxes to packaging, labelling, product regulation to raising the age of sale are policies that we cannot change in Wales.
During the passage of the Health and Care Bill, I added my name to the amendment tabled by the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) that would have introduced tougher regulations on smoking and would certainly have benefited people in Wales. However, these measures cannot be brought in. I would formally like to state my support for raising the age of sale to 21 and putting warnings on cigarettes, advice to quit inside packs and the rest of it.
Those measures would reduce inequalities and smoking uptake. A sensible point—for me at least—is that this is not only a health issue. It is also a class issue. Clearly, it affects people on lower incomes. It is also an age issue. To conclude, I would like to ensure that the Minister is aware of all of these matters, and I ask her to commit to meeting her opposite number in Cardiff regularly to discuss how these measures can be implemented.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. For the record, I confirm that I am vice-chair of the APPG on smoking and health.
The Minister may know that in health debates and in correspondence I spend much of my time banging on about health inequalities and the need for a new hospital in Stockton. Although we still need one, this morning I want to address another major health inequality. According to the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics, the average gross disposable income in the north-east is the lowest in the United Kingdom, at £16,995 per household—a full 43% lower than in London, where it is the highest.
Analysis of national data published by ASH has shown that the proportion of smokers living in poverty is also highest in the north-east. In our region, 42% of households containing smokers live in poverty, compared with only 17% in London. That is 112,000 north-east households. The average annual spend on tobacco per smoker is £2,000, so helping my constituents quit smoking will not only improve their health and wellbeing, but put badly needed money into their pockets. Smoking is an addiction. It is not a lifestyle choice. Smokers living in poverty tend to be the most addicted and need the most help to quit.
The Government’s arguments against the “polluter pays” levy are unconvincing. When we considered the Lords amendments to the Health and care Bill on 30 March, the Minister for Health, the hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), said that the Government
“cannot accept these Lords amendments, because the proposals would be very complex to implement, take several years to materialise and risk directing a lot of Government resource into something that we do not see as a sustainable or workable way to fund public health. This would also rightly be a matter for Her Majesty’s Treasury.”—[Official Report, 30 March 2022; Vol. 711, c. 866.]
I will address each of these arguments in turn.
First, on the Treasury, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, the Department of Health and Social Care already oversees a similar scheme for pharmaceuticals, put in place by health legislation that is a model for our proposals, so there is already a precedent for the Department to take the lead. It is clear that the Treasury would need to be involved, but the scheme we propose is not an additional tax. Rather, it is a pricing and profit control scheme put in place by health legislation and overseen by health Ministers.
The Minister for Health provided no evidence to justify his statement that the proposals would be “very complex to implement”, would need
“a lot of Government resource”,
and would not be a
“sustainable or workable way to fund public health.”
Indeed, evidence provided to the APPG by independent export analysts and economists demonstrates the opposite. The Department of Health and Social Care has a track record of more than 50 years of overseeing the pharmaceutical scheme. The expert analytical, finance and economic skills needed to run the tobacco levy are no different and the Department already has a team in place.
Let us not forget that the pharmaceutical market is complex. It has an enormously varied range of products, is constantly evolving and has heavy research and development costs that have to be taken into account by the analysts. More than 60 pharmaceutical manufacturers operate in the UK. Indeed, some of them are in my Stockton North constituency. Tobacco manufacturing is far simpler. Cigarettes and rolling tobacco are commodity products, cheap as chips to make. Only four manufacturers account for more than 90% of the market. Selling cigarettes is highly profitable, far more than pharmaceuticals or consumable staples. Imperial Brands sells around four in 10 cigarettes smoked in the UK and made a 71% operating profit in 2019, which is £71 in pure profit for every £100 of sales. It is not alone. The average for the big four manufacturers was 50%. By way of comparison, a 10% operating profit margin is considered average and Associated British Foods, Britain’s largest food manufacturer, made only 6% in 2021.
Clearly, some Government resource and expertise would be needed to develop a tobacco-specific scheme, but the potential returns, which would vastly outweigh the running cost, make it a no-brainer. As we have heard, £700 million a year could be raised from the four major tobacco manufacturers on sales of £14 billion, provided we could cap their profits at no more than 10%. At last, we have a Brexit dividend for the NHS, though it falls well short of the £350 million a week promised on the side of a bus not so long ago.
Market failure justifies the scheme, for this is an industry dominated by four big companies making eye-wateringly high profits from selling lethal products that kill most of their consumers. The extremely high profitability of cigarettes makes them as addictive to the companies as to the smoker. Big tobacco says it wants to turn over a new leaf and move out of cigarettes but shows no signs of doing so. Why would it? Selling cigarettes is far more profitable than any of the alternatives. The levy would provide the incentive the industry needs to deliver the Government’s ultimatum. That is a crucial function of the levy—a point Ministers seem not to have taken on board.
Lastly, the Minister for Health said it would
“take several years to materialise”.
That is not the case. The Government have already wasted three years when they could have put the scheme in place. I join my colleagues in inviting the Minister to meet the APPG officers and our independent experts to discuss our proposals. However, let me say in closing that if the levy had been implemented three years ago, we could already have invested £2 billion in smoking cessation and be well on our way to being a much healthier nation.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under you as Chair, Ms Nokes. I commend the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) for securing today’s debate. I also wish the hon. Member for Harrow East a very happy birthday.
Smoking, as we have heard, is not a lifestyle choice. It is a lethal addiction entered into by the vast majority of smokers even before they reach adulthood. It is an addiction that is increasingly concentrated among the most disadvantaged in society, fuelled by an industry—the tobacco industry—whose behaviour must be stringently regulated if we are to achieve our smokefree 2030 ambition.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, my constituency of Blaydon falls under Gateshead Council in the north-east, which I regret to say is the most disadvantaged region in the country. Smoking rates in Gateshead are particularly high, bringing disease, death and disability disproportionately to my constituency. In 2019, more than 17% of adults in Gateshead smoked, compared with 15.3% for the north-east as a whole, and far higher than the average for England of 13.9%.
That higher rate of smoking translates to a lower average life expectancy. The average male life expectancy in Gateshead is eight years less than in Westminster, and five years less for women. Smoking costs the NHS in Gateshead £9.3 million, and £5.6 million to local authorities for social care costs that are entirely due to smoking and entirely preventable. Tobacco addiction has been levelling down communities across the country for decades, and will go on doing so until the Government decide to get serious about delivering the smokefree ambition—for all in society.
Smokers in Gateshead spend on average £2,000 a year on smoking. The total spend in Gateshead is £54 million, an eye-watering amount of money that goes up in smoke for no benefit to the local community. Ending smoking will significantly increase disposable income in poorer communities such as those across Gateshead, helping to grow the local economy and to improve health and wellbeing for tens of thousands of people.
In March, I was pleased to be able to attend the event in Parliament marking national No Smoking Day and to reflect on the progress that has been made in tackling smoking over the years. Also, however, the event looked at what more needs to be done. The Minister spoke passionately about the Government’s commitment to making England smokefree by 2030, and said that investment in stop smoking services would be at the heart of the forthcoming tobacco control plan.
I agree wholeheartedly. Smokers need to be motivated and supported to quit. However, the funding for stop smoking services has been cut by a third in real terms since 2015. That funding must be reinstated if the services are to play their vital role in delivering the smokefree 2030 ambition.
That is not the only area that needs extra funding to achieve a smokefree 2030. Smoking during pregnancy is the leading modifiable risk factor for poor birth outcomes, including stillbirth, miscarriage and pre-term birth. The Government’s ambition is to reduce smoking in pregnancy to 6% by 2022, but with rates at 9.6% in 2020-21, that is unlikely to be delivered.
The rate of decline in smoking during pregnancy has been higher in the north-east, and that is because we have invested in specialist interventions. We are delighted to see that initiative being rolled out across the country as part of the NHS long-term plan. Smoking during pregnancy rates remain too high, however, so the north-east has gone further by introducing voucher schemes to provide a financial incentive to pregnant smokers to quit. That is particularly powerful for women on low incomes. In South Tyneside, an area of high deprivation, the proportion of pregnant women who are recorded as being smokers at their time of delivery has dropped by a third in the three years since the scheme was put in place.
Maternal smoking cost the NHS £20 million in 2015-16, with more than 10,000 episodes of admitted patient care. Since smoking is so damaging, incentive schemes are cost-saving, with an estimated return on investment of £4 for every £1 invested. Implementing financial incentives at scale is a vital measure that needs to be part of the forthcoming tobacco control plan, which I hope to see included in the independent review—but it will need funding.
I will touch briefly on mental health. Much more investment is needed to tackle smoking among those with a mental health condition. As many as one in three smokers have a diagnosable mental health condition. The NHS long-term plan tobacco dependency treatment pathway presents a major opportunity to tackle smoking among those with serious mental illness, but many others are not in that category. We need to ensure that much more work is done on pilot projects for IAPT—improving access to psychological therapies—counselling. Counsellors are willing to deliver such support, and they should be given the opportunity to do so.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes.
I thank the hon. Members for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) for securing this important debate. I well remember, as the hon. Lady will remember, that she had this debate in the main Chamber under the covid regulations. I was happy to assist in supporting her at that time, and my support is the same now.
As we turn our attention to the rebuilding of public health following the covid-19 pandemic, tackling smoking must be among our top priorities. Smoking is the leading cause of premature death, killing some 2,300 people in Northern Ireland each year—it is a devolved matter, but I think these figures are quite shocking—with 30 times as many suffering serious diseases and disabilities caused by smoking.
Ms Nokes, I have never had a wish to smoke. I can well recall the first time that I did, with my grandfather, back in the ’60s. He smoked Gallahers; there were no filters on them. I always admired my grandfather, and I said to him one day, “Granda, can I have a smoke of that cigarette?” I pestered and pestered him, and then, one day, he says, “Now, take one, and take a deep breath,” and I did. As a wee six-year-old, I was violently sick. I was green at the gills. In those days, we had—if I can say it—a po under the bed. I was sick into that, and I never had any wish, ever, to pursue the smoking of a cigarette ever since. It left a lasting impression. Maybe that is what we need to do for the young people of today. It is a bit drastic, perhaps, but none the less, it had a very sobering effect on me.
Achieving a smokefree 2030 would reduce the pressure on NHS services at a time when they are under the most severe strain in living memory. However, analysis by Cancer Research UK shows that at current rates of decline, Northern Ireland will not achieve the smokefree ambition of smoking rates of 5% or less until a decade after England—not until the late 2040s—with our most deprived populations not being smokefree until after 2050. We have really big issues to sort out in Northern Ireland regarding that.
While Northern Ireland and the devolved nations hold responsibility for our own public policies, the Government in Westminster maintain responsibility for important UK-wide policies. I therefore ask the Minister—as others have in relation to Wales—what discussions have taken place with the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Minister, Robin Swann?
There is substantial research supporting the implementation of health warnings on cigarettes and cigarette papers, and that is clearly under consideration in Canada, Australia and Scotland. Such warnings could be implemented by a simple amendment to the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015. Tobacco manufacturers already apply print to cigarette papers, so that would be cheap and easy to implement.
Health warnings, such as “Smoking kills”, have been shown to be effective on billboards and tobacco packs, so why would they not be as effective on cigarette sticks too? Adding warnings to cigarette sticks is important because young people in particular are likely to initiate smoking with individual cigarettes rather than packs. Is that something that the Minister and the Government would be prepared to look at?
Cigarette pack inserts providing health information are not a new idea; they have been required in Canada since 2000. The health messages are effective, and research has been carried out in the UK which supports their use here too. The Government have already acknowledged in the prevention Green Paper that,
“there could be a positive role for inserts in tobacco products giving quitting advice”,
so, again, I look to the Minister for her thoughts on that.
All those measures would be cheap and easy to implement and would benefit all the UK nations. They would also support and reinforce the impact of other measures that require significant investment, such as behaviour change campaigns and stop smoking services. Although the Government opposed the introduction of the measures as amendments to the Health and Care Bill, they did leave the door open—I believe—to considering them when developing the next tobacco control plan. Does the Minister—or the Government—intend to do just that?
I have spoken before in this House about the use of licensing for tobacco retailers. In Northern Ireland, since 6 April 2016, retailers have been obliged to register with the tobacco register of Northern Ireland, with a final deadline of 1 July 2016. That built on a similar scheme already in place in Scotland, and a scheme that was due for implementation in Wales.
Since 2018, we have seen the implementation of a tracking and tracing scheme, which requires every retailer to have an economic operator identifier code. Since leaving the EU—as the hon. Member for Harrow East mentioned—the UK has established and launched its own system, with Northern Ireland operating in the UK and EU systems. That makes it easy for all nations in the UK, including England, to not just implement a retail register scheme, but go further and implement a comprehensive retail licensing scheme. If the Minister can give us some thoughts on that, I would be very pleased.
Retail licensing is the obvious back-up to the tracking and tracing of cigarettes and would help tackle the illicit trade that gives smokers access to cheap tobacco. Those who sell illegal tobacco have no compunction about selling it to children too, so the illegal trade makes it not just less likely that smokers will quit, but more likely that children will start smoking. My hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), who is no longer in his place, mentioned that in his intervention on the hon. Member for Harrow East.
I await with interest Javed Khan OBE’s independent review, which is due to be published shortly. I hope it will address this important issue. England remains an outlier on that important measure, which could help tackle illicit trade and protect children from tobacco. We can and must address these issues collectively, bringing knowledge from the nations we represent. I am happy to support the Minister here at Westminster in taking this matter forward and, from a Northern Ireland point of view, it is important that we address these issues together. If we do so, I am confident that we will then deliver a policy that helps not only us, but the constituents we serve.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I begin by thanking the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for his tireless work in this area, along with my hon. Friends, and for the way he opened the debate. I also wish him a happy birthday.
Over the past 50 years, positive steps have been taken towards ending smoking, on both sides of the House. I am pleased to be here today responding to the debate on behalf of the shadow health and social care team from Her Majesty’s Opposition, because, from my point of view, it is a matter of great pride that I was in Parliament when Labour’s smoking ban was passed into law in 2006. It has become one of the defining public health achievements of the last Labour Government. The positive impact that it has had on the health of the nation is plain to see.
However, there is still much more to do, as we have heard in various speeches this morning. Smoking continues to be the leading preventable cause of ill health and mortality in England. The NHS estimates that 78,000 people in the UK die from smoking each year, with many more living with debilitating smoking-related illnesses. Smoking causes 44,000 cancer diagnoses per year, with almost 70% of all cases of lung cancers caused by smoking.
Smoking blights communities right across the country and contributes to the yawning health inequalities that we currently witness. However, smoking affects not only those who choose to do it; it affects many people around them, too. For example, a child who is exposed to second-hand or passive smoke has an increased risk of cot death, and of developing chest infections, meningitis and many other serious conditions.
The consequences of smoking are stark and affect not only our health, but our economic prosperity. My constituency of Denton and Reddish in Greater Manchester sits across the boroughs of Tameside and Stockport. Each year, smoking costs Tameside over £95 million in lost productivity and health and social care costs, and in Stockport that figure is just above £77 million. In my constituency, 22% of adults smoke, which is well above the national average of 14.5%. We will never truly level up while smoking continues to hold communities and individuals in a vice grip. We need to take robust and radical steps if we are to have any hope of reaching smokefree 2030.
Unfortunately, as we have heard in various contributions, there has been characteristic dither and delay from this Government, I am afraid to say. We were promised an updated tobacco control plan last year, but so far it has failed to materialise. The Government like to talk the talk on smoking cessation services but, as we have heard from numerous contributions, they have brutally slashed the local authority funding that allows those very services to exist.
The public health grant has been cut by £1 billion in real terms since 2015-16, and stop smoking services have suffered a funding decline of around one third over the same period, as we heard from the hon. Member for Harrow East. The Government cannot have it both ways; either they are for a smokefree 2030, and therefore they should support smoking cessation services, or they are not, in which case they should ditch the warm words. I will take the Government at face value—they want a smokefree 2030—so let us get that investment reinvested in smoking cessation services and let us restore public health funding.
I would be grateful if the Minister set out in her response a timeline for publishing the next tobacco control plan, and I want her to commit to publishing Javed Khan’s independent review into smokefree 2030 policies by no later than the end of May. Furthermore, can she outline what plans her Department has to improve access to smoking cessation services, and will she admit that stinging cuts to the public health grant have left communities such as mine, and those of many other hon. Members here today, worse off?
Yesterday, Members voted on the Government’s Health and Care Bill. The all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health set out several recommendations, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), on how to achieve a smokefree 2030. Several of those recommendations were tabled as amendments to the Bill. Labour Members were proud to support many of those amendments and proposals, yet the Government refused to back them, much to the disappointment of health leaders and politicians across the House.
The need for a smokefree 2030 has been reinforced during the course of the pandemic. We know that during the first year of the coronavirus crisis, the number of 18 to 34-year-olds who classed themselves as smokers increased by a quarter, from 21.5% to 26.8%. That is a huge increase and one that will have a lasting negative impact on the health of people across the country, unless they are given the tools to stop smoking for good.
In short, we are falling behind. We have a smokefree 2030 ambition, but very little in the way of funding and a seeming lack of urgency from the Government to publish the tobacco control plan.
Mary Glindon
My hon. Friend is probably aware that I am an advocate for vaping. Major reports by the former Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians have highlighted the reduced risk potential of vape products. Does he agree that the Government must address consumer misperceptions regarding the relative risk reduction of vaping compared with smoking combustible cigarettes?
Andrew Gwynne
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I think my answer will be very similar to that given by the hon. Member for Harrow East earlier. Yes, vaping has a clear role to play in reducing people’s addiction to nicotine and tobacco products, and clearly it has health benefits over smoking. However, I am increasingly concerned, partly because I see it in my own constituency—I recognise that this is only anecdotal evidence, but I see kids vaping. There is no good reason for children in Tameside or Stockport, or anywhere else in the United Kingdom, to be vaping.
I think the Government have to look very clearly at what is happening here, because vaping has a real role to play in helping people to wean themselves off nicotine and tobacco products, which I support. However, if we are starting to see children vaping because it is seen as the cool thing to do, as a replacement for what smoking was back in the day, then I think that is a cause of real concern that needs to be looked at. Like the hon. Member for Harrow East, I really do see the benefits of vaping, but we have to tread with caution, because we are starting to see the next generation of vapers being created. I want all children to be not just smokefree but vape-free. As I said, children have no reason to vape.
In closing, can the Minister say whether she recognises our concern about the lack of a tobacco control plan; whether she recognises the need to do more in such a short period, because we are now only eight years away from 2030; and whether she will pledge to resume public awareness campaigns about smoking and start to get really serious, as I know she wants to be, about a smokefree 2030?
Javed Khan’s independent review is exceptionally welcome, but we need to know that his recommendations will not be brushed aside. The tobacco control plan, when it comes, must contain the bold measures needed to create a healthier and more resilient nation. I give the Minister my word that the Labour party is ready and waiting to support the Government on that. We will give her the backing she needs to drive through the necessary reforms in Parliament. We cannot afford to waste more time. The clock is ticking, and as each second passes a smokefree 2030 slips further from our grip. Let us take this opportunity to redouble our efforts, with support from across the House, to make a smokefree 2030 a reality.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maggie Throup)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) for securing this important debate. I wish my hon. Friend a very happy birthday—it is probably one of the best birthdays he has had, given that he has started his day this way.
I am grateful to all hon. Members for their participation. We debate smokefree 2030 regularly, which indicates how important it is. We are all passionate about making England smokefree by 2030, and the devolved authorities have the same passion. The personal circumstances expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East no doubt drive his passion, and I am sure that the personal circumstances of other hon. Members drive their passion too. I appreciate the passion and dedication shown by Members from all parties, who work together to tackle the harms caused by smoking. I am pleased to update the House on our progress towards achieving the Government’s smokefree 2030 ambition.
Over the past 20 years, through successive and progressive policies, as the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) indicated, and regulatory measures, we have made progress in reducing smoking rates. Smoking prevalence in England is now 13.5%—the lowest on record. That is a fantastic public health story, but there are still nearly 6 million smokers in this country.
Alex Cunningham
Over the years, we have seen smoking in public places and all sorts of other things change under Labour and Conservative Governments. That reduction is a tremendous achievement, but in communities such as Stockton Town Centre ward in my constituency, smoking rates are still several times higher than that, and there are very high figures for smoking during pregnancy—way above the Government target. I hope the Minister recognises that, although we can cheer and say, “This is wonderful,” it is not wonderful in a lot of our communities.
Maggie Throup
I think the hon. Gentleman must have read the next page of my speech, because I was about to come on to that. He makes a really important point. As has been mentioned by the hon. Gentleman, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), who is no longer in his place, smoking rates are far higher in poorer areas of the country, among those socioeconomic groups. We see smoking rates of 20% in more deprived areas, compared with 5% in wealthier areas, and nearly one in 10 pregnant women still smokes, which increases the risk of health problems for their baby. Smoking prevalence for people with long-term mental health conditions is over 25%, so the burden of tobacco harm is not shared equally.
We cannot let that continue, so the Government are committed to doing more. Over the past decade we have made significant steps towards making England smokefree—a bold and ambitious target that we committed to in 2019. We continue to enforce high taxation to reduce the affordability of tobacco. As part of the annual Budget process, Her Majesty’s Treasury will continue the policy of using tax to raise revenues and will encourage cessation by continuing with duty increases on tobacco products above the retail prices index. We continue to invest in local stop smoking services and our high-impact marketing campaigns such as Stoptober—I hear it is VApril this month.
Between 2010 and 2021, almost 5 million people set a quit date with stop smoking services, and 2.5 million reported quitting after four weeks. We continue to enforce a strong regulatory framework, and we have introduced policies such as smokefree legislation and standardised packaging. All these measures, and many more, have been instrumental in helping smokers to quit and protecting future generations from starting this lethal habit.
Liz Twist
The Minister has spoken about the great progress that has been made in 11 years, but is it not about time that we started expecting the people who caused this problem to pay for the cost of further tobacco control measures and getting people off smoking? Is it not about time that the “polluter pays” principle is adopted?
Maggie Throup
If I may, I will come to that later in my speech, but the hon. Lady makes a very good point.
On top of the measures, the NHS has renewed its commitment to tobacco treatment through the NHS long-term plan, delivering NHS-funded tobacco treatment services to all in-patients, pregnant women and people accessing long-term mental health and learning disability services until 2024. The Government also continue to explore ways to move smokers away from smoking and towards alternative nicotine products such as vapes, as highlighted by the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon). We know that the best thing a smoker can do for their health is to quit smoking altogether, but we also know how hard that can be. It remains the Government’s goal to maximise the public health opportunities presented by vapes while ensuring that such products are not appealing to young people and non-smokers. The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish made a very good point on this issue in his speech, and it requires balanced and proportionate regulation.
Despite the progress made so far, the Government acknowledge that we need to go further to achieve our ambition to be smokefree by 2030, which is why the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care asked Javed Khan OBE to lead an independent review into tobacco control in January this year. The Khan review is expected to be published next month and will make a set of recommendations to the Government. The review has two objectives. The first is to identify the most impactful interventions to reduce the uptake of smoking, particularly among young people. The second is to identify how best to support smokers to quit, especially in deprived communities and among priority groups.
Mr Khan has met hon. Members from both the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health and the all-party parliamentary group for vaping, and he has carefully considered their views and proposals. Quite a number of members of those APPGs have expressed their approval of that route and how Javed Khan is getting into the depth of everything. Once the review is published next month, the Government will consider its recommendations, which will help inform both the upcoming health disparities White Paper and the new tobacco control plan, to be published later this year.
Jim Shannon
I thank the Minister for her response to this issue, and what she is saying is very positive. I am ever mindful that Northern Ireland has the highest rate of deaths due to smoking. Health is a devolved matter, and we are 10 years behind the rest of the UK on achieving our goals. What discussions could the Minister have with the Northern Ireland Assembly, and particularly with the Health Minister, Robin Swann, to enable us to catch up and achieve the goals and targets that the Minister has referred to?
Maggie Throup
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. The hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) also mentioned discussions with the devolved nations, and I am very happy to have discussions with my counterparts in the devolved health authorities.
As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and others, many in this room are supportive of a “polluter pays” levy. As they will be aware, tobacco taxation is a matter for Her Majesty’s Treasury, and the tobacco industry is already required to make a significant contribution to public finances through tobacco duty, VAT and corporation tax. As part of the development of the tobacco control plan, the Department will also continue to explore and review with the Treasury the evidence base on the best options to raise funding in support of the Government’s ambition to be smokefree by 2030. As a number of Members asked, I am happy to meet the APPG to discuss funding matters and the levy in detail, while the Khan report is being published. I have met the APPG before and am happy to continue having those meetings.
Alex Cunningham
Surely the Minister has not lost sight of the fact that the “polluter pays” levy is a levy and not a tax, and the Department of Health and Social Care can introduce it, as it has for the pharmaceutical industry. Will she give a further explanation of that, rather than just saying that it is a Treasury matter?
Maggie Throup
I fully appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s point. I enjoyed listening to his dissection of the issue, and I look forward to continuing discussions with the APPG.
The UK will continue its role as a global leader in tobacco control and remains fully committed to the World Health Organisation’s framework convention on tobacco control. The Department has received global recognition for its support of the official development assistance FCTC 2030 project over the past six years. This project helps low and middle-income countries improve their tobacco control and, ultimately, their population’s health. We will continue to support the project for a further three years under the current spending review settlement.
I turn to the questions raised during the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East raised the point that the independent review is late. The review is on track to be published in advance of the health disparities White Paper, which it was set up to help inform, this summer. The review was originally intended to be published this month, so it is just a short delay that will not compromise the review’s impact.
The hon. Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Blaydon (Liz Twist) talked about smoking in pregnancy. The Department continues to explore options to support smoking cessation among pregnant women, which will be set out in our new tobacco control plan. Already, as part of the NHS long-term plan, we have made commitments for a new smokefree pregnancy pathway providing focused sessions and treatment to support expectant mothers and their partners to be smokefree. It is important that partners are involved.
The hon. Member for City of Durham mentioned the breaches of menthol regulations. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities is investigating a range of cigarettes to determine whether the flavour is noticeable. Once that is complete, we will explore whether further action needs to be taken against companies who are in breach of the regulations.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish talked about stop smoking services, which provide support to help smokers quit and are highly cost-effective. Local stop smoking services continue to offer smokers the best chance of quitting. They produce high quit rates of 59% after four weeks, and they have helped nearly 5 million people to quit since 2000. The services are a key part of the Government’s tobacco control strategy, and will remain so in the new tobacco control plan.
On any regulatory reforms the Government wish to take forward, we will review what legislative powers we have available to us, either through secondary legislation or exploring whether a Bill is required. I was asked why we rejected the tobacco amendments to the Health and Care Bill. We were grateful to Members for suggesting the amendments, which showed their strong support for tobacco control, but it is only right for my Department to fully consider the issues they raised—I am sure those issues will also be raised in Javed Khan’s report—before publishing the new tobacco control plan. We felt that was the right place for the suggestions made in debates on the Health and Care Bill.
I would like to reassure the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish that I am serious about making England smokefree by 2030, as is the Secretary of State. I thank the hon. Member for the support he and the Labour party have offered in the mission to make England smokefree. It is definitely a cross-party issue, and it is really good that we will all be able to work together.
The point about how we are supporting people with mental health conditions to cease smoking has been made a couple of times. The new universal smoking cessation offer is available through the NHS long-term plan for long-term users of specialist mental health services and people with learning disabilities. It is important that we tackle health inequalities brought about through mental health issues, and help those people to quit smoking as well.
I again thank hon. Members for securing the debate and for all their contributions to it. We have made good progress in reducing smoking rates, but the Government acknowledge that we need to go further to level up society and achieve a smokefree country by 2030. Later this year, we will publish a new tobacco control plan setting out how we will achieve our bold ambition. Working together across all parties, our mission is to make smoking a thing of the past and save future generations from the death and misery we all know it causes.
Bob Blackman
I thank everyone who has contributed to the debate, including the Front Benchers, and I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for her commitment, which we all share. We have to remember, however, that Professor Sir Richard Peto has pointed out that smoking has killed nearly 8 million people over the past 50 years in the UK alone. That is 400 a day, every day—far more than have died under covid. It is obviously something that can be prevented, but more importantly even than that, 2 million more people are expected to die over the next 20 years unless we get smoking rates down.
We all support the Javed Khan review, and we are looking forward to it. I understand that it is going to be published on 17 May. I can inform my hon. Friend the Minister that we will be calling for another debate on its recommendations and looking forward to a commitment from the Government that they will be implemented. However, the most important thing is that all those recommendations, whether they are on raising the age of sale, more tobacco control or licensing—we could go through all the options—will cost money to implement, which is why today we have concentrated on the levy.
I return to the central point that I made at the beginning of the debate: the difference between a levy and taxation that is imposed on the tobacco companies is that the companies just pass the costs of taxation on to the consumer, so they suffer no consequences whatsoever from it. Those companies would not be allowed to pass a levy on to the consumer; they would have to pay it out of their profits, making their product that kills people less profitable. Until we get to that stage, we are not going to have the money in the health service that is required to stop smoking—to encourage people to quit, and to encourage young people not to start. That is why we have concentrated on the levy today. I look forward to helping my hon. Friend the Minister in her arguments with the Treasury, if that is what we need to do to achieve that goal.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered progress towards the Government’s smokefree 2030 ambition.
Future of Small Cities Following Covid-19
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
I will call Daniel Zeichner to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the future of small cities following the covid-19 outbreak.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Nokes. Let me start by saying that the pandemic clearly is not over—this debate is very much looking ahead. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise a huge subject, about small cities in general. I have a particular interest in Cambridge, my own small city, and in the future of the community that I represent and in which I live.
There are many things that could be said on this topic. I am conscious that it is a short debate and there are other Members who want to make a contribution. I therefore offer a warning to any watchers or readers: be aware that this will be a very narrow account, dealing particularly with issues of work and innovation. There is much more to be said on a whole range of issues, such as housing, fairness, mental health, transport, environmental sustainability, and air and water quality, but for today only, I will just touch on many of those issues.
The stimulus for this debate is the report by Cambridge Ahead entitled, “A New Era for the Cambridge Economy”. I pay tribute to the many Cambridge thinkers who have started the ball rolling on this discussion as we think about the world beyond the pandemic. I will mention in particular Jane Paterson-Todd and her team, Metro Dynamics, who were the lead authors, and the chair, Dr David Cleevely—there were many others.
The report sits in a wider framework. I have long felt that our goal as leaders should be to make Cambridge the best small city in the world. For me, when we are seeking to understand what that might look like, the idea of one city fair for all must be at its heart—social justice is essential. I am delighted that that runs as a golden thread throughout the report.
That goal will inevitably be delivered through the work of local leaders. I will name just a few: Councillor Anna Smith, the city council leader; Councillor Katie Thornburrow on the local plan; and Dr Nik Johnson, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. I have named some of my Labour colleagues, but I well appreciate the work of many others within and beyond local government. Future success will only be achieved in partnership; I look to the Government, and the Department in particular, to work with us to find constructive ways forward.
Let me turn to some lessons from the pandemic. A leitmotif for many of us was, “You’re on mute!”—I think many of us will remember that for years to come—but the report picked up on many more things. When it was launched a few weeks ago, I could not help noticing that it was picked up in the national media, by the Daily Mail and The Times, and it was almost as if the only issue was whether people should go back to the workplace—that is an ongoing conversation in Government, as I understand it.
However, those reports missed the core point of the report; frankly, the paradigm has shifted and the world has changed. The question is how to adapt and turn that change to our advantage. Let us be clear that for many workers in Cambridge and elsewhere, there is no choice. The street cleaners, the cabbies, the bus drivers, the hospitality workers, the cleaners, the health workers, the lab workers, the manufacturing workers and many people in schools and universities did not have a choice—all those people had to be in their workplace all the way through the pandemic and will continue to be there.
The knowledge economy is different. In some ways, historically, Cambridge has evolved in a unique way to foster networking. Those who are familiar with the college system will know that it has its pluses and minuses, but one of the great bonuses is the sense of people being together and meeting in human-sized communities. When one looks at the way the science parks, innovation centres and networking organisations, such as Cambridge Network, Cambridge Ahead and Cambridge Angels, have grown up, along with many of the consultancies that have emerged in Cambridge, one can see that it is key that those opportunities for people to meet and discuss continue as they have in the past.
David Cleevely talks passionately about what he calls the serendipity of the chance meetings that so often lead to breakthrough ideas. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me they were padlocking their bicycles in Cambridge and a chance conversation led to an investment opportunity, a discussion or a new idea. Those moments—in other places they are the water-cooler moments; in Cambridge, they are the bike-locking moments—are crucial.
The report argues that policy makers need to understand how these changes will work for city economies, so that we can respond positively and take advantage of them. Our places must not only be resilient to the shocks of the future but evolve, adapt and mature through the process, taking the opportunity to do things better than they were done before. To achieve that, we must be on the front foot and experiment to help us understand what new demands we need to make of our cities, and how resources could and should provide for all.
Cambridge Ahead is a business-led and academic membership organisation. It has been looking at the structural changes that have occurred in Cambridge during and after the pandemic, looking at internationally competitive companies, and bringing together world-leading thinkers to identify the impacts of the pandemic and the opportunities it might present. Clearly, the report was produced through the lens of Cambridge, but I believe much can be learned for other great small cities across the UK. Cambridge Ahead concluded that the UK is on a new path and that the changes we are seeing are substantially changing the city’s dynamics in a number of ways. I will touch on three points.
First, transport patterns have altered. It is pretty clear that private vehicles are still being used in preference to public transport. Public transport numbers have recovered, but not to pre-covid levels. The timing of people’s journeys has also shifted. That offers both a threat and an opportunity. There is a danger of gridlock, frankly, but if we can spread the peaks and understand that road spaces are a precious commodity, there is an opportunity to do something differently—to develop active travel in a city the size of Cambridge. There is a genuine opportunity to shift to things such as electric bikes—I am a passionate user of an electric bike myself; they are ideal for small cities such as Cambridge—and reliable, affordable mass transit into and out of the city to make sure that those outside the city are not disadvantaged.
This is a time of real opportunity, but to realise it, we have to resolve the vexed issue of financing such a transition. I make no apology for referring the Minister to my very first speech in this place, back in 2015. Perhaps slightly unusually in a first speech, I talked about tax increment financing and how close Cambridge had come to securing a truly innovative deal a few years earlier, until the dead hand of the Treasury descended, as it so often does. It is time for the Government to look at that again.
Secondly, the demand for space is changing. Perhaps counterintuitively, demand for office space in Cambridge continues to grow, even though not everyone is back. The report details why that is: people want to maintain a space, and with social distancing and so on, we do not necessarily have people back together in quite the same way. At the same time, people are also working from home. The report concludes that it looks as if we are going to settle back at somewhere between three and four days a week in the office for most people, meaning one and a half days working at home.
That means that people are working in places that were never originally designed as workplaces, which raises some real challenges, not least the need to develop far more neighbourhoods—or quarters, as one might call them—with services nearby. Academics are talking widely about the 15-minute city. We need to do that and find a way to create it. We also need green spaces for people to be able to enjoy those new workplaces. That is a very big planning issue and there are many ways to address it, but I gently suggest—this might be slightly controversial at home—that for Cambridge, where many of our green spaces are locked behind college walls, sharing that space more equitably with citizens of our city should be high on the list for those who have the opportunity to make these decisions.
Anthony Browne
The hon. Member is making an excellent speech. As he said, I am a neighbour of his; I am the MP for the bit of Cambridge that is not in his constituency. I pay tribute to Cambridge Ahead, which does excellent work—this is an excellent report.
The hon. Member makes a lot of interesting points about the changing nature of Cambridge. I just want to highlight a couple of other things. You mentioned quite a range of workers who could not work from home, but I do not think you included laboratory workers. A lot of those who work for life sciences companies, particularly in my constituency, have to go into laboratories to work, and they often stayed there throughout the pandemic. You mentioned the shortage of office space—
Anthony Browne
I am sorry, Ms Nokes. The hon. Member mentioned the shortage of office space, but there is also a shortage of wet lab space that is constraining a lot of companies. Perhaps he is going to come to this, but the changing nature of the high street is also very important, not only in Cambridge but in some of the villages in my constituency, particularly because people are doing more online shopping and there is a changing demand. The report is excellent, and I pay tribute to its authors.
Daniel Zeichner
I am grateful for those contributions—they are all important. I mentioned lab workers in passing at the beginning, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Cambridge economy is perhaps slightly different from other parts of the country, but many of these lessons, particularly those relating to reinventing the high street, will be key. The report picks up on the fact that a number of companies are looking at setting up work spaces in other areas, not necessarily in the city centre, so it is likely that there will be a different pattern to the way in which people work in future.
The third and final point that I will pull out from the report—this is, inevitably, a brief summary of a long, complicated report—is that the biggest thing for innovation in Cambridge is, as I have already hinted, how networks work and may change. New working patterns affect the frequency and manner in which we interact with people. There are generally many benefits to homeworking. At the document’s launch there was a discussion about our need—I think we can all appreciate this—for places where we are not being constantly interrupted and where we can think and work through ideas. Homeworking provides an opportunity for such a productive space, and it can clearly boost people’s quality of life.
However—and this is key for innovation—we still need to create moments of value where people come together. The report describes that as making “serendipitous encounters” happen—in other places, that could be the water cooler moment—which has been key to Cambridge’s success. Many people over many years have asked why Cambridge has done so well. This is one of the key understandings that we have learned over the years. We have to ensure that, in the transition to different working patterns, we do not lose that. To be frank, that is important not only for Cambridge. Cambridge is a key, significant driver not just of the regional economy but of the wider UK economy, so it is very important to the Government.
That is a brief summary of a much longer argument, but lessons can be pulled out for other small cities, too. Cambridge has a proud tradition of innovation and we could be an ideal test bed for new approaches. Our economy continues to grow and there are opportunities to observe, measure, experiment and learn. That will require selecting projects to monitor proactively, publish data and test ideas, so that other cities can benefit and share in the experience, with an emphasis on generating societal benefit for every community.
We are asking Government to work with Cambridge and perhaps other like-minded cities to take the work forward to the next step. I hope the Government will follow up on this discussion and agree to meet us to discuss the creation of what might be called a multi-disciplinary test bed: a framework for implementing experiments and studies, covering health, education, climate, retail, town and city centre offers, transport, housing, business models and the evolution of office and industrial space. Cities across the UK have different characteristics and face different challenges, and they will want to experiment in different ways. Of course, an experimental approach is not without risks. Some experiments will fail, but the vital thing is to have the mechanisms to monitor and learn.
In conclusion, our cities have changed substantially and will continue to do so. There will be no return to the way things were, so let us take action together to take advantage of these changes and give our cities the resilience they need to face the future.
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
I call the Minister to respond to the debate.
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
This is a 30-minute debate and we have not had notification that the hon. Member for Gloucester wanted to speak.
Richard Graham
My understanding was that my office had put me down to speak in the debate.
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
Thank you for making that clear. I will allow the Member to speak, but only for two minutes.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Thank you, Ms Nokes. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak very briefly about the future of small cities. The key thing is that historically small cities have lost out from consolidation and regionalisation by both Government and the private sector.
Big cities have the advantages of size, but small cities such as Gloucester have an enormous amount to contribute. We have fantastic cathedrals and great sports clubs such as Gloucester Rugby. We are highly rated by the Centre for Cities research on patent applications and digital connectivity, and we have all sorts of diversity, including a primary school with more than 50 nationalities. All of that can lead to very vibrant cities.
The Government’s role is to help us achieve our goal to be the greenest small city—converting our recycling centre such that it will be able to produce solar, wind and hydrogen: green energy made in Gloucester—and to enable us to realise our dream of becoming the cyber-city and cyber-county, and also the nuclear county, with nuclear fusion bids, as well as a bid to host Great British Railways and all sorts of activity on the cyber front.
Will the Minister continue to be flexible on the best structure for local government? Our city council is important to us. Will he ensure that local government is given sensible funding to guard against cyber-attacks and hacking from Russia, and will he continue the great work on the levelling-up fund? We in turn will deliver one of Britain’s most exciting small cities and a model for others.
The Minister for Housing (Stuart Andrew)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) on securing a debate on an issue that matters to so many communities across this country. The future prospects of small cities and our future support for them are real, tangible things that people in this country care deeply about. I commend him for his ongoing interest and convicti-on.
It almost goes without saying that covid-19 changed the world as we knew it. I cannot think of any part of the country that went untouched. Although the virus was a doomsday event for the businesses that make up our high streets, its effects—the hon. Gentleman has highlighted this in the past—were not evenly distributed. For places such as university cities and tourism hotspots, the effects of the virus were particularly profound. The issues created by the shutdown of local economies and the temporary closure of high streets were massively exacerbated by having fewer students and tourists in the city. For cities such as Cambridge, Oxford or York, whose populations always swell in size during normal times, the loss of revenue was especially damaging. I know that the hon. Gentleman will have felt that pain acutely, as Cambridge usually attracts more than 8 million visitors a year, bringing in about £800 million and accounting for nearly a quarter of all employment in the city.
I firmly believe that the Government, thanks to the support from the Treasury, did everything possible to support cities and places to weather the storm. That included billions of pounds of covid loans, furlough support and money to local authorities to support their communities. Those economic lifelines helped to keep businesses going, keep people in jobs and, most importantly, keep people safe from the virus. But it is right, with covid almost, I hope, in the rear-view mirror, that we look beyond the pandemic and at the wider economic geography of this country.
Although the virus was a generational event, we do not need to be economists to recognise that wider issues plaguing many of our small cities and towns have long predated the pandemic, including a lack of opportunities and good-quality jobs, and life prospects diminished by areas being overlooked and undervalued. Places across the country with proud histories have seen generation after generation leave the area in search of a brighter future that did not feel was possible where they were.
We need only to look at the high streets in some of the small cities dotted around the UK to see that they have been taken for granted for too long. Even places such as Cambridge, which draws millions of tourists and thousands of students, and places with a rich cultural heritage have at times been like a jet plane powered by only one of its engines. It does not have to be that way.
The Government party stood on a manifesto that promised to end the status quo, delivering policies and plans to usher in new opportunities across the country. That means reviving the fortunes and transforming some of our much loved cities, big and small, creating vibrant places and communities where people want to live and work.
In February we launched, in our levelling-up White Paper, our blueprint for how we get there. It outlines a huge number of measures designed to close gaps in health, education and wealth between regions, and inequalities that disfigure this country, including those in the east of England. It draws together policies on education, transport, housing, research and development and many other areas of Government spending. It is a plan that sets out a clear, targeted and measurable approach to breathing fresh life into our cities and improving the lives of people across the UK.
People want to see buzzing high streets. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) is right to raise the changing nature of many of our high streets and how we can tackle that. People want thriving local businesses and to see their children in good schools. They also want money to be invested back into things that strengthen the social fabric locally —from renovating the local theatre or museum, to constructing a neighbourhood community centre and preserving a centuries-old pub.
We believe that with the right approach—an approach that takes a long view and focuses on policies such as regeneration and proper devolution to local leaders—the results can be more money in the pockets of those people who need it most, more high-skilled jobs and more new investment attracted to an area.
Richard Graham
May I draw the Minister’s attention to one aspect of Gloucester’s success with the levelling-up fund, which is the first ever conversion in this country of a department store into a university teaching campus? It will open in September 2023 and I hope he will have the chance to visit it one day. That is also an opportunity for other cities.
Stuart Andrew
That is exactly the sort of innovation that we want to see in towns and cities all over the country, where people locally know what is best for their communities and of the existing opportunities, such as an empty building or area in need of redevelopment. Such local decision making will be key to ensuring that we maximise the potential for local communities. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that.
I also emphasise, as I have many times in the past, the moral imperative to level up the country. Levelling up is not about an arbitrary divide that starts just to the north of the Watford gap, and nor is it about a London versus everyone else divide; it is about breathing new life into, and offering a more prosperous future to, neglected areas across the country that have for years felt forgotten by Westminster. I assure every Member present that those places in the east—Cambridge, Peterborough, Luton, Bury St Edmunds—and those further afield, such as Gloucester, are just as central to our levelling-up ambitions as Sunderland, Darlington and Grimsby.
The hon. Member for Cambridge has said that while slogans come and go, we need a proper regional policy. I could not agree more. For our strategy to work, it has to be more than a slogan; it has to be something that people can really see and feel where they live. One of the central pillars, therefore, is regeneration, and I am delighted with the progress that we are making on that front. The towns fund of more than £3.6 billion is helping to create jobs and to build more resilient local communities and economies. Our investment of £2.4 billion through the town deals for 101 towns across England is giving them the tools they need to boost their local economy.
Hon. Members will have seen at first hand how that funding is supporting regeneration in the east of England. The region has received more than £287 million through our towns fund for several projects to support growth, regenerate public spaces, as the hon. Member for Cambridge mentioned, and improve transport. A fantastic example is the city of Peterborough, which will benefit from a range of new cultural facilities in the city centre, including a lakeside activity centre and the creation of new pedestrian links to improve access to the riverside and its green spaces, alongside the brand-new university opening its doors for the first time later this year. That is levelling up in action, and is just one of hundreds of examples.
We are soon to open the next round of our £4.8 billion levelling-up fund, and I encourage all smaller cities to get their bids in and to secure investment that will help to deliver on local priorities for the people they serve.
Daniel Zeichner
I am encouraged by much of what the Minister is saying. Cambridge is in a slightly different position, with slightly different issues. Will he undertake to meet Cambridge Ahead to look at how we can take things forward in future?
Stuart Andrew
I was literally about to come on to the hon. Member’s point. For me and the Department, regeneration has a fundamental role to play in the levelling-up agenda. By bringing together the vast experience that exists in our private sector businesses, local authorities, developers and local communities, we can create vibrant cities and restore people’s pride in the places where they live.
The hon. Member mentioned the Cambridge Ahead report, and I loved his comment that his ambition is for Cambridge to be the best small city in the world. The Government are clear that, as I have said, levelling up means levelling up all over the country—and that, of course, includes Cambridge. He will understand that certain points he raised on education and transport are not in my Department’s remit. None the less, the values he raised from the report sound like they could be of value to our Department’s levelling-up mission. I particularly welcome the report’s recommendations for a more resilient city with well-designed, inclusive spaces. That will be a key element of some of the work we will be doing in the forthcoming months. I will ensure that this report is reviewed and taken into consideration by my Department as we consider the next steps from the levelling-up White Paper. More importantly, I am more than happy to ensure that officials meet people in Cambridge to discuss the report further.
I want to touch on another central theme of our levelling-up plans, and that is devolution. As part of our diagnosis of the challenges that areas are facing, we recognise that low-paid, low-productivity work is largely concentrated in areas that are disconnected from much bigger cities. We believe that one of the principal solutions should be levelling up by devolving down, with a proper revolution in how we approach local democracy—one that replicates some of the extraordinary successes that have come from the introduction of metro Mayors in places such as Teesside and the west midlands. We believe that that is a winning formula for giving back control to areas over their own destiny.
That kind of devolution is what will propel us beyond what Michael Heseltine termed “the traditional Whitehall solution” of
“throwing money at individual identified problems”.
Our approach will embody the Heseltine approach to devolution, where the focus is not based on north, south, east and west, but on devolving power to cities and devolving to towns. For the east of England, that process has already begun, with Norfolk and Suffolk among the first wave of areas being invited to discuss county deals.
I will finish by thanking the hon. Member for championing the cause of small cities and bringing the debate to us today. I hope I have laid out our vision for how we offer these places a positive vision for the post-covid era, with policies and initiatives that meet the urgent needs of the moment. Individually these policies would do little to transform the fortunes of any given place, but taken together our levelling-up plans, with new hospitals, new county deals, new 4G infrastructure investment and new powers for local leaders have the potential to lift up every single city and strengthen its social fabric.
Local government and local institutions worked with national Government throughout the pandemic to support people through one of the most challenging periods in the history of this country. We did that in the spirit of collaboration and with a desire to protect people from a deadly virus. I am certain that if we work together and apply the same spirit and zeal that we showed in that moment to levelling up our country, we can deliver on the things that matter to people. I know that all hon. Members present share the motivations behind that agenda, even if we may sometimes disagree on the precise means of getting there, and I look forward to working hand in hand with hon. Members present and on all sides of the political divide to make that a reality.
Question put and agreed to.
Future of Rail
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
There are a lot of colleagues present. Some are on the speaking list and others are not. If you are hoping to get on the speaking list, I do not think you will have much success, but if Members keep their interventions short, there might be extra space. There will be three votes in about 10 to 15 minutes, and I shall suspend the sitting for 35 minutes to account for them.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the future of rail.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Charles. On 27 September 1825, as Stephenson’s Locomotion powered its way up out of Shildon towards Stockton, the eyes of the world marvelled at the height of British engineering. As we prepare for rail’s bicentenary against the backdrop of a different set of challenges, the excellence of British engineering can once again capture the imagination of what can be achieved and ignite a new transport revolution.
Rachael Maskell
Today, I will set out why consolidation and intersection with other forms of transport and energy technologies is essential if Britain is once again to lead the transport revolution, and why it is vital that the Government invest in this unique global rail supercluster for rail’s bicentenary. I am ambitious for rail and I am ambitious for Britain.
It will not be lost on anyone in this debate that York is where that revolution will occur. After all, York made the railways and the railways made York. The partnership between York University and Leeds University centres the future of digital and advanced rail, including the Institute for High Speed Rail and System Integration at Leeds University, bringing together the very best of transport, academia and digital technologies with the 13 leading rail education providers in the region, including the Institute of Technology at York College, which I visited recently.
We love our steam trains; whether it is the Mallard or the Flying Scotsman that fills people with greatest pride, our rail heritage is a natural draw for anyone across the network. Today, York has over 100 rail companies, which are at the forefront of engineering, operations, software development, timetabling and planning, providing over 5,500 of York’s top jobs and 9,500 jobs in the surrounding region, and consolidating York’s rail cluster, which is the largest outside London and now eager to take us forward once more.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this excellent debate. Does she agree that there is not a good case, but an overwhelming case, to make York the headquarters of Great British Railways?
Rachael Maskell
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Where else can Great British Railways locate itself but in York if it is to level up the whole country? That really must be the argument we make.
The York Rail Innovation Community already oversees the intersection of rail businesses and innovations, enabling the northern rail economy to generate over £42 billion, according to the University of Leeds. It draws on the University of York’s Institute for Safe Autonomy, bringing new technologies and robotics together, and opening up a new conversation for the future of rail and the future of transportation, and modernising how we think about rail and transport. The institute’s £12 million programme leads global research to provide industry, regulators and researchers with guidance on assuring and regulating robotics and autonomous systems, including those on rail. York’s work is setting global standards and ensuring that such systems are safe.
Taking the search for answers into applied testbeds, such as the advanced rail test facilities, widens possibilities and the collaborations between York, Leeds, Sheffield, Huddersfield and Hull. This is not just a rail cluster, but a transport cluster. Interlink that with the new headquarters of Active Travel England, and we will have end-to-end connectivity and endless possibilities. Now that the Government are seeing such enthusiasm for BioYorkshire, Yorkshire’s green new deal and advancing a new generation of fuels, including links to the Teesside and Humber energy clusters, even more future technologies open up, with new innovations between transport and energy clusters.
The electric vehicle revolution is too slow, too expensive, with too little infrastructure and too few people engaged, and it is not sustainable enough. We need travelling by train to be competitive with travelling by road. Pricing matters. Rail advancement will be far more efficient, faster, cleaner and greener, if we are to decarbonise and claim the climate dividend to keep the target of 1.5 degrees alive. That must be our bicentenary challenge.
As a nation, there are significant challenges we need to address. Post pandemic, the trains need to see patronage restored and advanced, better timetabling and intermodal end-to-end connectivity, not least connectivity from main lines to improved branch lines, to consolidate opportunity. The very best industry expertise across the railways in York is ready to rise to the challenge. With fuel prices escalating, the Government must seize the moment to achieve a sustained and sustainable modal shift.
Although the integrated rail plan came as a bitter blow to us in Yorkshire, centring Great British Railways’ future on driving up patronage, accessibility, connectivity and reliability across the towns and cities of our region will address some of the Williams-Shapps plans. I know other colleagues will reinforce the point and urge the door not to be closed on our ambition.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Entire sections of the transport infrastructure, especially in the north, are just not up to the job. A good example is the Hull to Selby route. We have been begging and pleading for years for that rail line to be electrified. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is about time the Government got their finger out?
Rachael Maskell
My hon. Friend is always to the point in expressing the frustration of his constituents, and detailing the opportunity that electrification of the Hull to Selby line would draw to the whole region.
Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. The problem in the north is much greater, because most of the north suffers from the situation identified by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner); we lose the economic benefits that would be brought by electrification. If the Government are serious in their levelling-up rhetoric, the people of the north need to see that. The Government need to take action.
Rachael Maskell
My hon. Friend is right. I know his frustrations for Bradford, and the opportunity he wants to bring to his constituents and his city through greater connectivity.
The reason for this debate is to lift the sights of the Minister beyond York and Yorkshire, and beyond even our railway nation. The UK could once again take pride of place in marketing the very best in railway planning, operations and engineering globally. If we are looking for a reason for global Britain, the operational and engineering expertise grown in our rail cluster in York, mixing the intermodal intersections with the next generation of energy, could be globally marketable and transformative. Already students from 120 countries study in Yorkshire. Global companies already understand the power of what is happening in York. Bosch has just made a significant investment in the city, building partnerships and integrating with other high-tech initiatives. The Government must invest if we are to move forward over the next 200 years of rail.
York also stables the Network Rail trackside repair fleet. My recent visit to Holgate engineering works showed me how the most advanced trackside safety developments are being integrated into the fleet, with robotics, digital and high-end scanning equipment filling these yellow mechanical engines. That will give the UK the reputation for having the safest railway anywhere in the world. Again, that will be priceless when exporting our safety capability.
York’s Rail Operating Centre—the largest in the UK—has tech that mirrors that of a spaceship. Every inch of the network is mapped live, overseen and monitored across a series a sophisticated digital tools, which enhances rail operations. It is preparing us for the future, playing a key role in plans to introduce the next generation of digital signalling on the east coast and beyond. Network Rail’s training centre for professional development is already in the city and helping to take this revolution forward, with more than 1,000 Network Rail staff already working in York.
Every time I meet York’s engineers, excitement for the next development greets me. My thinking is transformed, my mind left marvelling. This is what we can do when we build a sustained rail cluster. When the network’s guiding mind is anchored and embedded in the midst of such developments, and the sparks of each rail entrepreneur are joined together, the future of our rail is set ablaze. That is why I am calling for investment for the rail bicentenary. The Minister will see its return.
As for freight—perhaps the most challenging but neglected area of the network—investment in innovation has never been more needed. High Speed 2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail were partially about freeing up track for freight. That argument got lost as the debate turned to speed and costs. Our freight capability is woeful. Now coal remains in the ground, and while the likes of Drax see biofuels slowly chug their way from Liverpool docks to Selby, investment is urgently needed to drive freight forward.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for her speech. She mentioned the port of Liverpool; trading goods through the port of Liverpool has expanded dramatically, but it has put far more freight into lorries in an area with some of the worst air quality in the country. The Government’s answer is to build another road, which will increase roadside emissions and go through a much-loved country park. Through her, may I make a plea to the Minister that it be reconsidered and that rail be seen as the option not just to address those short-term challenges, but because the long-term success of our freight transport depends on massive investment in rail?
Rachael Maskell
To harness the opportunity provided by the bicentenary of British Rail, investment in the freight industry will be the gamechanger for our logistics and transport.
Those living in Kent are constantly reminded of the challenges of road haulage. However, the last couple of years have exposed the risks that the logistics industry is facing. Short-term fixes do not address the twin challenges of climate and workforce. As motorways turn into motels, a modal shift from road to rail for freight must be a priority. Cutting emissions, addressing the skills shortage and moving goods reliably is not only good for the climate, but better for business, which can become more dependable, meeting just-in-time demands that are essential in logistics. Moving goods from road to rail must be the rail cluster’s bicentenary challenge and the Minister’s focus. If we get the engineering, logistics, planning and operations right on freight, we can be confident of export demand for another product from global Britain: not just capability, but know-how, too. That is the prize for the industry.
The brilliant minds that serve our industry are the people who, at the height of the pandemic, got on our trains, repaired our tracks and advanced the network. Some, such as Belly Mujinga, gave their lives. We truly honour our transport workers and their unions—ASLEF, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association and Unite—who have worked tirelessly to keep staff and us safe, and to keep people in work.
We have difficult months ahead, but the Government must guarantee job security and good wages as staff work to rebuild the future of the industry to be even better than before. We need to enable all—from the station porter and train cleaner, to ticket office staff, trackside engineers, operators, designers, controllers, electricians and train drivers—to know that they are valued in our rail family, as they keep us safe and take our industry forward. Although consolidation of York’s rail cluster will level up our city, address the low-wage economy and accelerate inward investment for York and the region, it is what York’s rail cluster can deliver for levelling up across the whole country that excites our city the most. We believe that can be achieved only if Great British Railways is anchored in York and if investment in the sector’s research and development powers that opportunity.
York has the very best of our rail past and present, but in politics we cannot change the past; it is the future that is placed in our hands. I look at the girls and boys in my city, who are all mesmerised by our rail story. The National Rail Museum’s new galleries will give them the first taste of rail engineering and spark their ambition to be the planners, operators and engineers of the future as they embark on their science, technology, engineering and maths journey. Our collective ambition will realise the potential power of York’s rail intersectional clusters to deliver the very best rail future—all delivered on the site of the old British Rail carriage works, adjacent to just about the best-connected station in the country.
Great British Railways will be no add-on in York; it will anchor Britain’s rail future, ignite Britain’s rail ambition and deliver the next chapter of our Great British Railways revolution like no other place can. The bicentenary of rail gives the Minister the opportunity to invest in the future of passenger and freight. That will be the pride of my city, and that is our offer to the future of rail.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Order. There will be a four-minute time limit on speeches.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles.
I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing this debate. She spoke very well about why the headquarters of Great British Railways should be located in York, and about the opportunities that transport investment delivers for levelling up and decarbonising for the future. I want to support that argument.
Lots of Members will put forward the case for their areas. Some of those cases are, quite frankly, a bit on the thin side. I understand why they are doing it, but I believe that the correct way to approach this question is to look at the criteria that the decision makers in this competition have set.
Let me start by suggesting what the challenges for rail are, and how they influence what Great British Railways needs. The rail industry is a huge success. The pre-pandemic data, which I use for obvious reasons, tells us that it had 1.8 billion passenger journeys per year and 140,000-plus services per week—more than ever before. The question for Ministers and the industry is how to cope with the growth. The answer has been, through a variety of mechanisms, to increase capacity with new lines, improve existing lines, and provide new rolling stock and better signalling. The pandemic has clearly changed things, and it is too early to see how the trends will settle, but we can see that demand is returning already, although the commuting sector is still weak. The long-term problems have not gone away, and Great British Railways will need to address them.
The Government have published six criteria for judging the bids, and a critical element is the opportunity for Great British Railways. That is the third of the listed criteria, and I will focus on it for a few moments. It is against that criterion that York emerges head and shoulders above the others as the strongest bid. The question is: how do we deliver the future? The digital signalling, the planning of line enhancements, the new systems of power to drive the industry as the sector decarbonises, the expertise, the skills, the wider rail ecosystem with companies based in York and beyond in Yorkshire, the partnerships with academic institutions—they are all in place in York now, ready to be expanded and play a greater role.
Let me give one small example. The UK has been developing a series of rail operating centres—12 in total—that will control all the country’s signalling. They have been operating for some years and have taken on more services over time. York hosts one now, and it is in fact the largest of them all. It was part of a Network Rail campus, and it includes a workforce development centre, so York is already at the heart of the digital rail future.
The other criteria against which the bids will be judged are again met by the qualities of York: connectivity north-south and east-west is excellent; it is centrally located, half way between London and Edinburgh; the railway heritage is obviously second to none; and it hosts one of the major rail museums of the world. I know that the Science Museum Group has already made an important representation to the Minister in the bid process in favour of York. Public support has been demonstrated by the work undertaken locally by political representatives, not least in this debate. York is Yorkshire’s choice.
The hon. Member for York Central did not mention that in Yorkshire we are famous for liking value. [Interruption.] That is not really a joke, but a truth. We are famous for liking value, and with the York Central development we have an enterprise zone, with much of the land already in Network Rail ownership, so there is a ready-made value solution.
The last criterion is levelling up. Some of the most left-behind communities in the country are within a short journey time from York. The halo effect, building upon the current cluster, would have the positive effect of providing opportunity across these communities. Looking at the criteria as a whole and seeing what York can deliver, I see the York bid as being head and shoulders above the others, which is why I support it. I am grateful for the opportunity to share my views this afternoon and to support this bid.
Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Charles, and to take part in this debate. I congratulate my good friend, my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), on securing the debate.
We hear a lot from the Government about the decarbonisation agenda, and it is important to highlight that we can cut congestion on the road, as well as noise and air pollution, by investing in good quality public transport across the country. My constituency of Stockport is in Greater Manchester, and unfortunately the rail capacity through Stockport is currently insufficient to operate any extra services. The rail network around Stockport and south Manchester is among the most congested in the country. The Government have to address that issue to ensure that decades of under-investment is reversed and that people in my constituency and across Greater Manchester get good quality public transport options.
I associate myself with the comments that my hon. Friend the Member for York Central made about transport workers and transport unions. They do a really good job in difficult circumstances. The pandemic has not been easy for any of us, but people in that sector do a very important job with long hours and low pay, and we are grateful to them.
Two businesses based in my constituency provide services to the rail industry: Sella Controls, in Manor ward, which I visited last year, and Lundy Projects, a few minutes’ walk from my constituency office, which I visited only a few days ago. Rail electrification has to go far beyond the Government’s current ambition. Lundy Projects is a specialist company that focuses on signalling and electrification. I want to see more skilled, well-paid, unionised jobs in my constituency, and the Government should come forward with investment.
In Manchester, Mayor Andy Burnham is doing a very good job with the Bee Network, which integrates walking, cycling, trams and buses into integrated systems similar to those in London. It is a long time coming, because people in my constituency in Greater Manchester have suffered from a disintegrated public transport system at very high cost, so bus franchising is a good move. I will not go into that too much because we are here to talk about trains. We all love trains, so I will stick to trains rather than going on about buses.
I will come to a conclusion in just over a minute, but I thank two groups in my constituency: the Friends of Heaton Chapel Station, who visited me last week in the Palace of Westminster and who I was pleased to give a tour to, and the Friends of Davenport Station. The platforms at both stations lack tactile safety tiles, which is a serious issue. Unfortunately, we recently had a fatality on the railway network. The Government must come up with a timetable to ensure that all train stations have that provision, so that people with disabilities or visual impairments are not injured.
There are four stations in my constituency, but the main Stockport station on the mainline to Birmingham, London and Manchester, is not in a good shape. Platforms often flood, the roof leaks and the lift is often broken, which makes staff members’ lives difficult as well as creating discomfort and inconvenience for passengers. We need a significant capital investment in the station, so I hope the Minister will address those issues at Stockport train station.
Finally, the Greek Street bridge has come to the end of its life and needs to be replaced. We need a new bridge that will safeguard the future of the Metrolink tram system coming into Stockport, which provides better integration with Manchester and wider areas. I could go on, but I will leave it there, Sir Charles. I hope the Minister will address these issues.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Sir Charles. I thank the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for bringing forward this important debate. I will confine my remarks to supporting York’s bid, as others have, for the Great British Rail headquarters. My constituency is a little further north of York, but will nevertheless form part of the new York city region, which we are all very excited about in our neck of the woods. We will see an elected mayor for the region in 2024. Economic development is a key part of that role and what elected mayors are all about.
I am a little parochial in making my arguments, of course. Other people will obviously make their very good cases for other places, be it Derby, Darlington or wherever else, but I feel that York is the best option. I have been keen to support other cases for other investments in other parts of Yorkshire and further afield. I am very keen for us to look again at Northern Powerhouse Rail having a proper independent line between Leeds and Bradford through to Manchester. That would transform the economy in Bradford.
I am very happy to support the cases of other areas where they make sense, but the York case makes so much sense. It makes sense primarily, as the hon. Member for York Central said, in terms of the proven economic effect, called the cluster effect, which is huge. We only have to look down the road at the City of London to see how important the cluster effect is for economics. It works on the basis of three important fundamentals: it enhances productivity and brings forward innovation, and a huge amount of new business is created in the supply chain and direct supply into the particular cluster.
It is very important that, when we talk about moving jobs out of London and potentially into our regions, we do not put them just anywhere, so that we can say we are levelling up and distributing those jobs around. We have to put them in the right place, because after all, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones) said, we need to make sure that the money spent represents good value.
The cluster effect will mean there is enhanced value by putting these jobs near to other jobs and other businesses that specialise in those areas, so that we get the productivity benefit. Clearly, if people can walk across a street to talk to somebody about a certain innovation, or if they work together on an innovation, that is hugely important. The businesses that are created are on wonderful sites, such as the brownfield sites of York central, which is a wonderful opportunity for an entire city and region.
Some 5,500 people work in the rail industry in York: engineers and skilled people, clearly consultants and people involved in the new digital world of rail. Some 10% of UK workforce work in York, so it is pretty compelling. Again, the heritage has been mentioned by others. People recognise York as the nation’s capital when it comes to rail, and we are of course proud to host the wonderful National Railway Museum.
The city is hugely well connected. It is connected directly to one third of UK stations. The wonderful thing is that when the public across Yorkshire were asked the best place to put the headquarters of Great British Rail, six out of 10 said it should be York—three times the number that said any other location. Let us support the #yestoyork campaign and make sure the headquarters of Great British Rail come to York.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
Ealing and Acton would not be here without the railways. Both have stations underground, overground—not wombling free—east, west, south, broadway, common, central. They are in “that there London”, so people might be thinking, “You’re all right, Jack,” but I want to counter this misperception that has grown up around the Government’s levelling up rhetoric. It is in the suburbs of London that we feel this most acutely. Our trains are full and getting fuller, fares are rising faster than wages, and west London, the sub-region with Heathrow, is a key driver of our national economy, but it needs transport fit for purpose, not just to and from central London but between the suburban bits.
An obvious solution would be breathing life into the old Beeching line, the west London orbital. There is Ealing, the centre of west London, and to the north Brent Cross, with lots of jobs, and to the south, Brentford, but good luck to anyone trying to get between any of those three. There is the super-development opportunity area of Old Oak, which has promised 24,000 dwellings and jobs, jobs, jobs. Again, this proposal could link them all, but there is no chance in sight, because the Government will not commit long-term funding to TfL.
Instead, we have the ignominious situation of cap-in-hand, eleventh-hour settlements, being marched to the top of the hill and down again. We are pretty much the only capital city on earth—I am not counting Singapore—where there is no central Government subsidy. We need reliability, predictability and all those things. When the current Prime Minister was Mayor of London, he was bequeathed a load of goodies from his Labour predecessor: the bikes that bear his name, the TfL rail Overground—it used to be quite scary when it was the Silverlink; it is brilliant now—the DLR extension and bus investment. But for Sadiq Khan—bless his cotton socks—the cupboard is bare.
Chris Loder (West Dorset) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing the debate. I have been listening intently to what the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) said about the finances for TfL. Does she agree that if the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport did not strike so often in London and bring the whole of London to a standstill, the TfL finances might be in a better position?
Dr Huq
The hon. Gentleman is falling into the Tory trope of union bashing. I am a proud trade unionist, and the unions are there to better the conditions of their members. We do not want exploitation, do we? Is he going to be shoving kids up chimneys next? I fear the track he is going down. This issue is a bit of a smoke screen. We need long-term funding and a dependable model for London, which we used to have. Every other London Mayor had that, but in 2016 George Osborne suddenly cut the support grant. I think that had something to do with the complexion of City Hall, but—[Interruption.] I am not going to give way, because I do not get any extra time.
With covid giving way to a cost of living crisis, what did we see from the Chancellor? A cut in fuel duty and a 3.8% rise in fares, and I am not counting that gimmicky video—that thing, whatever it was—about the 1% of journeys where someone can get a cheap fare, going to the right place on the right day. That is not going to affect any of my constituents.
Meanwhile, we can only marvel at what they are doing outre-Manche in the rest of Europe. Look at Austria’s climate ticket. In Germany, there is a €9 a month regional transport ticket. In this country, no one between 25 and 65, which is probably most of the people here, is eligible for a national railcard, which is available elsewhere. I urge the Minister to look at something like that.
In conclusion, the future of rail should include projects that complete vaguely on time. I have an Oyster card holder that says, “Crossrail—new for 2018”. Ha! The future of rail would have considerate construction. HS2 goes through my seat and has made life a misery for the residents of Wells House Road, NW10. The future of rail would also have a visionary Government that could think long term, rather than say, “It’s all Sadiq Khan’s fault,” any time a London MP stands up to say anything, when we know that our London Mayor is doing a fantastic job against the odds. The country cannot be levelled up by levelling down London. The new Piccadilly line trains, due in 2025, are being built in Yorkshire. Level up London and the whole country benefits. Let us get Ealing, Acton and Chiswick back on the rails. Now that’s what I really call levelling up.
Chris Loder (West Dorset) (Con)
Thank you for calling me, Sir Charles. Well, with three minutes I will just get to the point, if I may.
I appreciate the comments of the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq). I should just say that the RMT does not quite agree with her about the London Mayor. I respectfully make that point, because the RMT has itself said that it is the London Mayor who is causing the logjam, and ultimately that has a considerable impact on the finances available. I represent a constituency that I am afraid has a three-hourly train service frequency, and when I see Transport for London getting such considerable amounts of money, it is a matter of great concern to me. That is money going to support the good people of London, rather than to support the Heart of Wessex line. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is well aware of my strong views on that point.
I will move on to the future of rail. I spent 20 years working for the railways before being elected to Parliament. I am not sure whether there are any Opposition Members present who used to be members of the RMT. I was once a member and should give it a big shout-out for its policy briefing, which was very interesting and for which I am grateful. The railways are very important for the future of this country. I appreciate that lots of people have strong views on where the new GB Railways HQ should be, although personally I do not think that will make much of a difference to the future capability of the railway; what will make an enormous difference is where the Government look to invest. The Government have supported the railway to the tune of £14 billion during the worst time of the pandemic. They have kept thousands of people in jobs, and they have done so to ensure that the future of our railways is extremely good and supports the future of our country.
It is really important that we also consider the wider things that the railways have to change going forward. The railways have been marvellous in lots of ways, but the fact that it can take 12 months to change a timetable is not acceptable in the current day and age. Why is it that we have a timetable that is the same on a Monday as it is on a Friday, when we know that the demands are very different? There are fundamental changes that need to happen in order for our railways to excel.
I am conscious of time and am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. As a final point, it is really important that we remember it is not all about the cities; it is about connecting the rural areas as well—areas such as West Dorset and other parts of the country that would greatly benefit from that in the future.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Charles. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for introducing the debate. I am also pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) here, because I want to talk about the journeys that we used to take together when we were first elected in 2015. Those hourly direct services from Chester to London have all gone during the pandemic and are yet to return. I understand that we are due to get some back next month, but not all of them will be restored. I have to ask the Minister, why are we waiting longer than everyone else to get a lesser service restored? Who is accountable for that decision? Will we ever get back to what we had before? What evidence are those decisions based on?
Those questions are important because the Department is also planning to award a new 10-year franchise to run the line later in the year. How can decisions be properly made on future service provision when the service is not yet back to pre-pandemic levels? What evidence base will the Department be working on for that decision? There needs to be a crystal-clear commitment that the new franchise will restore hourly direct services from Chester to London. I would like the Minister, when she responds, to say that is exactly what will happen. If she cannot do that, will she at least meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester to discuss what we would like to see in the new 10-year deal?
We cannot continue to have decisions made about our rail services without reference to Members in this place and our communities. I have suggested to Avanti already that if it does not want to run the service at the previous level, it should not only not bid on the current franchise but give the current one up. I am due to meet Avanti on Friday, and I will be interested to hear what it has to say. In the meantime, I hope that we have the Department’s support in restoring services to pre-pandemic levels.
Perhaps when I meet Avanti I will be told that it has been unable to restore services because of a lack of demand. Of course, if it does not put the services on, we do not know what the demand is. It may be the case that a huge increase in home working as a result of the pandemic has affected travel patterns, but I would not be surprised if there were other issues at play. If there is a feeling that businesses are using rail less, perhaps the answer may lie in the eye-watering costs attached to such travel.
Let us look at journeys of a similar distance between cities in England, Germany and France: Chester to London is 165 miles; Hamburg to Berlin is 159 miles; and Calais to Paris is 147 miles. The cost of a single rail ticket for the morning to arrive by 9 am for each of those journeys tells its own story: Hamburg to Berlin is £26; Calais to Paris is £39; and Chester to London is £155. Travelling from Chester to London costs nearly six times more than a similar journey in Germany and nearly four times more than a similar journey in France. In fact, I can get to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt or to Tel Aviv in Israel for less money than it costs me to get to London by train before 9 am, so I can actually get to another continent for less money. Therefore, if we are going to do something about rail travel in future, let us make it affordable for everyone.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing the debate.
This debate is about the future of rail, but understandably the question on everyone’s mind at the moment is which of our towns or cities will be given the huge honour of hosting the public body tasked with delivering that future. Right hon. and hon. Members will not be surprised to hear that I very much support what the hon. Member for York Central has set out, and what my hon. Friends the Members for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones) and for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) have set out. There is also support from other north Yorkshire MPs.
Members have previously heard me set out at length why I think York is the best site for Great British Railways, but in the short time available I will briefly reiterate what I consider to be the main points in support of York’s strong case. First, there are York’s existing Network Rail facilities, strong connectivity and rail heritage, as well as the availability of a range of convenient city-centre sites. That last point has already been touched on, but the York central site stands out proud in terms of what it can deliver. It is also shovel-ready—it is ready to go—and that must add huge weight to York’s bid.
Secondly, York has a skilled workforce, which accounts for over 10% of the national rail industry’s workforce, and it is also situated at the centre of the north-east Yorkshire rail cluster, which is the largest in the UK.
Thirdly, York has leading status in training and innovation, which has been driven by local businesses, colleges and universities. I could add so much more to this point, but I cannot do so in the brief time available, although I know that other Members have already touched on it.
Fourthly, York’s position at the heart of the UK rail network makes it an ideal national administrative base. Moreover, York would potentially contribute to the Government’s goals of strengthening the Union and levelling up in the north of England, based on York’s strong links to Scotland, the north-east, Manchester and all parts of Yorkshire.
Yorkshire and, in particular, York have not only a proud rail history but a vital role to play in the future, by leading the way in developing new technologies and providing new skills that will revolutionise rail travel in York. For me, the case for York’s bid is absolutely overwhelming, and I am proud to be supporting it here today. I am also proud to support Members from across our region in supporting York’s case, and I very much look forward to learning how the Government will take this matter forward.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for securing this important debate.
It has been a year since East West Rail gave the devastating news to my constituents that their homes and land were at risk, but it was only this week that they have received letters from EWR to inform them that they “may be” affected or “probably” will be affected by the scheme. The letters arrived after months of pushing for them from my office and from councillors in the impacted wards, during which time we pleaded with EWR and the DFT to be much more open and honest about where my residents stand and what their options are, whatever the outcome of the scheme.
Communications from the Government and EWR—whether on the consultation or on answering the many questions my constituents have about the project, such as its environmental impact—have been deplorable from day one. Both the Government and EWR have been happy to allow local representatives, who have no real influence on or knowledge of the plans, to take the flak and try to fill a void where their information and transparency should have been.
The consultation response, which was due in March, has been delayed, so we are still none the wiser; we cannot even be sure whether the project will go ahead. I do not know why the Government will still not commit to electrifying the line from day one, given their net zero targets.
I want to explain the cost of dither and delay for my constituents. Residents have written to me in distress at being in limbo. One describes her home as feeling like a prison. People cannot make plans. They do not know whether to make home improvements, or whether they will even have a home. They fear the loss of their community. Many worry that they may not be able to move house. This situation is taking its toll on people’s mental health and wellbeing.
The uncertainty cannot go on. The Government are now in the process of reviewing the strategic and economic case. In my view, the only thing the Government are assessing is whether they will risk running a train line through the Tory shires before the next general election. If the Government are minded to U-turn on their plans, I urge them to level up with the public about what is going on. What I see is East West Rail forging ahead with meetings and mailouts, and a Government in reverse.
If the Department for Transport is to proceed with the investment, it needs to bring the proposals forward immediately, so that the public understand what they are dealing with. The Rail Minister will be aware that I was broadly in favour of the fantastic connectivity and investment opportunities that a green rail link between Oxford and Cambridge would bring to the people of Bedford, but not at any cost.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Charles. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing today’s debate. I agree that rail and our wider public transport network are essential to tackling the climate crisis and meeting our net zero commitment, but we do not have a Government willing to drive a transformative strategy that encourages more people to travel by train.
In the midst of a cost of living crisis, the Government decided to increase rail fares by a brutal 3.8%. Average fares have now risen by 48.9% more than in 2010—that is twice as fast as wages. In my constituency of Luton South, that means commuters to London now pay £4,717 for a season ticket, an increase of 46% since 2010. The Government’s short-term “Great British Rail Sale” does not scratch the surface of tackling the broken system of overpriced fares. A flash sale is not a strategy. My constituents and our country have suffered 12 years of rail mismanagement and under-investment.
I am here to say, again, that Luton station is not fit for purpose. The patching up of roof leaks, licks of paint and basic renovations are not sufficient to provide people in Luton with the modern-day train station they deserve. Accessibility remains a major issue. Disabled and elderly people and young families are marginalised, as there are no lifts to four out of five platforms.
The long-awaited Access for All funding for lifts at the station is welcome, although I understand that works will not be completed until early 2024. Luton needs a comprehensive station revamp in line with our town’s modern 21st century ambitions. Will the Minister explain whether additional capital funding will be allocated to redeveloping town train stations such as Luton as part of the Government delivering on their levelling-up commitments?
I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for York Central on the importance of rail unions. Long-term rail reform must have the interests of rail workers at its heart. I send my solidarity to RMT members who are opposing pay freezes, threats to their jobs and attacks on their terms and conditions. Staff are not being properly rewarded. Commuters are not getting value for money and the public are not getting a plan that helps tackle the climate crisis.
It does not have to be this way. For every pound spent on rail, £2.50 is generated for the wider economy. There are European comparisons, too, with cheaper journeys, punctual trains and publicly-owned railways. European state-owned companies are making profits delivering our rail services. Essentially, British taxpayers are subsidising European countries’ rail services. That is absurd. We know the benefits that UK-owned East Coast and London North Eastern Railway have delivered to the Treasury. Reform of rail cannot come soon enough. We need accessible, affordable and better connected railways that work for passengers, our community and rail workers.
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to appear before you, Sir Charles. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for introducing this debate on the future of rail. I say, “What future?”
Many of the problems with rail can be traced back to 1993, when British Rail was privatised into more than 100 separate companies under the Conservative Government. It was supposed to bring greater efficiency and innovation. Instead, it brought fragmentation, confusion and extortionate fare increases.
In 2018, the Government finally admitted that privatisation was not working when the east coast franchise collapsed and was taken into public ownership. It is now making profit. Instead of doing the right thing, putting passengers before profit, and bringing our rail franchises back into full public ownership, the Government are now proposing a joint system under which taxpayers will continue to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in profit to rail companies to run the network. It is unacceptable.
For years I have had constituents write to me about the impact of daily overcrowded trains and infrequent, unreliable train services. They have lost jobs, missed lectures and medical appointments, and in some cases have been sanctioned by the Department for Work and Pensions for arriving late to their appointment. The cost to commuters has grown by 50% in the past 12 years of Tory government, and Transport for London is now facing a 40% loss of its core funding.
In January, a report was published on behalf of the Minister’s Department that said that only major Government funding would solve the accessibility problems at stations across the country. One of the rail operators interviewed said that 60% of stations lacked step-free access from street level to the platforms. Just last month, elderly constituents from Farnworth in my constituency were returning from a holiday and took a train from Manchester airport to Bolton with heavy luggage. When they got to Bolton, the station lift was not working. What were they supposed to do? Another woman behind them was carrying a pram.
We know from reports that ticket offices are set to close across the country. That will impact those who need face-to-face services, such as the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women and other people. What will happen to them, especially if trains are not running at night?
We were told that there was going to be an integrated plan on infrastructure for the north, which was then scrapped. For a whole year, I sat on the High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill Committee. We had seven sessions a week. HS2 will run from London to Birmingham, and we were told that there would be a continuation of the line to Manchester and Leeds, but that integrated rail plan has now been scrapped. It is wrong. We need transport infrastructure in the north. We also need proper train services connecting the east and west along the M62 corridor—
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Order. Sorry, I am trying to get everybody in.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
If William Gladstone, when he was Prime Minister in the 1880s, had organised a debate such as this on the future of the railways and came back today, I imagine he would be shocked. The UK was the great industrial powerhouse, and he would have expected the railways to have improved. However, as the Transport Committee found when it looked at regional railways, the timetables are slower than they were in Gladstone’s time.
There are three primary reasons for that. First, the over-application of public sector borrowing requirements starved the railways of investment for decades. Secondly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) said, there was the privatisation of the railways. The railways were under-sold—the National Audit Office recognised that they had been massively sold at a loss. They were then prey to unregulated rolling stock companies, which hired trains at massive profits. Thirdly, Railtrack—the people running the railways—decided it was a property company, not a railway company, and killed people. That is what privatisation did.
Now the Government are showing some faith in the future, and we are going back to a similar structure to British Rail, but we need integration. The hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) said that we could have different timetables every day of the week. Privatisation meant that when people sat down to work out timetables, there were about five times as many people as there were under British Rail. It was inefficient.
I have three quick points. We need investment in the pinch points in the rail system. In Manchester’s case, we need platforms 14 and 15 at Piccadilly station, which would help the whole of the north of England. We need HS2. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East correctly pointed out that HS2 should benefit the whole of the north of England. In fact, it should go to Scotland. HS2 should be the backbone of our rail system.
Finally, a point that everybody else has made, although it is not necessarily about the future of the railways: the site of the Manchester Exchange Station in Salford, which had the longest platform in the world, going to Victoria Station, should be the home of GBR. This was the home of the first scheduled passenger rail service between Manchester and Liverpool.
Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing this important debate.
The climate emergency really does require that we change the way we travel. Radical and urgent action is needed, as well as a transformative plan to switch to more sustainable forms of transport and at the same time create new and innovative jobs for our workforce. As in other parts of the country, rail plays a pivotal role in Wales as a public transport network, with millions of passengers dependent on rail for commuting and leisure. It is a critical asset and must have a greater role in Wales if it is to achieve an integrated, intersectional, accessible, affordable, efficient and sustainable transport system that meets the needs of the present while protecting the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The Welsh Government have set out an ambitious vision for transport in Wales, as set out in their strategy, Llwybr Newydd.
As in other parts of the country, Wales faces many challenges—similar challenges to the rest of the United Kingdom. When he was Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport, Ken Skates, Member of the Senedd, said that rail delivery in Wales was “complex, fragmented and underfunded.” In Wales, the rail service continues to suffer from infrequent services, unreliable infrastructure and indirect routes. Only last year the Welsh Affairs Committee, on which I sit, published a report on rail in Wales that exposed a raft of issues: performance issues, poor service experience, inadequate stations, the cost, infrequency, accessibility and low standards. There is an urgent need for the network in Wales, as in the rest of the UK, to be upgraded.
I want to focus on three priorities for Wales. Again, these apply to the rest of the UK. First is bringing rail back into public ownership. In 2020, the Welsh Government decided to take the Wales and Borders rail franchise into public ownership in order to protect services, safeguard jobs and deliver infrastructure improvements, particularly in light of the ongoing challenges associated with covid. Second is fully devolved rail in Wales. In the words of the Welsh Government:
“Rail devolution is essential for us to deliver the comprehensive, integrated, and efficient transport network needed across Wales”.
Finally, we need a fair funding settlement to improve rail networks in Wales. HS2 should be reclassified as an England-only project. That would provide Wales, through the Barnett formula, with around £5 billion—not million—to spend on rail infrastructure in Wales. We are taking a llwybr newydd—a new path. We have set out a new way of thinking that places people and climate at the centre of our transport system so that we can deliver a transport system for the whole of Wales, but we need action by Westminster as well, and action needs to happen now. Diolch yn fawr.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Gavin Newlands, you have 10 minutes. You do not have to take it all, but we will put you on a countdown clock.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
I hear you, Sir Charles. It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing this important debate. She set the scene very well and spoke proudly—quite rightly—about York’s magnificent railway heritage. She spoke about modal shift, including freight—a point that was echoed by the hon. Members for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) and for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins), who, along with many other Members, brought up pricing.
Decarbonisation was mentioned. The hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) mentioned that the Government are not electrifying the track quickly enough. I completely agree and I will come to that in my speech. The hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) mentioned East West Rail using diesel on its trains. The hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter)—apologies for my pronunciation—mentioned decarbonisation and HS2 with regard to Wales, and the fact that Wales gets no Barnett money, but Scotland gets 100% Barnett. It is a point I have raised before.
Connectivity and capacity were issues mentioned by the hon. Members for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), for West Dorset (Chris Loder)—who is my comrade on the Transport Committee—and for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders). This debate became about the location of GBR’s headquarters. Many strong cases were made for York, not least by the hon. Member for York Central and the hon. Members for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones), for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and for York Outer (Julian Sturdy). If I have missed any hon. Members, I do apologise. It is a very good case that they made, but it is one that I cannot support, because there are six Scottish bidders—Dundee, Edinburgh, Fife, Motherwell, Perth and Stirling—and I am not choosing one of them either.
The hon. Member for York Central finished her contribution with a tribute to all our public transport staff for the work they did to keep us moving through the pandemic. It is a tribute I very much echo. Despite the significant impact of the covid pandemic, I believe that the future of rail is bright and green. I believe also that the future of rail is in public ownership. I think it is a policy that both the hon. Members for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) would also support.
I want to talk about the future of rail in Scotland. The future of rail in England and Wales is a little more debatable. The action by the Scottish Government to take ScotRail back into public control just under four weeks ago should be a template for railways elsewhere. Public ownership is a fresh start for the railways in Scotland. Already we can see innovation in the shape of the spring fare deals that far exceeded DFT’s plans. If the issue is about tempting travellers to use rail on a national and transformational basis, it should be up to Government to set the priorities of our railways and, more widely, set out how those priorities integrate with other modes of transport.
It is disappointing that the Williams review ruled out real public ownership, instead opting for operating concessions. It is a real missed opportunity to begin revitalising rail services in England and across borders. The chance to provide real accountability within the system has been missed. Instead, the DFT has settled for a halfway house, where blame continues to be placed on operators where expedient. Meanwhile, the real direction of travel is set by GBR and the DFT.
I know that the team at the top of GBR are leaders in the industry. The Transport Committee recently heard Andrew Haines give evidence, and we were impressed by his track record, knowledge and genuine enthusiasm for building a railway fit for the future. However, all the talent in the world will struggle against a structure that is not fit for purpose from the start. I worry that behind the glossy reports that the Secretary of State likes to show off on his bookshelves whenever he appears on the TV, the new GBR will simply be a rebranding of Network Rail, with some of the DFT and Office of Rail and Road’s current functions.
There also must be an appetite for real change right across the industry from those who hold the purse strings, and the signs from the DFT and Treasury are not good. We have a ludicrous situation where ScotRail is paying over double the amount of track access charges that Northern Rail is liable for—£340 million versus £150 million—while running only slightly fewer services by distance travelled.
Indeed, ScotRail pays the third-highest total access charges of any train operator in Britain. That might be worthwhile if that funding gave Scotland the kind of railway of the future that people and passengers in Scotland are looking for, but even with that kind of expenditure, Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government had to plough in an additional £630 million in capital and infrastructure investment in 2020-21, in line with the Scottish Government’s plans for decarbonisation of our passenger rail services by 2035. That is £1 billion toward track and infrastructure every year, funnelled to Network Rail and under its command, while Network Rail remains out of devolved control and reports to the DFT and the Office of Rail and Road.
As things stand, GBR will take over control of infrastructure in Scotland in the same way that Network Rail controls it. That is a missed opportunity to do the sensible thing and fully devolve responsibility and control of the entire rail network to the Scottish Parliament. Already ScotRail and Network Rail work closely together as part of the ScotRail Alliance. Full devolution would strengthen that alliance and finish the work of fully integrating track and train that started in 2005 with the transfer of franchising and services to Holyrood. We will have a situation whereby a publicly owned train company will have to negotiate with the publicly owned network operator, whose primary job will be dealing with private concession operators that are running services on behalf of the Government-owned GBR. Inevitably, the culture and institutional knowledge of GBR will skew towards that needed to deal with the private operators rather than a publicly owned company. Full devolution of Network Rail in Scotland, before it ends up under the auspices of GBR, will avoid that happening. Given the inevitability of all transport in Scotland coming under the control of the Scottish Parliament once we are independent, it would be real planning for the long-term future, but that future has to be cleaner and greener.
Scotland’s rail decarbonisation target of 2035 is hugely ambitious. It is 15 years ahead of DFT’s target for England. Hundreds of miles of our network run through areas of extremely low population, and maintaining and improving them over time is technically challenging. At this stage, full electrification of such routes would be disproportionate to passenger numbers, but in the longer term we should be looking to invest in these railways in the same way that Norway has electrified many of its rural routes. However, the development of alternative fuel trains, such as the zero-emission train developed under Transport Scotland and fuelled by hydrogen fuel cells, along with battery electric solutions, shows that no corner of our rail network will be untouched by the zero-carbon revolution that is not just desirable but critical for the future of our society and the planet.
That all said, our track record—apologies for the pun—on rail electrification since devolution has been excellent. Over the last 20 years or so, Scotland has electrified track at more than twice the rate that DFT has in England, which has resulted in a 44% increase in routes electrified since devolution, compared with just 17% across Britain as a whole. Moreover, this rolling programme of investment, which has been much lauded not just by me but by the industry, has resulted in far lower costs, with electrification costs 50% higher per single track kilometre in England than in Scotland, and there is a target to lower the cost to around half of the current English electrification cost.
In Scotland, we already have the Edinburgh-Falkirk electrification scheme, with the Shotts line, Paisley canal and Alloa all seeing the wires go up. Future projects will connect East Kilbride and Barrhead to the electric railway, and some lines have been reinstated after the short-sighted closures of decades past, including the Borders railway—a huge success story, as passenger numbers hugely exceed expectations. The Levenmouth link is currently under construction.
It pays to invest, to give certainty and to allow decisions to be made closer to the local people, communities and businesses that they affect. The fact that it took devolution for Scotland to get on and start our decarbonisation journey should be a red flag for the Government, and it makes an indisputable case for full devolution of rail. By the end, if there is one, of what has so far been a two-decade-long process—a process, incidentally, that was ignored by Westminster when it had control of rail in Scotland, but which has been driven forward by all political parties in Scotland, bar the Conservatives—we will have a railway that is fully fit for the future.
I want the future to include constructive relationships with GBR and the Department for Transport across borders—not just in Scotland but in Wales—but I fear that the overriding urge to centralise and the inability to let go, even when it makes very little sense not to do so, will mean that we still have the same outdated and outmoded structures of railway governance that have dragged the industry down over recent years. That cannot be allowed to happen, and if the Minister takes on board one thing from today, I hope it is that the new GBR cannot follow the centralising model that has been a dead hand preventing the devolved Administrations and many areas of England from taking the decisions that best support their priorities. Decisions on investment and growth are best taken by those on the ground, not by a DFT trying to extend its reach across the UK. That needs a real transfer of power to national Parliaments and regional authorities, and I hope that the future plans for rail mean that that task can be completed sooner rather than later.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to be taking part in this crucial debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for securing it. As my predecessor in this role, she certainly has superb knowledge in this field. I also applaud her for being an amazing champion of her constituents, and for her dedication in supporting York in its bid to be the new headquarters for Great British Railways. Indeed, there was a lot of harmony in the room when the hon. Members for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones), for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) all supported York’s bid because of the city’s global rail cluster and digital technology firms, which contribute immensely to UK rail innovation. I applaud them all for their dedication, and I am sure that York will be a very strong candidate. Indeed, as a nation we must ensure that we increase exports of such cutting-edge technologies to other parts of the world.
We cannot debate the future of rail without considering its past. Understanding first where rail has come from in the past decade is crucial in understanding where it is going in the next. As the phrase goes, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, which we definitely do not want for our railways. The 2010s can only be described as a disastrous decade for rail, with fares rising twice as fast as wages, as my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) eloquently highlighted, cuts to rail services up and down our country, a network unlikely to be decarbonised and net zero by 2050, and a consistently vague communications approach for future development and investment in rail. Despite the Tory rhetoric of investment and expansion, the Government’s actions speak far louder than their words.
Passengers travelling by rail today compared to 12 years ago are paying twice as much for a lot less. Year on year, rail fares have ballooned, increasing by 49% since 2010, while wages across the UK have stalled, with weekly median earnings increasing by just 23% since 2010, all while incomes are being squeezed by a pressing cost of living crisis. How do this Government expect people to be able to keep up with these brutal hikes? Increasing passenger numbers while simultaneously pricing them out does not seem like the most robust strategy from the Government.
The Government solution appears to be the “Great British Rail Sale”, touted to offer huge savings on many off-peak intercity routes, but Labour findings suggest that these discounts will be applied to a mere 1% of all journeys taken, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) eloquently explained. Perhaps we are being far too generous, Sir Charles, as even the Tory press are running stories that only 0.66% of journeys will be discounted. This is nothing more than a gimmick, and rail staff, unions and passengers know that all too well. No wonder it has been called the “Great British Rail Fail”.
Short-term sales and political gimmicks should not be the future of our railways, but a permanent, affordable, efficient and green network should be. Given the steep cost of travelling on our railways, passengers would be expected to experience an equally steep improvement in services. Sadly, that has not been the case. This Government are imposing cuts of 10% on operators, threatening jobs across the network and reducing network capacity.
Furthermore, industry anxiety about omicron, used as a front to permanently reduced timetables, seems to have materialised, with 19,000 pre-pandemic services yet to return, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) eloquently explained when he talked about services to and from Chester. In areas of the south-west, there is a distinct lack of services, as the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder), who has considerable experience in the rail industry, highlighted. It is evident to me that while the Tories might talk up the bright future of rail, all I can see is managed decline. Will the Minister tell us what plans the Government have to bring back these lost services and provide passengers with a future in which rail travel is better value for money?
A key part of rail’s future, and of all of our futures, is the climate crisis, but Government failures on rail are a pattern, with an equally poor record on electrification, despite increased climate change awareness during the last decade. This is the view not just of the Labour party but of industry professionals and stakeholders with whom I have had several meetings. The Railway Industry Association’s 2021 report, entitled “Why Rail Electrification?”, puts forward the case for a rolling plan of electrification, which is necessary for network decarbonisation, adding that that is how the UK will reach its net zero targets.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Dhesi
I can see several Members want to get in and normally I would be well up for taking interventions, but Sir Charles has intimated the lack of time. I apologise to Members on both sides, but I have only a few minutes.
Despite Conservative boasts in the Chamber about the record on electrification, the facts show that there is absolutely nothing to be proud about. The Government have reneged on plans to electrify east-west rail, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) highlighted. According to Network Rail, 13,000 single track kilometres of rail or 88% of the total network should be electrified by 2050. However, between 2010 and March 2020, just 1,786 kilometres of rail track were electrified, meaning that only an additional 5,358 kilometres would be electrified by 2050. At the current rate, the Government will not get even halfway to their net zero target on electrification.
Perhaps the Minister will clarify this point, rather than just harking back a couple of decades to the days of the last Labour Government. How will this Government reach net zero targets on our rail network? We all know that the last Labour Government invested billions to modernise the old inefficient rolling stock. That is what their priority was. The priority now should be to tackle the climate crisis and electrify.
Part of the issue with the Government’s approach to the future of our railway infrastructure is its lack of detail, specificity and long-term commitment to investment. The devil is in the detail. Much to the dismay of the rail industry, the “Rail Network Enhancements Pipeline”, the document providing the detail on infrastructure delivery, which the Government have told the House will be published annually, is a mere 900 days out of date.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Wendy Morton)
It’s coming!
Mr Dhesi
Oh, it’s coming—only 900 days late, severely hindering industry players’ investment in their skills and technology and making future infrastructure programmes even more expensive and slower to deliver. Given the unheeded warnings regarding the enhancement pipeline, including a plethora of my own written parliamentary questions on this subject, perhaps the Minister will enlighten us today as to when the updated document will finally appear.
Then, of course, there is the distinct lack of accessibility, as ably highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra). I appreciate that the Minister has only recently taken on the rail brief, but considering the Government’s decade of rail mismanagement, what prospects are there for a promising future in rail under this Government? No doubt, the Ministers today will extol the virtues of Great British Railways as their innovative solution to revolutionise the railways and herald a bright future, but despite consisting of 113 pages, last year’s Williams-Schapps plan for rail lacked the detail necessary for the industry to understand its day-to-day operations.
As the barrister and legal commentator Max Hardy recently tweeted:
“A car journey costs the same if it’s planned 6 minutes ahead or 6 months ahead”.
If trains are not competing on price, comfort or convenience, what is the point of them? We need devolution and integration of our public transport, as was ably highlighted by my hon. Friends the Members for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) and for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer)—and, indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who explained why the fragmentation and privatisation of the rail industry has ensured that there is such a disastrous impact on our railways. I hope that the Government will look back into taking the railways back into public ownership, so that we put people before profit.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Well done. Minister, you have 10 minutes and then Rachel Maskell has 90 seconds to wind up.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Wendy Morton)
It is a privilege to respond to this debate under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I start by thanking the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for securing this important debate on the future of the railways, and all hon. Members who have made contributions today.
As some hon. Members will know, the railways are close to my heart: both my paternal grandfathers worked on the railways, one in Wensleydale in North Yorkshire—for those who are not Yorkshire colleagues—and the other in County Durham. My dad was actually born in a railway cottage, so I like to think that I have a little railway heritage or railway stock in my blood.
I understand the importance of the industry and the magnificent railway heritage of this country. There is a lot to respond to in this debate. I will respond to as much as I can. It has been a very broad debate—a good debate—but there are some specific points that I want to cover, particularly the point about GBR HQ, which I will come to shortly.
The Government are committed to securing the heritage of our railways, now and in the future. Although I cannot comment today on specifics of the initiative in York, our plans for the future of rail will benefit the UK as a whole.
I will start with the Williams-Shapps plan for rail. The case for change has long been clear, and the need to move away from a model that delivered multiple franchise failures, falling passenger satisfaction, a timetable collapse, spiralling costs and a one in three chance of delays across the network. That is why we commissioned Keith Williams in 2018 to carry out the first root and branch review of the rail industry in a generation. Keith and his team identified six key problems facing our railways; I am sure hon. Members will be familiar with some of them.
The rail sector too often loses sight of its customers, both passengers and freight. It is missing opportunities to meet the needs of the communities it serves. It is fragmented, and accountabilities are not always clear. It lacks clear, strategic direction. It needs to become more productive and tackle long-term costs. It struggles to innovate and adapt.
The pandemic has only exacerbated those problems, with revenues down and costs up. The Government rightly stepped in with emergency financial support, from the start of the pandemic to the end of the previous financial year, spending almost £14 billion funding on passenger services. I also recognise the work of the industry in keeping services going through the pandemic. But that support cannot be open-ended and the need for change is greater than ever.
Hon. Members will be aware that the Williams-Shapps plan for rail, published in May 2021, set out the path towards a truly passenger-focused railway, underpinned by new contracts that prioritise punctual and reliable services, the rapid delivery of a ticketing revolution with new flexible and convenient tickets, and long-term proposals to build a modern, green and accessible rail network. We are confident that our ambitious programme for reform will address the problems that Keith identified and support recovery from the pandemic. To that end, we are now well on the way to the biggest transformation of the railways in three decades.
Central to our vision is the establishment of a new rail body, Great British Railways, which will provide a single familiar brand and strong unified leadership across the rail network. Once established, GBR will be responsible for delivering better value and flexible fares, and the punctual and reliable services that passengers deserve. Bringing ownership of the infrastructure, fares, timetables and planning of the network under one roof, it will bring today’s fragmented railways under a single point of operational accountability, ensuring that the focus is delivering for passengers and freight customers and encouraging integration across the system as a whole.
GBR will be a new organisation with a commercial mindset and strong customer focus. It will also have a different culture to the current infrastructure owner, Network Rail, and different incentives from the beginning. It will also be accountable to Ministers, ensuring that its focus is on providing value for the taxpayer, enabling innovation and delivering for passengers and freight customers.
Dr Huq
I am grateful for what the Minister is saying about the GB focus and the new thing coming. Will she look at the European examples that I mentioned? As a member of the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, I know that tourism is a big thing in this country. It is worrying that people land in London and cannot get to Manchester without its costing a three-figure sum. Can the Minister sort that out, too?
Wendy Morton
The hon. Lady is demonstrating the need for a railway system that is not fragmented, and highlighting the importance of the rail industry, not just for commuters and travel to work, but for the tourism sector and leisure.
Private businesses have always played a big role on the railway, originally as its creators, then as providers of passenger and freight serves, and suppliers and partners to Network Rail. Privatisation has been a success story for the rail network, with passenger numbers doubling in the 25 years before the pandemic, and passengers travelling more safely. [Interruption.] Some hon. Members might not like that, but numbers have doubled in 25 years. The private sector has invested billions into new, modern trains and the upgrading of stations.
Our reforms are about simplification—
Andrew Jones
It would be helpful to remind this debate of what has happened in our railways over the past few years. After decades of decline, we reached the point where we had only 760 million passenger journeys per year. The situation transformed, under privatisation, to 1.8 billion passenger journeys a year. I think the Minister should continue her history lesson to the Opposition Members, who really haven’t got a clue.
Wendy Morton
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the intervention. Let me continue, because he does make some very important points on the private sector. GBR will harness the very best of the private sector—innovation, an unrelenting focus on quality, and outstanding customer service—and fuse it with a single guiding mind, empowered to drive benefits and efficiencies across the system as a whole.
I will quickly touch on some of the points raised by hon. Members. A number spoke of reform; I want to be absolutely clear that we are committed to workforce reform, which will make the railways financially and operationally sustainable for the future, to deliver in the ways that passengers want, and provide greater opportunities and more flexible roles for employees.
We talked about GBR; we also have the GBR transition team in place. While transformation on this scale cannot happen overnight, the Government and the sector are committed to ensuring that benefits for passengers and freight customers are brought forward as quickly as possible. Since our plan for rail, we have set up the GBR transition team, fulfilling the plan for rail’s commitment to start interim arrangements immediately.
The hon. Member for York Central referenced her bid for York to be the GBR HQ, as did others—my hon. Friends the Members for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) and for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones). GBRTT is currently overseeing the competition to select the national HQ for GBR, which is to be based outside of London, ensuring that skilled jobs, investment and economic benefits are delivered nationwide and in line with this Government’s historic commitment to levelling up across the nation.
I am pleased to say that we have received an amazing 42 applications—an incredibly positive response to the recent expression of interest phase. Obviously, there was one for York, and six others were mentioned by the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands). I am conscious of time, and I know that there have been other debates on GBR’s possible HQ locations, but I do commend the hon. Member for York Central for her tireless advocacy of York in the past.
I want to quickly touch on other points in the time that I have. On RNEP, please be patient; we will be coming forward with that in due course. There were very specific requests from the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) around services, new franchising, and a request for a meeting. I am happy to pick that up after the debate.
Various points were raised around accessibility and tactiles by a number of colleagues. That is something that I feel is very important, and we are absolutely committed to increasing the tactiles to 100%, and Network Rail has received an initial £10 million to install tactiles.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Rachel Maskell, you have one minute and 20 seconds.
Rachael Maskell
Thank you, Sir Charles. I thank all hon. Members for their participation in today’s debate. We truly have debated the future of rail. It has been outstanding, with all of the contributions mentioning safety, stations, staffing and local services, as we try to grapple with the real challenges ahead of us around connectivity and the climate. Of course, centred in that is the opportunity that Great British Railways will bring to our network, to our country and to our future.
I trust that, in today’s debate, not only was the case for York made so strongly, but also the plea to look to the next 200 years of our railways, using the bicentenary for real investment in our rail cluster, to ensure that we truly can be global Britain once more on our railways.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Thank you very much, colleagues; you performed magnificently—a team effort.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).
Women’s Elite Sport: Prize Money
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered prize money in women’s elite sport.
It is a pleasure, as ever, Sir Charles, to speak under your chairmanship. I am grateful to the Speaker for granting this debate on such an important subject at a critical time for women’s sport.
The issue of prize money in women’s sport featured quite prominently in a debate on women’s football that I led in this Chamber back in January, and it is great to see the Minister announce that there is to be a review into women’s football, as recommended in the fan-led review, the call for which I and many colleagues echoed in that debate. I am sure that the issue of prize money will be included in that. Taken alongside the news that the Women’s EURO taking place in England this summer and the women’s World Cup will be added to the listed events regime, it is a great time for women to be involved in sport. The Minister said in the previous debate that the Government were minded to agree to that change in the regime, so I am very glad that that has now been confirmed. Visibility is vital and I think that will go a long way towards improving women’s sport.
One of the other issues raised by colleagues in the debate was the difference in FA cup prize money that the women’s teams received in comparison with the men’s. At the time of the debate, the women’s competition received 2% of the total prize money received by the men. I am sure most people would be shocked by that. Even if we take into account the fact that around double the number of teams play in the men’s competition, the disparity was huge.
It was therefore extremely welcome that the FA announced two days after the debate that it was to raise the prize money for the women’s game tenfold. The final figure of rewards for the women’s FA cup is still only 20% of what the men get, but this is good progress and I must pay tribute to the FA for its swift action in increasing support for the women’s competition. The FA has already noted that the distribution of that money will be disproportionately directed towards the early stages of the competition, which will go a long way in supporting clubs that need that extra funding, given that some made a loss on their FA cup games in the past and many had to be crowdfunded in order to fulfil games in the event that they progressed further than their budget predicted. The FA has done some incredible work in growing the women’s game, and the increase in the women’s FA cup prize money will help put the money where the game needs it most.
While I start with the good news, I intend this debate to be on wider issues of equality in sport, not just football. I have long taken a keen interest in equal pay in sport, and given the work done by the Telegraph women’s sports team on the new Close The Gap campaign, I believe now is the right time to bring the matter forward. I must thank Anna Kessel, Jeremy Wilson, Molly McElwee, Fiona Tomas and Tom Garry for all their research on this area and their work in bringing the issue to light. The campaign was launched a few weeks ago with the support of incredible sports icons, including Dame Laura Kenny, Steph Houghton and Ian Wright, and it seeks to highlight the massive disparity in prize money awarded to men and women in elite sports, both in the UK and abroad. Jessica Ennis-Hill, who wrote in support of the campaign, said:
“We all tell our children that everyone is equal. I always say to my daughter, ‘Girls can do anything,’ and she says, ‘and boys can too!’ But one day they will go out into the big wide world and they will realise, ‘No, this isn’t actually equal, there is a big discrepancy.’”
Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that financial support for young women’s teams, which sets the scene for later years, feeds into the very issue of inequity that she is talking about, and that funding for young women’s and girls’ football teams is crucial to setting the cultural scene?
Julie Elliott
Absolutely—and, as I have said, not just in football; this debate is happening across sport more widely. Unfortunately, that is where we are with sport.
Jessica Ennis-Hill went on to say:
“Many of us know the story of how tennis made huge strides around equal prize money, with Billie Jean King and Venus Williams, and others, lobbying for change, but you do not hear much about the discrepancies in other sports. It tends to go under the radar. Unless you are a diehard sports fan most of us probably are not aware how different the prize money scales are across different events. It is only when you take the time to delve into it, and look at the numbers. Then you cannot help but think it is just ridiculous.”
So let us look at the numbers. The men’s European championship in football, which was held in this country last year, saw the men awarded a total prize pot of some £335 million. The women’s European championship, which will be held in this country this year, will see women receive a total prize pot of £13.4 million. The champions league, which of course we do not solely host but many of our clubs play in, offers a £1.6 billion prize fund to the men, but just £20 million to the women.
Snooker is a sport that historically women have been allowed to play, but without equal access to facilities in venues such as working men’s clubs, and therefore they have struggled to gain access to it. Snooker’s world championship winner is awarded a £500,000 prize, but the winner of the women-only competition receives just £5,000.
In cricket, the International Cricket Council’s one-day international World cup for men, which was held in England and Wales in 2019, awards just over £7.5 million. The women’s competition, which was held in New Zealand this year, awarded only a third of that—£2.6 million—although I understand that the ICC is working towards making the situation more equitable.
Without going into too many more numbers, as I am sure people will get the picture from those snapshots, I will offer as a final example rugby union, the sport that I really enjoy—watching, not playing. Although it was difficult to get any finite data on the Six Nations, I understand that the tournament says it does not award prize money but instead awards the participating teams a tenth of its annual revenue from the men’s tournament—that is reportedly around £16 million, although, as I said, exact numbers are unclear—relative to performance. There is no such distribution of revenue in the women’s tournament. Jessica Ennis-Hill said in her article on the campaign for equality:
“At last year’s women’s Six Nations…some teams had to manage without sanitary bins, fresh kit, or even hot showers—it is a hard pill to swallow being underpaid compared to your male compatriots.”
At a global level, World Rugby says that it does not do prize money, but there is a “participation grant” in the men’s World cup, which is awarded depending on performance, whereas the women get a “preparation grant”.
I could go on. In golf, women consistently get much less money than men; in tennis, there have been some famous successes, but around the world the situation is still variable; and in cycling, the men’s Tour de France offers a prize pot of almost £2 million to men and just over a tenth of that to women.
The numbers are important because they paint a picture and they show an attitude. First, it is about respect. To reach the levels in elite sport that these athletes reach takes extreme dedication; it takes many hours of practice, energy and commitment to get to the pinnacle of a particular sport. Yet the nature of unequal prize money means that the effort of one person is valued so much more than that of another—in some instances, 10 times or even 20 times more. If we consider the situation purely on the basis of respect, then it is demonstrably unfair.
Secondly, it is about sport being a livelihood and something that athletes can commit time to, in order to take them to the top of the game. Whether that is a world cup, a world championship or the Olympics, it takes time and costs money. When the prize money for even the few who win is not enough for them to commit to an effective and long-lasting training programme in order to sustain high levels of performance, what of those who place lower down but work just as hard? That is part of the reason why there are far fewer female athletes, and why so many more female athletes need second jobs outside their sport—any possible hard-fought win does not provide enough to sustain the process full time. As Jessica Ennis-Hill writes,
“in some sports prize money is an essential part of our income, rather than a cash bonus.”
This takes me to my third point—the wider benefit to the sport of providing a more evenly financially rewarding playing field. The ability for an athlete to make their sport their full-time job is of benefit not only to them, but to the sport’s future. By giving more time to the sport, they are able not only to raise their game and compete on a larger stage for more reward, but to raise the game of those around them and those who train with them. They are able to spend more time in training facilities, learning from the best and passing on what they know to those who are following in their footsteps. And they are able to inspire more young boys and girls to get involved, and perhaps be future champions themselves.
Many of the organisations that I have mentioned will talk about their investment in women’s sport and the money that they put in elsewhere, but the issue of prize money is symbolic as much as anything else. One of the key metrics that they often refer to is commercial revenue; they say that the women do not bring in as much money. But we simply must place that in the context of women being banned for so long from playing different sports—they were banned for 50 years from playing football—of the unequal access to facilities, and of the attitude towards women playing sport that still exists today, as researchers at the University of Leicester reported earlier this year. That has had an effect on the commercial revenues available to people, especially as the visibility of women’s sport still suffers from historical inequalities.
There has been progress in this area. It is clear that women’s sport is getting more coverage than ever. That is testament to those at the BBC, under the incredible leadership of Barbara Slater, and at Sky, for example. There are brand-new deals on women’s sport, and there is the greater exposure that many women who play elite sport receive today. But ultimately, as the organisation Women in Sport notes, women’s sport still accounts for only about 10% of total sports coverage, and when we flick through the sports pages of newspapers, we still have to look much more closely to find women’s sport. There are many excellent journalists out there who are doing all they can to bring attention to women’s sport—not least those whom I mentioned earlier—but there is still so much more to do.
The lack of general coverage and the historical context in which elite sportswomen have operated contribute to the arguments about lower commercial revenue. I know that many of the organisations will point to commitments to raise their game, but it would be wrong not to take this opportunity to say that more can always be done. Above all, this is about a fairer distribution, about respect, and about ensuring that children and young people have the chance to see people like them competing at the highest levels of their sport and to think, “That could be me, too.” I therefore ask the Minister what plans he has to work with governing bodies towards a fairer deal for women’s sport and how he will go about continuing the huge growth that we have seen in women’s sport in the last decade.
I will end with a quote from Steph Houghton, the former Lionesses captain, whom we are extremely proud of in my city of Sunderland; she is a former Sunderland player who grew up in the city. She said this in support of the campaign:
“The prize money in women’s sport to reward and acknowledge personal and team achievements continues to fall incredibly short. Football clubs and sponsors are increasing investment into the sport more than ever before, but prize money seems to have a glass ceiling that needs to be broken. Let’s work together to #CloseTheGap.”
We have seen cracks in the glass ceiling. I am with Steph—let’s break it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Nigel Huddleston)
It is, as always, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I thank the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) for securing time for this important debate today. Let us just hope that we can have the same success rate in delivering the things that she has asked for as we were able to achieve in the last debate. We were only half-joking when we said outside the Chamber that I should just stand up, say that I agree with everything the hon. Lady says, and then sit down. This is one of those cases in point, so I will try not to repeat too many of the points that she raised, but she raised such important points and I genuinely do agree with everything she said. I am also signed up to the campaign.
The hon. Lady was right to name-check all the people who have campaigned with her on this issue for so long, including journalists, sportspeople and people in this House. I give credit to her, because I know this is a topic she has been campaigning on for some time.
I am absolutely committed to supporting women’s sport at every opportunity, which means pushing for greater participation, more commercial opportunities and increased visibility of women’s sport in the media. We should do all we can to ensure women’s sport is treated equally to men’s at all levels, including in areas such as prize money. With that in mind, I would like to set out some of the progress that has been made and the challenges that remain. I will try not to repeat exactly what the hon. Lady said, but it is important to get all this on the record.
I agree that it is vital that women and men are recognised and paid equally for their achievements. I welcome the recent launch of the Telegraph’s Close the Gap campaign calling for fairer prize money in women’s sport—a campaign that I know the hon. Lady and many others have supported, as I do. In a bumper year for sport this year, with the women’s Euros, the rugby league World cup and the Commonwealth games in the UK, I am keen for all sports bodies to look at what more can be done to redress existing imbalances. As the hon. Lady mentioned, we are seeing progress, but we need to see more.
In January, it was announced that the FA will increase prize money for the winners of the women’s FA cup from next season—the hon. Lady gave it due credit for that—and professional female footballers in England are to benefit from maternity and long-term sickness cover in a landmark change to their contracts. It is remarkable to be saying that in this day and age and that it happened just this year. Yesterday, I was pleased to announce that the Government will be launching an in-depth review of domestic women’s football this summer to examine issues affecting the game at elite and grassroots level.
In cricket, last year, the £600,000 total prize pool for The Hundred was split evenly between the men’s and women’s competitions. As the hon. Lady mentioned, tennis is a great example to other sports; it has offered equal prize money in all four majors since 2007. The International Triathlon Union leads the way, having paid equal prize money to men and women in every race for every year since its inception in 1989, more than a decade before triathlon became an Olympic sport.
We know there is still a lot more to do. In September 2021, UEFA announced that it would double the women’s Euro 2022 prize money, but it is still a fraction of the prize money of the men’s competition. The 16 qualifying teams for the women’s Euros will share a pot of €16 million, but the 2021 men’s Euros saw a total prize pot of €371 million. I thought that either I or the hon. Lady had the numbers wrong, but she quoted pounds and I am quoting euros. The currency does not matter—the gap is still huge.
Of course, it is often argued that differing rates of pay for sportsmen and sportswomen is largely down to women’s sport not having the profile or media coverage of men’s sport over the years, but that is changing. Sponsorship and media coverage go hand in hand. If women’s sport does not have the media coverage, sponsors often do not see it as commercially attractive.
Record sponsorship deals have been struck with women’s sports leagues, such as Barclays’ sponsorship of the women’s super league, the premier women’s football league in England. Barclays will also be investing more than £30 million in women’s and girls’ football from 2022 to 2025, doubling its existing investment and becoming the first title sponsor of the FA women’s championship. The media profile of women’s sport is continuing to rise with new and innovative broadcasting deals being struck, such as DAZN’s four-year partnership with YouTube for the women’s champions league.
We have been working to improve the diversity of the listed events regime, first by adding the Paralympic games to the list in 2020. In addition, I was pleased to announce yesterday that the FIFA women’s World cup and the UEFA women’s European championships have been added to group A of the listed events regime, as the hon. Lady pleaded for in January. That will ensure that those tournaments continue to be available to as wide an audience as possible. Research conducted recently by the Women’s Sport Trust shows that almost 33 million people watched women’s domestic sport in 2021, with The Hundred and the women’s super league bringing in 11 million new viewers to women’s events, but we want to continue to push for greater change and strive for more equality and inclusivity in sport.
That is why in May 2021 I set up a women’s sport working group with key sector partners to explore some of these challenges and identify opportunities in women’s sport. Since May, we have held four meetings of the group, which have focused on participation, visibility, commercial investment and major events. We want to continue to use these meetings to bring value to and challenge all aspects of women’s sport. They are not just talking shops; we have some very powerful and influential people in those groups, and we will see, and have already seen, some action.
The hon. Lady asked what I can do. I regularly meet governing bodies of multiple sports—football and beyond. The topic of women’s pay and prize money comes up all the time, and I assure her that I raise it at every opportunity. Although we always get warm words, as she perhaps gets in the conversations that she and the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee have, we want to see action following on from that. I assure her that I will raise this issue at every opportunity.
The 2022 sporting calendar presents some great opportunities to demonstrate our commitment to women’s sport. At the rugby league World cup this year, female and wheelchair athletes will receive equal participation fees and will get prize money for the first time in the tournament’s history. I was delighted to see the news last week that all the Lionesses games at the women’s Euros this summer have now sold out, and a record attendance for any women’s football match is expected at the final. It is not true, therefore, that there is no interest in women’s sport; those figures show that that is not the case.
There are lots of reasons to be optimistic about women’s sport, but work remains to be done, as the hon. Lady said. I want to leave hon. Members in no doubt that I am personally committed to doing everything to raise the profile of women’s sport, women’s pay and prize money.
Question put and agreed to.
National Strategy for Self-Care
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the potential merits of a national strategy for self-care.
As ever, Sir Charles, I am pleased to have this debate with you in the Chair. In October 2019, I chaired a roundtable event on self-care, which involved healthcare professionals, pharmacists and other experts. It was organized by the consumer healthcare association the Proprietary Association of Great Britain, and following the event we produced a report that the Minister, or at least the Minister who was supposed to be here—the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield)—is aware of. I am indebted to PAGB, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and Diabetes UK for the briefing they have provided for this debate.
It might be helpful if I define what I mean by self-care. Essentially, it is about the actions individuals take for themselves, on behalf of others or with others to develop, protect or maintain their health. It can be summarised as a spectrum that includes the promotion of everyday wellbeing, taking care of self-treatable conditions, and the management of long-term conditions. It is important, however, to point out that self-care is not no care. Those who need medical support on a more traditional basis should be entitled to that type of care.
The covid-19 pandemic has revealed the important role that self-care can play in reducing the burden on GPs and hospital A&E departments, so that those with the most serious ailments can be treated with greater urgency. Prior to the pandemic, it is estimated that 18 million GP appointments and 3.7 million A&E visits were for minor ailments, including a blocked nose, dandruff and travel sickness, at an estimated cost of £1.5 billion annually. A survey of frontline healthcare professionals carried out by the self-care academic research unit at Imperial College in 2021 indicated that 95% of those who responded felt that self-care was important during the pandemic, compared with 55% pre-pandemic. However, a further survey carried out by PAGB later in 2021 found that the percentage of members of the public saying that they were more likely to self-care had fallen from 69% in 2020 to 55%, which illustrates that the trend in that direction has reversed.
My key point in this debate is to highlight the necessity for a new national strategy for self-care. The previous such strategy, “Self-care—A Real Choice”, was published in 2005. Since then there have been many new developments and the case for a new strategy has been more clearly recognised.
Before I move on to describe what the elements of a new strategy might be, I will use the example of those with diabetes to illustrate how self-care can work well. Other conditions could also serve to make that point, but, to avoid taking up too much time, I will use this single example. JDRF has pointed out that 79% of the management of type 1 diabetes is carried out by the individual with the condition, often with the help and support of their families and carers. That makes type 1 diabetes a case study in how to successfully promote self-management. JDRF also draws attention to the need to invest in technology as a crucial benefit to the long-term sustainability of the NHS post-covid.
JDRF’s 2021 report, “Covid and Beyond”, concluded that people with type 1 diabetes who had access to relevant technologies felt more confident in managing their diabetes in the absence of routine NHS care and support. The charity Diabetes UK points out that diabetes is
“the fastest growing health crisis of our time”,
with the equivalent of one in 14 people—that is 4.9 million in total—living with the condition, and that it accounts for 10% of the NHS budget—that is a staggering figure—80% of which is spent on treating largely preventable conditions.
Diabetes UK draws attention to the fact that, to live well with diabetes, avoid complications and successfully self-manage diabetes, those living with the condition require five things: first, access to education about diabetes and how to manage it; secondly, emotional and psychological support, which is increasingly important; thirdly, access to technology to support self-management; fourthly, access to weight-management support when needed, and I will say more about that in a moment; and finally, facilitated peer support.
Typically, those with diabetes spend about three hours a year with their doctor, nurse or consultant, and a staggering 8,757 hours managing the condition themselves. As Diabetes UK points out:
“Managing diabetes day-to-day can be difficult. This is why it’s important people have the knowledge and skills to manage their diabetes so they can live well and avoid complications.”
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I appreciate what the right hon. Gentleman is saying and I understand that he has spoken to my constituent Scott Craig. Does he agree that there needs to be awareness of the risks, and training for people who are self-managing and for their families? I understand that my constituent’s husband’s device failed, leading to his untimely death. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there needs to be greater awareness of how these devices work and what people need to do should things go wrong?
Sir George Howarth
As the hon. Lady is aware, I spoke to her constituent about that point earlier today. She makes a good point and I agree with her, and I would add that it is important that those who use technology are properly trained in how to use it best. The devices need to be reliable, so that technology can provide effective help with these conditions.
Those with type 1 diabetes who also struggle with eating disorders experience problems if they omit to take their insulin in order to lose weight. I know that you are familiar with this issue, Sir Charles. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and I will shortly carry out an inquiry into this growing problem, with the support of JDRF. We hope to point to how self-care can play an important role in dealing with this worrying trend. Hon. Members may be aware that there is a storyline in the soap opera “Coronation Street” that covers this subject. It has not yet concluded, but it offers a helpful perspective of how the problem has arisen, what it is and what the dreadful consequences can be.
I will refer to the recommendations from the report following the roundtable I chaired in October 2019. First, the Department of Health and Social Care should develop a national self-care strategy. Secondly, NHS England and Improvement should explore the implementation of self-care recommendation prescriptions, to support clinicians to discuss self-care with patients and refer them towards it. Thirdly, primary care networks should consider ways to improve self-care in local populations as part of the development of the network across the local health system. Fourthly, NHS England and Improvement should enable community pharmacists to refer people directly to other healthcare professionals. That has become even more apparent during the covid-19 pandemic.
The fifth recommendation is that NHS England and Improvement should support moves towards community pharmacists being granted read and write access, to give them full integration and interoperability of IT systems as part of local health and care records partnerships, and promote national support for such data-sharing agreements. That would unlock the door to a hugely increased, positive role for community pharmacies. Sixthly, the Government and royal colleges should include in the healthcare professional curriculum and the national curriculum self-care modules that can be delivered sustainably by schools. Finally, NHSX should explore technologies that could be used to promote self-care and manage demand on the NHS.
Before concluding, I would be grateful if the Minister, or his colleague, could consider some questions. It is not necessary for them to be answered today; theyj could respond by letter if that would be more effective. First, will the Minister undertake to look closely at the recommendations for a new self-care strategy? Secondly, will he give consideration to the report’s seven recommendations, which I referred to earlier? Thirdly, will he agree to meet a representative group of healthcare professionals, other interested parties and me to discuss potential ways forward? Finally, will he meet diabetes charities, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead and me to discuss the relevance of the two conditions—it is often overlooked that type 1 and type 2 diabetes are two distinct conditions—and to explore how the condition can serve as an example for self-care management? I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his speech and for the support that he has given to two of my constituents—Neal and Lesley Davison. Perhaps I might tag along to one of those meetings with him.
Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to be under your stewardship, Sir Charles. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth) for securing the debate.
We all know that people have self-cared in one fashion or another for thousands of years. Personally, I think that self-care starts with mental health, which can often be forgotten in strategies. The old Hippocratic approach was to be in a good frame of mind: a healthy mind produces a healthy body, and that is as pertinent today as it was more than 2,000 years ago. A self-care strategy should take a holistic approach that covers lifestyle, diet, as my right hon. Friend has said, and exercise, and a person’s state of employment is also a factor. They must all be taken into account by strategies dealing with self-care, because this is about not just people’s physical health, but their social and economic health.
On the point made by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) about self-care, I do not think that self-care means self-isolation as far as healthcare is concerned. It is about sharing care. It is also important that people use the healthcare system responsibly. Some referrals to GPs and hospitals could be considered inappropriate—I think my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley touched on that—with people turning up and putting a strain on the system. We have a personal responsibility to ensure that the health service is used in the most appropriate way. That is not to dissuade people or tell them not to go to the GP, but it is a factor that must be taken into account. There must be a system that assists in self-care so that people feel empowered and, crucially, safe, as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central referred to, when making decisions about self-care.
We have also got to take into account those people who cannot self-care and need support from family or carers who are, in effect, proxy self-carers, if I may use that phrase. A strategy must also include a safety net for people who are not in a position to self-care as much as they would like.
The World Health Organisation has an excellent prospectus on self-care. It straddles many different cultures and countries, but broadly talks about self-management, the use of self-testing and, importantly, self-awareness, which goes back to one or two of my earlier points.
I welcome the 2019 clinical consensus statement on self-care, which sets out seven recommendations, as touched on by my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley. More recently, “Realising the potential: Developing a blueprint for a self-care strategy for England” sets out nine themes.
In the current climate there are huge stresses on the health service and on people’s mental health and, subsequently, their physical health, partly because of covid and partly because of their individual social and economic circumstances. A care strategy must take into account societal movement and those social and economic factors that impinge on people’s health, so that, in helping people to self-care, we must also have a net in place to ensure that that self-care is safe.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
I will call the shadow Minister shortly. There is usually a five-minute limit for the Opposition spokesperson, but as we have quite a long time left, if the hon. Lady would like to speak for longer, she can do so, although she is under no obligation to do that. I am sure the Minister would not mind either.
Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)
Yes, indeed. Having sat opposite the Minister in Committee and when ping-ponging with Lords amendments, I am sure I can dredge up an awful lot to talk about for a very long time, but I will not do that. That would be unfair, although we might have another opportunity to do that tomorrow.
It is a pleasure serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth) on securing this debate. There are not many hon. Members here, but that belies the fact that this subject is of interest to an awful lot of people. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) outlined, it covers not only physical health but mental health, and deserves time to be discussed.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley said, self-care refers to long-term conditions and preventive health measures. It is an important component for healthy living. We all need to be clear that self-care is not passing responsibility that should be with professionals to the individual, or that we are using self-care to prop up our increasingly underfunded health and social care systems. We need to look at self-care in a positive sense, as has been discussed, as empowering people and patients to know and understand their own bodies and their own physical and mental health, but also to know how to manage the many things that life throws at us all along the way, and to do that from a young age.
Self-care is about lifestyle choices, but also about better awareness of symptoms and when it is important to seek professional advice. Our professional systems should be set up with that in mind, starting with empowering people and not telling them all the time what they should be doing or expecting them to be at the end of a professional opinion. There are many examples, but with cancer symptoms, early diagnosis is crucial and we know that can be a matter of life and death. We also need to understand when an ailment can be treated by someone themselves, and when to do that, or by talking to community pharmacists, as has been mentioned and which I will say more about as I go on.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley talked eloquently and from experience about diabetes, which is an important area. We know how many people have diabetes, what a huge area it is for the health service and how important education and self-management strategies are for people with diabetes. Before the pandemic, I worked a lot with Diabetes UK in my constituency and across Bristol, as I did in my previous life as a health service manager, to support those important local groups of people coming together. Those groups support individuals, share professional information and empower people very well. We all look forward to the results of my right hon. Friend’s work with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). We wish them well and offer our support for that work in any way we can.
My area, like many other constituencies, has high levels of health inequality. I recognise the importance of improving health literacy as a way of supporting people to help them tackle some of those health inequalities themselves.
As the Minister would expect me to say, after a decade of Tory mismanagement of the NHS, with long waiting lists before the pandemic and staff shortages, record numbers of people are waiting for care. Self-care is essential for the future sustainability of the NHS. Through empowering people to take control of minor ailments, we can focus NHS resources on those who need them most.
Peter Dowd
Does my hon. Friend agree that organisations such as those in the voluntary, community and faith sector have been absolutely fantastic in supporting people over the last two years and have enabled them to self-care as part of their healthy lifestyle, at a time when the NHS has been under huge stress?
Karin Smyth
I absolutely agree. The pandemic has been a terrible time for most of us, but it has provided the opportunity to look at, and to trial in real time, different ways of working with and helping people. A lot of third-sector organisations have been able to use technology, particularly in rural areas, so that people no longer have to travel to centres if they do not want to. Such organisations have been supporting people to use more online communication methods, and people have been coming together in more localised settings and been supported in a different way.
From my many years in the health service, I know that getting online appointments organised and, as the hon. Gentleman has heard me say before, managing things—for example, dermatology—using online services was a really hard task. We have now gone through that process and need to learn the lessons from the pandemic. It is a unique opportunity to promote self-care as an essential part of healthy living. We have heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley about the numbers involved. People are keen to take this opportunity to promote self-care and improve our understanding of, and confidence in, our own health, so that people can access the right service at the right time, and we ensure that our highly professional health service and specialist services are well used.
I would like to mention local pharmacies in my constituency of Bristol South. Bedminster pharmacy has been commended several times—it has the most commended pharmacy team in the United Kingdom—by national awards. I echo the points that have been made about pharmacies, which are often overlooked by other professional organisations. Some primary care services in different parts of the country are better than others at working together across the piece. I certainly hope that is a feature of the new integrated care systems, which have a huge opportunity to support pharmacies properly so that they can do their day-to-day work.
Sir George Howarth
My hon. Friend makes a good point about community pharmacies and the potential they offer. Does she agree that in the past the potential of community pharmacies has been underused, just as the capacity of GP and A&E services has been overused? It is not just about sloughing off the responsibility to somebody else; it is a matter of using the expertise that already exists.
Karin Smyth
Absolutely. I refer back to one of my favourite pieces of legislation, the Health and Social Care Act 2012; one of the many terrible things that that Act did was to demote the role of pharmacists in local communities and affect the support they were given by primary care trusts. In my area, we had a huge team supporting pharmacies who were very much part of that local community offer. I hope that the integrated care systems recognise that that was a mistake. We have lost a decade and really should be working much more closely together. Pharmacies exist in most areas and are easy for local people to access. They can give people confidence to look after themselves and the literacy that I mentioned.
It is vital that people receive a consistent message about self-care when they look at NHS services online, call 111, or visit a GP or local pharmacist, and that requires local systems to work together. A national self-care strategy would help to embed consistency across the country. As has been mentioned, self-care is a continuum that covers adopting healthy lifestyle choices and managing long-term health conditions, be they mental or physical. We must ensure that health literacy and targeted actions to tackle health inequalities take account of the systemic barriers in place for many people who wish to live a healthier lifestyle, particularly given the rising cost of living. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about how the Government’s upcoming White Paper on health inequalities will consider the issue.
We need to remember that self-care is for everyone at all stages of life. Educating children through programmes in school is an important part of that. As I said earlier, the confidence to manage our own health with appropriate support is as important for someone in a care home as it is for a parent looking after a new baby or for children growing up, particularly those growing up with long-term conditions.
Empowering and enabling us all to take charge of our health, be that through using digital interventions, improving health literacy or providing greater support for self-care, is important not only for the long-term sustainability of the health and care service, but for patients. We must ensure that the system does not inadvertently disempower people or result in gaps in the care pathway. I very much look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on this.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Minister, you have been seeing rather a lot of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) recently, so no doubt you are looking forward to your next meeting with her.
The Minister for Health (Edward Argar)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles, and a particular pleasure to serve opposite the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), the shadow Minister. We spent many happy days in Committee on the Health and Care Bill, even if we were not in full agreement. The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), within whose portfolio this would normally sit, has just been answering a debate in the Chamber, which is why I am responding to this debate.
I will endeavour to do justice to the very important points that the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth) raised in his speech. I will do something, which, even within my own portfolio, would cause my officials to wince—and I suspect that the same may happen given that this falls within somebody else’s portfolio—which is that, notwithstanding the wonderfully well written notes that my officials have provided me with, I may well say what I think on this subject and respond to the specific points that have been raised in the course of this debate. This could be career limiting, but we will see.
The right hon. Member made a powerful speech. Essentially, the way in which he illustrated through the prism of a particular condition of diabetes a number of the points that could be applied more broadly across the spectrum of self-care was particularly helpful to hon. Members. Although we may not have a huge quantity of hon. Members in this Chamber today, what we do have is quality, judging by the contributions that we have heard.
The right hon. Member is absolutely right, as is the shadow Minister, that, in talking about self-care, we must be very clear that we do not see it as an alternative—an either/or—to medically qualified support or other forms of support. The two parts of the system should work hand in hand. Indeed, I see it as a continuum. I have seen the work done by PAGB, the Self-Care Forum and others on that self-care continuum. We start at one end with education, which I will turn to in a moment. The pure end of self-care is around diet, daily calorie intake, and the simple lifestyle changes that can make a big difference to our own health and the risk of our contracting illnesses or diseases. Those lifestyle and dietary factors may not be for everyone given the nature of particular conditions, but, by and large, are within the control of the vast majority of us.
At the other end of that continuum, we have things such as major trauma, or treatment for illnesses such as cancer or cardiac conditions where medical care, and often hospital-based care is essential. Then there is that space in the middle around self-treatable conditions. There are the minor ailments where people might be able to self-care, but where, as the hon. Member for Bristol South put it very well, some might need some confidence or advice to be able to do so.
There is also the management of acute conditions and long-term conditions, which, I suspect, will entail a degree of professionally qualified medical care, but, equally, a degree of self-care based on that advice as well. We have that spectrum—that continuum—and it is important that we view it in that way. The ability to turn to the right type of support at the right time is crucial to maximising the benefits and opportunities for individuals in self-care.
Through the pandemic, we have seen the opportunities to innovate. They were opportunities forced on us by the circumstances in a dreadful situation, but, none the less, there have been ideas and innovations that have come out of that pandemic. We have seen also the consequences of demand within our healthcare system, particularly at GP practices, at accident and emergency, and at urgent treatment centres. Notwithstanding the record investment by this Government in our NHS, and notwithstanding the record numbers of staff in the NHS, we do see pressures. An effective and proportionate self-care approach that people feel confident in can play a key part in helping to manage the pressures, where people go to the most appropriate point to be treated.
Empowerment is key—people understanding and being educated in their choices and the implications of their choices, through public health messaging. There is a telling statistic, although it may be a little out of date—I was discussing this with some officials earlier this week: 43% of the population do not feel fully confident in understanding health information conveyed in words. The figure leaps to 61% of people who do not feel fully confident in understanding information about their own health and their choices when the information contains words and numbers. That signifies that there is a lot more work for us to do.
Sir George Howarth
I am encouraged by the first part of the Minister’s speech that he gets this, as I was by the response of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) on the Front Bench. The Minister is right that people who have long-term conditions—or, for that matter, the general population—need to understand better what they can do for themselves. It is not always obvious to people what they can do. It is also important—I referred to the recommendations—that medical practitioners understand these issues in their initial training and that they are kept up to date on the potential. Otherwise, people are operating in a fog, without understanding the potential. I am sure the Minister will agree that those things are important.
Edward Argar
I entirely agree that for health professionals, having up-to-date and refreshed knowledge is hugely important. In my current role and my previous role at the Ministry of Justice, I have looked at this point when considering domestic abuse and domestic violence. GP practice staff are often the first people to get an indication that something is wrong—not necessarily because a patient presents saying so, but because of the nature of their injuries or what they present with. Up-to-date knowledge across a range of areas is hugely important.
The hon. Member for Bristol South is right that education cannot start too early for forming good habits, and that, through school and beyond, it is important to educate people about the choices they make and the impact of those choices. That is not the so-called nanny state; it is about people being given the information to make an informed and educated choice for themselves and the benefit of their health. Another key element is confidence. People need information, but they also need to be confident to take a decision on that basis and to know where to go if they are not sure. I will turn to community pharmacies in a moment.
There are two other broad points to highlight—mental and emotional health—which the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) quite rightly highlighted. I hope that all of us in this place agree, and that it is understood more broadly in society, that we cannot look at physical health in isolation. All elements interact with and impact on each other. We need to be fully cognisant of that and of the broader determinants of health and health inequalities, be they social, economic or health factors. There are a whole range of impacts on individuals and their overall health.
We need to ensure that people have access not only to information, but to the technology and kit to be able to manage their condition. During the pandemic, virtual wards have become more prevalent. For example, there are pieces of kit that monitor oxygen levels in blood and report back to the GP to give an early indication. That is just one example of how technology can assist, and it expanded rapidly of necessity.
I will turn to the recommendations in the report, speak a little about community pharmacies, which have quite rightly been highlighted, and then turn to the request of the right hon. Member for Knowsley for a meeting—always an easy point to respond to when one is not the Minister responsible. It is always nice to be able to commit other colleagues to meetings, but I will also address the issues in my own right.
I hear what the right hon. Member for Knowsley says about the need for a specific strategy, but I would sound a slight note of caution. It is often the case that the first call in a particular area of policy is, “We need a strategy around this”, and I am slightly cautious about having a multiplicity of strategies without bringing together a whole range of actions. That may be a point that the right hon. Gentleman wishes to raise with my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes, who I will commit to meeting him in a moment.
On that specific recommendation, self-care is an integral part of the NHS long-term plan, which we are looking at at the moment in the light of the experiences and impacts of covid, and the community pharmacy contractual framework—the five-year deal running to 2024. For that reason, I merely sound a note of caution about an additional national strategy, because over the past two and a half—almost three—years, what I have often seen in the Department of Health is a strategy for a particular issue or area of care that does not always interact with other elements of the system or take into account just how complex that landscape is. The right hon. Member for Knowsley is aware of that point from his many years in this House, but I merely sound a slight note of caution.
Peter Dowd
The Minister is making an important point. However, I am sure he also recognises that there are already lots of things out there in the care continuum he spoke about: the health literacy toolkit, the e-learning programme on health literacy from Health Education England, the health literacy support hub, guidance on physical health and mental wellbeing in schools, the community pharmacy contractual framework to which he referred, modules on self-care for minor ailments and successful self-care, and so on. Part of a strategy, if that is what we want to call it, is trying to bring all those things together. On top of that, does the Minister agree that in the plan, so to speak—the “Realising the Potential” document—there is a reference to how
“There should be a cultural shift among healthcare professionals, towards wellbeing and away from the biomedical model of care”?
It is about trying to fit those things together in a coherent strategy, if that is what we want to call it.
Edward Argar
The hon. Gentleman is seeking to find a way through some of these points in his typically dexterous way. Suggesting “a strategy, if that is what we want to call it”, leaves open the option for my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes to consider other ways in which the same thing might be achieved. I do not want to prejudge the conclusion that she will come to, but I will ensure that she receives a transcript of this debate.
Sir George Howarth
I hear what the Minister says. To be honest, I am not overly fussed about what we call it. My concern is that the Government—and, for that matter, the rest of us—are able to draw on the experience of patients, clinicians, and all those in the healthcare system to examine how we can do things better. If the Minister wants to call it something else, I am not here to have a row with him about that; I am here to try to make some progress.
Edward Argar
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that typically courteous intervention. A lot of what we are seeking to do in this area comes back to the refresh of the NHS long-term plan, which will have to happen in the context of what we have seen during the pandemic. The hon. Member for Bristol South highlighted the health inequalities White Paper, which will come forward in due course. There is a genuine opportunity to use that White Paper to draw a number of these elements together.
I am conscious that the right hon. Member for Knowsley had six other key recommendations, which I will address briefly. I will say a little bit about community pharmacy before I turn to meetings. He raised the issue of building on the successful community pharmacist consultation service, and exploring additional pathways to access that service through the implementation of self-care recommendation prescriptions to support GPs and other professionals to appropriately refer patients to self-care. Rather than taking the issue of community pharmacy separately, I will address it in response to this point, because that is probably the neatest way to do so.
I fully recognise the value of community pharmacy, and the hon. Member for Bristol South also rightly highlighted its importance. My first official engagement when I took on this job in 2019 was to attend, in lieu of the Pharmacy Minister at the time, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), the Pharmacy Business Awards ceremony, which recognised community pharmacies that had done amazing work in their communities, such as the one the hon. Member for Bristol South highlighted.
As constituency Members of Parliament, we all know the depth of expertise and local knowledge that our community pharmacies bring to the communities they serve, and we know just how well regarded they are by our constituents as friendly, accessible sources of advice. Constituents do not have to be there first thing in the morning, and they do not have to make an appointment. They can stroll in and talk to a pharmacist who can give them genuinely helpful advice, without having to wait. I put on record my gratitude, and I suspect that of all hon. Members, to community pharmacies.
We are increasing our potential to expand the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service to urgent treatment centres and A&E departments. It has already taken just shy of 184,000 referrals from GPs, which, as hon. Members have suggested, is of benefit to our general practitioners, who can better manage their workload, given that some people do not need to see a GP. We are promoting the uptake of that service and incentivising its use through the GP contractual arrangements. Negotiations with the PSNC on what community pharmacy will deliver in 2022-23 as part of the five-year deal are ongoing, and hon. Members would not expect me to prejudge those negotiations. As soon as they conclude, we will announce the arrangements so that Members can consider and scrutinise them as they see fit.
The right hon. Member for Knowsley talked about primary care networks. I know the value of primary care networks. My own GP in Leicestershire is actively involved in the PCN. We saw their potential to do amazing things during the pandemic when they supported our communities with the vaccination programme and in a whole range of ways. He is right to highlight their potential to consider ways to improve self-care in their local populations as part of their network development. I hope that the soon-to-be-statutorily-constituted ICSs and ICBs will also take that very seriously, obviously subject to the other place and their deliberations later this evening.
I know from my own GP, who I regularly speak to, that many local health systems are proactively exploring upstream prevention initiatives across the health and care system and looking for further partnership opportunities to support people to improve their overall health and care outcomes. Clinical commissioning groups—soon to be ICSs—and NHSEI regionally also have the option to commission a local minor ailments service in addition to CPCSs. I hope they will explore those options as they go forward—particularly ICSs.
The fourth recommendation was that NHSEI should enable community pharmacists to refer people directly to other healthcare professionals where self-care is not appropriate, enhancing the role of pharmacists as a first port of call for healthcare advice. I entirely agree with that. There is an educational point as well in making people aware that they can go to their pharmacists. Equally, all community pharmacists are required under the terms of service to signpost people to other health and social care providers and support organisations as appropriate. There is, I suspect, more we can do in that space, but I think we have an extraordinary resource there at our disposal. NHSEI is accelerating efforts to enable community pharmacists to populate medical records and give them full integration into operability of IT systems as part of LHCR partnerships and national support for data sharing.
Data and the sharing of data in this space is, as all hon. Members know, a vexed and complicated subject, but when got right, it holds incredible potential for improving health outcomes and care. NHSX is leading the Government’s plans that will see the development of interoperable NHS IT systems that integrate health and care records, while of course considering issues that the hon. Member for Bristol South brought up in Committee when we were discussing similar matters—issues such as patient consent and data security.
We are very clear in our view that community pharmacy must play an enhanced role in the healthcare of our country, and it is our responsibility and NHS England’s responsibility to help support that. The right hon. Member for Knowsley made two final recommendations about meetings. The Government should promote a system-wide approach to improving health literacy, including working with royal colleges to include self-care modules in healthcare professionals’ training curricula and continuous professional development. I touched on that point in my response to his intervention. I have had many helpful and positive meetings with the royal colleges. I seek to meet them regularly—perhaps not as regularly as I would like, given the pressure of business in this place at times—because they have a depth of knowledge that is incomparable and incredibly useful.
Public Health England, when it was around, undertook a programme of work to improve health literacy across the country, and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities will continue to work on that issue. The pharmacy integration programme will deliver a further almost £16 million-worth of post-registration training. That investment will equip pharmacy teams across primary care so that they are better prepared to support wider integrated healthcare delivery and expand their role in providing clinical care to patients. A pharmacist independent prescriber can provide autonomously for any condition within their clinical competence, with the exception of certain controlled drugs, particularly for the treatment of addiction. To become an independent prescriber, pharmacists must complete additional qualifications, which last typically six months, before they can prescribe.
In 2021, the General Pharmaceutical Council introduced new professional standards for initial education and training to ensure that the next generation of pharmacists is equipped with essential clinical skills. A key theme running through all the contributions today is that, when a resource is used, there can still be an untapped element of it that can be better utilised to provide support, alongside education, self-care and all the things we can do as individuals, to provide confidence and professional expertise.
NHSX should evaluate the use of technologies that have been developed during the covid-19 pandemic, and develop them to cover a wider range of minor ailments to promote self-care and manage demand on the NHS. I alluded to one example that we are working on. The Department is working with NHS Digital and NHS England and Improvement to encourage innovation and enable new approaches and organisations to support services and collaborate effectively.
I hope that, as someone whose policy area this is not, I have addressed at least in outline some of the right hon. Gentleman’s key recommendations. He made specific requests about meetings. I am always wary about that, because I have discovered that when I have meetings with my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and you, Sir Charles, I come out having agreed to something or changed the direction of a policy, after being persuaded by both of you. I know that the right hon. Member for Knowsley is equally persuasive. With that in mind, I am happy to ask the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes, to arrange to meet the right hon. Gentleman, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead and you, Sir Charles, to discuss this issue more broadly.
The right hon. Member for Knowsley also asked for a meeting with Diabetes UK and the relevant Minister. I will certainly pass that on to the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes. In the context of the elective recovery work and my work with the NHS more broadly, I have met a number of charities in the course of developing the elective recovery plan and since we published it. I am always happy to meet charities and other organisations that do so much not only to educate people and campaign on issues, but sometimes to press us in particular directions. They always do so with good intentions and to support people. In that context, I have also met trade unions and other bodies, because I believe that a collaborative approach in this space is useful. I will pass the request on to the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes, but if the right hon. Member for Knowsley feels that this could also fall within the ambit of elective recovery or of my role as Minister sponsoring the NHS long-term plan, I will of course, framed in that way, also be happy to meet Diabetes UK—I have met many charities in recent months.
If that does not provide the right hon. Gentleman with immediate agreement on what he called on the Government to do, I hope it provides him with some reassurance of just how seriously we take this issue and the recognition of just how important self-care is for each of us as individuals, for our constituents, for our healthcare system and indeed for this country. And I am very grateful to him for bringing the matter before the House today.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
I call Sir George to sum up, for no more than two minutes.
Sir George Howarth
Thank you, Sir Charles, for calling me to sum up.
First, I thank everybody who has taken part in this debate: my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), who is the shadow Minister, and the Minister himself. As I had hoped it would be, it has been a constructive debate. Although the Minister did not quite go as far as agreeing with me on every single point that I made, he showed a degree of understanding and presented what he had to say as constructively as everybody else’s contribution was. He was unfailingly polite, although I have learned through bitter experience that Ministers can be unfailingly polite and then go away and forget all about the matter that has just been discussed. However, I am sure that will not be the case now.
I am grateful and I see this debate not as the end of a process but as its beginning, and I am pleased that the Minister has nodded in agreement with that comment. And believe me, we will take up his offer of various meetings to progress these matters, including with your good self, Sir Charles.
Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Well, that debate was a pleasure to chair; it really was.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the potential merits of a national strategy for self-care.
Written Statements
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Register of Overseas Entities
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)
My noble Friend Lord Callanan, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Minister for Climate Change and Corporate Responsibility) has today made the following statement:
I welcome the opportunity to update Parliament on the progress the Government are making implementing the register of overseas entities, six weeks after the expedited Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 received Royal Assent.
The Act sets out measures to tackle economic crime, by creating a register of the beneficial owners of overseas entities which own or buy property in the UK, as well as measures on unexplained wealth orders and sanctions.
Since the legislation received Royal Assent, the Government have been working at pace to ensure the register is in place as soon as reasonably practicable. There are two main aspects to this work—the technical development of the register itself and the establishment of the appropriate legal framework through secondary legislation. An implementation group comprising officials from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Companies House and the UK Land Registries has been established and is driving forward delivery across both aspects.
On developing the register, Companies House digital design teams are making strong progress in building the register for operational readiness. They have been working at pace alongside the three land registries to have systems and processes in place to identify and capture information on overseas entities who buy, sell or transfer property in the UK. This work will ensure that a first phase of the register can be operational as soon as possible capturing new transactions from the moment the register is live, enabling those in scope already owning land in the UK to register, and capturing disposals of assets between 28 February 2022 and the end of the six-month transitional period. This important amendment introduced during passage of the Act will ensure we have information on any relevant property sales taking place before the register is operational. Further steps will be taken over the course of the transitional period to enhance the functionality of the register.
On legislation, as set out in the Act, a number of important aspects of the register need to be defined through secondary legislation before the register can come into force. These include technical details of verification requirements to ensure the register is sufficiently robust; the protection regime for beneficial owners and managing officers that wish to have their details protected from public disclosure due to a risk of serious harm or violence; and mandating the digital delivery of information to Companies House.
In the weeks since Royal Assent, good progress has been made on finalising the policy on these areas of detail. These details are vital to get right if the register is to work as intended. Engagement with expert stakeholders, such as the UK’s law societies, on technical aspects of the register and the supporting legislation is ongoing and we welcome their constructive input to ensure the register works as intended across the UK. Drafting the actual regulations and accompanying guidance will begin imminently and we will lay the regulations for parliamentary scrutiny as soon as possible.
[HCWS788]
Public Bodies Reform
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency (Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg)
I am pleased to announce that, today, we are publishing guidance documents that will underpin a new series of public body reviews.
The review programme and associated guidance delivers against the commitments made in the declaration on government reform to increase the effectiveness of arm’s length bodies, making government work better for the citizens it serves.
Public bodies are a critical delivery arm of the Government. They work in tandem with their Departments to provide services to the public. The pandemic has considerably stretched public bodies. There have been some outstanding success stories, such as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs delivery of the furlough scheme, or the vaccination programme through the national health service.
The fiscal challenge this country faces is the greatest since the second world war. Arm’s length bodies, which are classified as such by the Cabinet Office, now spend over £220 billion a year, and employ over 300,000 people. The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee published reports last year demonstrating the need for the centre of Government to go further in supporting public bodies to succeed.
This is why Her Majesty’s Treasury and the Cabinet Office established the public bodies reform programme last year. Its mission is for accountable, efficient and effective public bodies that are fit to deliver the Government’s priorities. This will mean decision making is restored to democratically accountable Ministers, a reduced burden on the taxpayer and greater focus on every pound spent by public bodies. It is expected that the average public body review delivers efficiency savings of at least 5%.
Public body reviews
The public bodies reform programme has developed new guidance documents to provide information to sponsor Departments, public bodies, review teams and lead reviewers on the undertaking of the reviews of public bodies. The guidance is built on lessons learnt from previous review programmes and has been developed with the understanding that the public body landscape is varied.
Departments will lead these reviews. The Government are clear that scarce resources should be focused where they are needed most, so it will be for Departments to prioritise which bodies are reviewed and when. By undertaking reviews we can reassure the public that the Government are taking every possible step to level up our country, reduce the burden on the public purse and deliver first in class public services.
The guidance documents will be available on gov.uk. We will seek to review and update the guidance each year.
[HCWS784]
Armed Forces Incentivisation Review
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Minister for Defence People and Veterans (Leo Docherty)
I am pleased to announce that the Prime Minister has approved the appointment of Mr Rick Haythornthwaite to chair an independent review of our service personnel’s terms and conditions.
The review, which will be known as the Haythornthwaite review of armed forces incentivisation, is a commitment published in the Defence Command Paper (March 2021). It aims to modernise financial and non-financial elements of the offer to service personnel so that these are commensurate with the ways in which the armed forces are expected to change and operate in future, as set out in the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy. By modernising both elements of the offer, the review aims to improve how defence recruits, incentivises and retains the skills it requires, and to better reflect people’s changing expectations of work and ways of living in the 21st century. The review is expected to conclude by spring 2023, when a report will be submitted to the Secretary of State for Defence, who will determine the Government response in due course.
Rick has established an impressive executive and non-executive career across a diverse range of businesses within the private and third sectors. He has a variety of experience as a chair and a highly tuned strategic perspective. I look forward to working closely with him on his review.
[HCWS787]
Media Policy Update
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Ms Nadine Dorries)
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has today written to Newsquest Media Group and Archant Community Media, to inform them that I am “minded to” issue an intervention notice. This relates to concerns I have that there may be public interest considerations—as set out in section 58 of the Enterprise Act 2002—that are relevant to the recent acquisition of Archant Media by Newsquest Media and that these concerns warrant further investigation.
A “minded to” letter has therefore been issued to the parties on one public interest ground specified in section 58 of the Enterprise Act 2002:
(2B) The need for, to the extent that it is reasonable and practicable, a sufficient plurality of views in newspapers in each market for newspapers in the United Kingdom or a part of the United Kingdom.
It is important to note that I have not taken a final decision on intervention at this stage. In line with the statutory guidance on media mergers, the “minded to” letter invites further representations in writing from the parties and gives them until 29 April to respond. I will then make my final decision, which needs to be made on a quasi-judicial basis, on whether to issue an intervention notice.
If I decide to issue an intervention notice, the next stage would be for Ofcom to assess and report to me on the public interest concerns and for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to assess and report to me on whether a relevant merger situation has been created and any impact this may have on competition. Following these reports, I will decide whether to refer the matter for a more detailed investigation by the CMA under section 45 of the Enterprise Act 2002.
I will keep Parliament updated on progress with this media merger case.
[HCWS785]
Judicial Conduct Investigations Office Annual Report 2020-21
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Dominic Raab)
With the concurrence of the Lord Chief Justice, I will today publish the 15th annual report of the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO).
The JCIO supports the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor in our joint statutory responsibility for judicial discipline.
The judiciary comprises approximately 21,000 individuals serving across a range of jurisdictions. Over the past year, the JCIO received 1,236 complaints against judicial office-holders. Fifty-three investigations resulted in disciplinary action.
I have placed copies of the report in the Libraries of both Houses, the Vote Office and the Printed Paper Office. Copies are also available online at: https://www.complaints.judicialconduct.gov.uk/reportsandpublications/.
[HCWS786]
Merchant Shipping (High Speed Craft) Regulations 2022
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Robert Courts)
I have today published as a draft the Merchant Shipping (High Speed Craft) Regulations 2022, along with an accompanying draft explanatory memorandum. The draft regulations revoke and replace the Merchant Shipping (High Speed Craft) Regulations 2004 (SI 2004/302) and the instruments that amend them and implement the most up-to-date requirements of the international convention for the safety of life at sea, 1974 (the convention), relating to safety measures for high-speed craft.
The draft regulations are being published for 28 days. Following the conclusion of this period, and once any observations on the draft regulations have been taken into account, they will be laid for approval by each House of Parliament. This procedure is required under paragraph 14 of schedule 8 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 because these regulations revoke an instrument, the Merchant Shipping (High Speed Craft) Regulations 2004, that was made under section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972. Further details are contained in the annex to the draft explanatory memorandum.
The draft regulations implement requirements for high- speed craft in chapter X of the annex to the convention, including previously unimplemented requirements to carry out and record entry and rescue drills in enclosed spaces, and to open up the global distress satellite system provider market.
The updated measures in chapter X are in force internationally, but the measures must also be incorporated into our national legislation to enable them to be enforced effectively, most notably to discourage non-compliance by non-UK flagged ships in UK waters, which would be detrimental to the safety of shipping in UK coastal areas. The draft regulations will ensure that UK law includes increased safety standards for high-speed craft and seafarers on UK flagged high-speed and non-UK flagged high-speed operating in UK waters by implementing updates to improve high-speed craft safety.
The draft regulations also include an ambulatory reference provision to ensure that future amendments to the convention referred to in the draft regulations will automatically become UK law when they enter into force internationally. As described in the accompanying draft explanatory memorandum, a ministerial statement will be provided to both Houses of Parliament ahead of any amendment to chapter X, or other provision, of the convention referenced in the draft regulations, prior to it coming into force in UK law by way of the ambulatory reference provision.
[HCWS783]